Anyway, I wish people would stop trying to fix the clearly broken privileged/non-privileged dichotomy by just shifting the goalposts to keep the "right people" in the non-privileged group, or adding extra intersections. Sadly, I'm no Kepler with a new and better neat model to explain everything, but "use privilege when it works but remember it is just a flawed model" still seems like a step forward from pretending the system is perfect and the only people who question it are bigots.
I had...actually never really thought that we could have something *other* than this dichotomy, until you mentioned it, and now it seems really obvious, and also really obviously Flawed as an approach that can't possibly apply to every scenario, because binaries never do and never have, even when they try and be 'Respectfully Shifting Binaries.'
It's really tough, because I think there is that instinct to self-validate through Oppression Olympics style discourse. Even if the words aren't being used by individuals, I still wonder if there's a bent towards securing a *safe place* by proving one's belonging in a community by defining one's non-privileges alongside one's privileges. Maybe it's because there's already so little cross-group solidarity, that the battle lines happen internally for some, even if they're not being spoken. I know for myself, I sometimes feel the pull to do it, and have to consciously choose to resist it, which means I haven't yet internalised 'you don't have to do this' yet.
As an AFAB NB person who is genderqueer/genderfluid, I do sometimes feel like a woman, and sometimes like a man, and sometimes like neither. My definitions for all those things are strange and amorphous. Woman =/= femme and man =/= hypermasculine, and I'm sure to other people, the question: 'well how do you KNOW' might come up but whatever that's just how I idenfity. I've often not given much thought to how much of a voice I have, whether I'm allowed to talk over people more, or less, because of my identity, but you know that I tend to avoid groups (even online at times), and so I miss a lot of the places and conversations where situations play out where 'I can talk about this with authority Because.'
It's...
What confounds me is a whole swathe of NB people using binary language to talk about the NB and non-binary gender experience. Even people who identify in the societally given binary, are still working in a world of like...'the gender binary still doesn't actually exist.' And as I sit here thinking about it, I have no tools to grasp how to begin to change that language, beyond reading posts like this and knowing that it's necessary, at least for some, to find a way over time.
Anyway I'm having lots of thinky thoughts basically and don't have anything concrete other than 'wow, it's weird but definitely true that we use binaries in many different ways to talk about the NB experience and that must impact a lot of different NB people - AMAB people as mentioned here for example' in pretty serious ways.
And yet before today, I'd not even considered that privileged/non-privileged *is* a binary form of language in the first place (why Pia), or what it might mean to constantly use binary language in a community trying to find its way in a non-binary world.
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I had...actually never really thought that we could have something *other* than this dichotomy, until you mentioned it, and now it seems really obvious, and also really obviously Flawed as an approach that can't possibly apply to every scenario, because binaries never do and never have, even when they try and be 'Respectfully Shifting Binaries.'
It's really tough, because I think there is that instinct to self-validate through Oppression Olympics style discourse. Even if the words aren't being used by individuals, I still wonder if there's a bent towards securing a *safe place* by proving one's belonging in a community by defining one's non-privileges alongside one's privileges. Maybe it's because there's already so little cross-group solidarity, that the battle lines happen internally for some, even if they're not being spoken. I know for myself, I sometimes feel the pull to do it, and have to consciously choose to resist it, which means I haven't yet internalised 'you don't have to do this' yet.
As an AFAB NB person who is genderqueer/genderfluid, I do sometimes feel like a woman, and sometimes like a man, and sometimes like neither. My definitions for all those things are strange and amorphous. Woman =/= femme and man =/= hypermasculine, and I'm sure to other people, the question: 'well how do you KNOW' might come up but whatever that's just how I idenfity. I've often not given much thought to how much of a voice I have, whether I'm allowed to talk over people more, or less, because of my identity, but you know that I tend to avoid groups (even online at times), and so I miss a lot of the places and conversations where situations play out where 'I can talk about this with authority Because.'
It's...
What confounds me is a whole swathe of NB people using binary language to talk about the NB and non-binary gender experience. Even people who identify in the societally given binary, are still working in a world of like...'the gender binary still doesn't actually exist.' And as I sit here thinking about it, I have no tools to grasp how to begin to change that language, beyond reading posts like this and knowing that it's necessary, at least for some, to find a way over time.
Anyway I'm having lots of thinky thoughts basically and don't have anything concrete other than 'wow, it's weird but definitely true that we use binaries in many different ways to talk about the NB experience and that must impact a lot of different NB people - AMAB people as mentioned here for example' in pretty serious ways.
And yet before today, I'd not even considered that privileged/non-privileged *is* a binary form of language in the first place (why Pia), or what it might mean to constantly use binary language in a community trying to find its way in a non-binary world.