Can someone explain non-binary gender identities to me?

[Saint Frankenstein]

I don't get it. I see labels like genderqueer, third gender, bigender, neutrois, degender, pangender, omnigender, etc. I get androgyny because that's very old and has been a part of popular culture for decades, but that's usually used as more of a description for how a person presents themselves rather than as an identity i.e. the person tends to present themselves with a combination of traits generally considered masculine and feminine but tends to identify as a man or woman. So that makes sense to me. Butch and femme are similar labels denoting types of masculinity and femininity in presentation.

But non-binary people usually are denoting an identity and not a form of presentation with those other labels. What I don't get is what it means and how is it experienced? I'm a transsexual man and that's really pretty simple to understand and explain, and there's even scientific research explaining the condition of transsexualism. But the same isn't true of non-binary identities. I'm not aware of any scientific research on people who identify as non-gendered, for example. In a sexually dimorphic species such as humans, it doesn't make any sense that a person can identify with nothing in terms of gender/sex.

How does a non-binary person perceive themselves? Is it all based on social construct theories of gender that class certain presentations and behaviors as man/male or woman/female? Is it just postmodernism applied to gender and sex? Is it appropriation of transsexualism and/or transsexualism? Where does dysphoria fit in?

I really don't get it and I'm not sure if there's a scientific reality to it. I tend to think it's just another facet of postmodern deconstructionism.

 

[Laika]

I'm not 100% sure, but I think it is based on arguing that the 'male-female binary' is a mis-representation of the actual biological diversity and an authoritarian perscription of gender identity, (i.e. your either 'male' or 'female'). Hence it's not a purely objective classification or a 'scientific' one, but represents part of our moral understanding which is given a scientific guise. The way in which race was once considered a scientific classification, or homosexuality a mental disorder, or the current issues surronding whether there is such as thing as ADHD or Sexual addiction are examples where the role of society in defining what is 'normal' plays a role in marginalising and stigmatising beaviours or people.
This is not an issue I know well, but I've had to think about gender roles as I'm bisexual and despite being a guy, homosexuality/bisexuality is associated with femine submissiveness and as a challange to traditional conception of masculinity as social dominance. So it's the same issue, only that it takes on much greater proportions from someone questioning their gender than their sexuality. Inspite of the advances in sexual freedoms, Transgender remains a taboo.

Where does dysphoria fit in?

Dysphoria is really about the sense that "you can't be this way because society says so". It may well go deeper than that if gender roles and identity is thought of as a 'given', that it is self-evident and impossible to be anything other than one or the other. A freind of mine (on Facebook) is going through it who is transgender (M to F) and it sounds very similar to the struggles over sexual orientation in terms of the anxiety and the fear of coming out. He/She came out to his parents and they were not thrilled about it, but his girlfreind has been very supportive. The difference is that wanting to change your gender is much more visible and in his/her case the anxiety appears to be much worse and more pervasive than my own experiences which were still pretty bad.

 

[Mycroft]

Basically someone may feel they are Agendered. That means neither male for female, and so don't fit into the binary categories of male/female. Such people like to have themselves referred to as 'They' rather than 'She' and 'Them' rather than 'Her' etc.

Obviously nobody is born agendered, so they must pick it up from some stimuli throughout their life, but it's an interesting psychological phenomenon.

 

[Valjean]

Usually you get a male or female brain in a male or female body.
Sometimes you get a male brain with a female sexual orientation in a male body -- or vice versa.
Occasionally you get a homosexual female brain in a male body -- or vice versa.
There's a lot of variation in Nature.

 

[MysticSang'ha]

Usually you get a male or female brain in a male or female body.
Sometimes you get a male brain with a female sexual orientation in a male body -- or vice versa.
Occasionally you get a homosexual female brain in a male body -- or vice versa.
There's a lot of variation in Nature.

I saw it as these variables of karyotype and chromosomal structure, to gonad development, to hormonal production, to brain development, to neurochemical processes, to genitalia development (such as a phallic location of a urethra), to gender role cultural conditioning, to sexual and romantic orientation....all these variables create a spectrum of possibilities for human sexual identity.

A constellation of sorts, rather than two distinct boxes. I agree with your point that there is wide variation in Nature.

To answer the OP, given the point presented above, so many variables present opportunities for ambiguity in what humans attempt in sexual dimorphic distinction. This ambiguity is offered as non-binary gender identities for now. The more we learn, the better we can categorize inclusively.

 

[Yerda]

It's too confusing. Do we need gender?

 

[Valjean]

No, not all languages have gender. Some even lost it, like Afrikaans.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

The female/male gender binary is a social construct. We live in a very "either-or" "black-and-white" society, even though nature itself just does not function in this regard. Physical/biological sex is not even a concrete "male-or-female" given the many various inter sexed conditions. The gender identity of the brain does not always match the biological sex. Some people do not particularly like identifying with their sex organs or prescribed social roles. Some people have a more fluid gender identity, and some people can turn their gender identity on-and-off like a light switch.
There is no appropriation going on. Rather more people are standing up for their rights to not be assumed to be a societal "one-or-the-other" and to not have to fit into those roles.
Dysphoria doesn't fit in with it. The dysphoria experienced by the transsexual community is the part that makes transsexualism a medical condition that warrants medical intervention as the appropriate treatment. The dysphoria is the discomfort and distress over having the body of one sex but the gender identity of the opposite. Those of the non-binary identities do not inherently have the discomfort and distress over their biological sex, but rather have the discomfort over having to be forced into a mold they don't fit into. Some may go through physical alterations of their body (such as nullos), but many times no such things are desired.
The best way to explain it is to explain the need to discard the concept of the female/male binary because that is not how nature functions. Rather, as Heather put it, it's more of a constellation than two boxes.

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

I guess I should've clarified in the OP. I really wanted people who identify as non-binary to discuss their experiences and perception of self. Outsiders can't tell me anything I've never heard before, unless you have some new research that shows that having a non-binary identity has a biological backing (I'm unaware of such and even intersex people generally identify as "one or the other"). Sorry. I was really tired when I wrote it and I wrote it on a whim.

 

[Penumbra]

I don't get it. I see labels like genderqueer, third gender, bigender, neutrois, degender, pangender, omnigender, etc. I get androgyny because that's very old and has been a part of popular culture for decades, but that's usually used as more of a description for how a person presents themselves rather than as an identity i.e. the person tends to present themselves with a combination of traits generally considered masculine and feminine but tends to identify as a man or woman. So that makes sense to me. Butch and femme are similar labels denoting types of masculinity and femininity in presentation.

But non-binary people usually are denoting an identity and not a form of presentation with those other labels. What I don't get is what it means and how is it experienced? I'm a transsexual man and that's really pretty simple to understand and explain, and there's even scientific research explaining the condition of transsexualism. But the same isn't true of non-binary identities. I'm not aware of any scientific research on people who identify as non-gendered, for example. In a sexually dimorphic species such as humans, it doesn't make any sense that a person can identify with nothing in terms of gender/sex.

How does a non-binary person perceive themselves? Is it all based on social construct theories of gender that class certain presentations and behaviors as man/male or woman/female? Is it just postmodernism applied to gender and sex? Is it appropriation of transsexualism and/or transsexualism? Where does dysphoria fit in?

I really don't get it and I'm not sure if there's a scientific reality to it. I tend to think it's just another facet of postmodern deconstructionism.

I guess I should've clarified in the OP. I really wanted people who identify as non-binary to discuss their experiences and perception of self. Outsiders can't tell me anything I've never heard before, unless you have some new research that shows that having a non-binary identity has a biological backing (I'm unaware of such and even intersex people generally identify as "one or the other"). Sorry. I was really tired when I wrote it and I wrote it on a whim.

Well I'm not non-binary but from an outside perspective it doesn't seem so complex to me.

Humans are a sexually dimorphic species but it's along a spectrum rather than a binary. Or perhaps along several spectra. A person could have a primarily female body but XY genes, or a primarily male body but XX genes. Or XXY genes. A person could have secondary sexual characteristics that are somewhere in the middle or a mix of both. Genitalia are sometimes ambiguous. Hormonal levels might be in the middle. Various intersex conditions, in other words. And if we just focus on gender identity, or the sexual dimorphism of the brain itself, then that too is along a spectrum. You mention scientific evidence for transsexualism, which often takes the form of studies showing that transsexuals have brains more physically similar to their identified gender than their assigned gender. But if that's true, then what about people that have brains somewhere between both camps? Right in the middle of male/female average? Maybe it would be interesting to do brain scans of people that identify as agender or gender fluid or genderqueer or use neutral pronouns to see if their physical brain structure falls somewhere in the middle.

Does a person have to pick one of the two common genders? Or can they just say they're somewhere in the middle, or a bit of both, or neither? I'm not going to be the one to tell them they can't.