New study finds genderqueer people face unique patterns of abuse and discrimination »

neutrois:

The study, A Gender Not Listed Here: Genderqueers, Gender Rebels, and OtherWise in the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, was just published by the LGBTQ Policy Journal at the Harvard Kennedy School. It examines the experiences of genderqueer individuals and others who clearly identified as neither a man nor a woman.

You can find the summary and full report at the link above or at the Williams Institute website.

Asking this question is like standing underneath two enormous waterfalls of bright pink and blue paint which are covering you and everybody else with gallon after gallon of gloopy, gloss paint, getting in your eyes and your mouth, stopping you from seeing and breathing, the level is up around your neck, and nearby others are trying to swim and sinking and drowning, and you’re turning to your friend and asking, ‘Hey, was my t-shirt white or pale yellow?’

”

— In response to the question, “What does gender mean in the absence of gender roles?”

(Source: radtransfem, via practicalandrogyny)

Practical Androgyny: Androgynous model sought for London-based project »

Signal boosting. This project could produce valuable nonbinary visibility materials:

practicalandrogyny:

Practical Androgyny has been contacted by Charlotte, a photographer working with a student from the London College of Fashion on a not-for-profit project that aims to challenge people’s perceptions of gender. If you’re in the London area or able to travel there, and you’re of androgynous appearance, please consider volunteering to model for the photoshoot. No experience required.

Our project explores the way that we perceive positions of political power.  We will be be portraying a fictional presidential figure in a way that challenges people’s assumptions about gender.

We’re looking to explore the way that traditional images of powerful political figures could be subverted to show a future where ‘the president’ appears to be androgynous - or in some way not fitting in with most people’s expectations of binary gender.  We’re looking for someone who could wear the traditional uniform of presidential power (i.e. a smart, dark suit) and present as an extremely attractive individual, without giving the usual cues as to their gender.  We’ll be working with a stylist and a makeup artist to achieve the right look, with our model looking as natural as possible. 

We’re heavily influenced by models like Andrej Pejic and we’d like to envisage a time where people who subvert the gender norm are in public positions outside the fashion world.

We’re going to shoot on Friday 24th or Saturday 25th of this month in South London and unfortunately, we can’t offer payment or travel expenses.  Everyone involved is working on a time-for-images basis, so you’ll get copies of all the final images to use as you see fit.

We very much want to make the best use of the photographs and we are hoping to have them accompany a piece on gender identity for publication and we’d like to offer the whole thing to a magazine as a package on a not-for-profit basis.  You need to be comfortable with this and you’ll be asked to sign a standard model release.

If you’re interested in the project and you think the way you look might fit with our creative vision, please send some recent photos to charlotte<at>lyope<dot>com 

Please reblog and signal boost this request.

Nonbinary gender identity and expression outside of the transgender community

practicalandrogyny:

Today is UK trans* activist organisation Trans Media Action’s Trans Camp event, bringing media and IT professionals together with trans* people to make positive change.

As part of the preparations, trans* people from across the UK were asked to give one minute video responses on the topics of childhood, media, comedy and family.

This is my response to the question of media representation. As a nonbinary person I felt erased or misrepresented by recent media coverage…

I’m nonbinary, that means I live as something other than a woman or a man. It also means I have next to no representation in the media.

Even in documentaries featuring trans* people with genderqueer or gender binary challenging identities or histories, like some of the participants in My Transsexual Summer, these are simplified, glossed over or completely edited out in fear of ‘confusing’ the general public.

If my life experiences are ever touched upon, they’re simplified to the point of misrepresentation. If I’m to be hinted at, it’s in the suggestion that some people are ‘in between’.

My gender and my body are not ‘between’ anything. My gender is not a balancing act. I’m not in the middle ground, I haven’t gone halfway and stopped. I am not half a woman and half a man, I’m not following two sets of sexist stereotypes. I do not ‘pick and choose’ about gender. And I’m not ‘on the fence’. And I’ve definitely not ‘de-transitioned’.

I’m a trans* person, I’m doing what I need to do to be true to myself.

Of course not all nonbinary people object to being described as ‘in between’; that’s an accurate description of some people’s gender identities. But there are many more people besides me whose experiences of being agender, bigender, fluid gender, genderqueer etc are erased by that simplification.

In my case, I experienced gender dysphoria and I did what it was necessary to do to become comfortable with my body. Doing so didn’t fix my social dysphoria though. I tried to be a ‘classic transsexual’, I tried to pretend to be a gender I didn’t truly feel I was. But I found ‘passing’ made me just as socially dysphoric as my assigned gender role had done.

It turned out that transition just wasn’t the perfect ‘package deal’ I’d been sold in the brochure, I had to go off the beaten track to find my own way to authentically express myself to the world.

It would be nice to see this represented in the media at all, especially on TV shows where some of the participants have similar feelings.

(And no, ‘androgyny’ and ‘androgyne’ don’t have to mean ‘in between’; the dictionary definition boils down to ‘having both male and female traits’, and anyway that’s my appearance not my gender).

See further one minute video responses on childhood, comedy and family from an androgynous nonbinary trans* person

Nonbinary.org Wiki »

New year, new web presence! Nonbinary.org now hosts a nonbinary gender community wiki with forums coming soon!

Get involved by expanding stub articles or creating wanted pages.

Recommended reading: This is how "gender is all/only performance" is harmful »

Recommended reading: a life lived in fragments talks about the difference between gender identification and expression, and how the conflation of identity and behaviour is harmful:

youarenotyou:

[Trigger warning for cissexism, gender binarism and policing]

when you question how I can be both femme and agender, or tell me that being assigned female at birth and femme just means that I’m a woman, what you’re really saying is that there is a specific way one must perform a non-binary gender identity.

and this has little to do with how the individual feels and relates to their gender, and everything to do with how they are perceived.

THERE IS NO ONE WAY TO BE AGENDER.

if a cis man who is read as male were to wear lipstick, you’d say he was being subversive. he’s going against expectations. he’s “breaking out” of his gender role. but when a trans man is femme, you think that’s different (especially,especially if he isn’t perceived to be male). because your ideas about gender are narrowly defined. cis people are allowed (to an extent) to play with gender and express themselves, while binary trans people are expected to conform to rigid conceptions of male or female. and non-binary people don’t even factor into this equation.

so when you first start to learn about non-binary people, you may think a non-binary gender must fall in between “male” and “female” on some sort of scale. and that if a person is non-binary but perceived to be female, they need to butch it up; while if they are perceived as male, they need to be more effeminate. the overall goal of a non-binary person being: to fall in the middle. you think that’s what it feels like to be non-binary; to be in between. (hint: gender isn’t a scale)

you think because I identify as not having a gender, that somehow I must present in a way that will result in me not being gendered (impossible). you think that my goal should be to confuse people who will try to gender me based on my appearance, by not conforming to expectations for women since I was assigned to be one and am continually assigned female every day.

my femme identity means often meeting others’ expectations of how I will look and act, because I am perceived to be a woman. to you, this means I’m not authentically non-binary. but to me, the way that I present myself is the way that I feel comfortable. it is unrelated to what others expect of me. only when I started to let go of where I fit into the binary gender system did I start to make sense of myself; I don’t fit into it. but in a cissexist culture, the gender I am assigned every day is defined by how I exist in relation to that system. in other words: what looks “androgynous” is defined by the binary gender system. 

my goal when I get dressed every day as an agender person is not to avoid being gendered when I am out in the world. the validity of my gender identity does not rest upon the ability of others to correctly assign my gender. my gender expression does not determine my gender identity.

there is more than one way to challenge the oppressive gender dichotomy. if the way I describe my gender confuses you, then how can you tell me i’m not subverting anything?

Very well said!

I have observed a tendency in some circles to conflate androgynous appearance with nonbinary identity or to imply that those who are androgynous (or who take or once took hormones, or who have transgender surgery, or who use gender neutral pronouns) are ‘more successfully’ nonbinary than those who express their nonbinary gender in other ways.

We must resist any implication there is only one way to live outside the restrictive gender binary. We all have different comfort points, we are all individuals. We should not re-create the hierarchies of ‘success’ and ‘passing’ seen in other trans* communities. We should be united in the cause of gaining greater freedom to be our authentic selves, express our genders in whichever way is right for us, and celebrate the diversity of identities possible outside of the rigid binary.

Nobody ‘passes’, nobody fails, nobody left behind.

(via youarenotyou-deactivated2012022)

When activists don't represent - Christie Elan-Cane and 'Gender Identity' »

Branching off from the earlier discussion about how some people find ‘queer’ or ‘genderqueer’ offensive; some commentary on how activism that focuses on a single rigid narrative can erase the experiences and identities of those it claims to represent:

rhivolution:

nonbinary:

Christie Elan-Cane’s strong objections to ‘gender queer’

I mainly reblogged Christie Elan-Cane’s opinion to raise the point that some people do find the term offensive when it’s applied to them, and that it can be problematic to use reclaimed slur words for umbrella terms when some people object to being put under their umbrella.

[…]

And yes, I agree that Elan-Cane has a tendency to write in a single voice as if speaking for everyone outside the binary, and in doing so often erases people with different nonbinary experiences in just the same way as non-gendered people usually get erased in transgender writing.

I think activism work that sets out to be inclusive and representative of a plurality of voices and experiences, rather than a single activist’s opinions, tends to be more effective.

Somewhat OTly, I find the implication that people who identify as genderqueer should be classed, in Mx Elan-Cane’s terms, as ‘non-gendered’, to be highly incorrect—not offensive, but frustrating.

I have a gender. It’s a lot of different things at a lot of different times, but I definitely have one. There are people who don’t have a gender, who really are non-gendered, and that is cool, but I don’t think they or I would want ‘non-gendered’ to be the blanket term here either.

[FYI Elan-Cane’s title preference is ‘Pr’ and pronoun preference is ‘per’, both as in ‘person’]

Christie Elan-Cane’s misrepresentation of gender outside the binary goes further than that. Much of per activism, including press releases and letters sent to governmental, public and private organisations focuses on the term ‘gender identity’ and how (in per opinion) only people who identify as female or male have gender identities. Here’s a strongly worded example to that effect:

Fact!  The NON-GENDERED identity cannot be a ‘gender identity’.

Fact!  An identity that is neither male nor female is NOT a ‘gender identity’ in a societal structure comprised of two genders: male and female.

By definition, there is a contradiction. And furthermore, as a non-gendered human being, I object to the casual negation of the non-gendered identity through careless use of an indication reference marker that serves to exclude and ignore the socially invisible non-gendered members of the transpopulation.

[…]

It has been suggested on more than one occasion that non-gendered should learn to ‘embrace’ the term because the intention was that ‘gender identity’ should be inclusive to all transpeople. But the problem is that ‘gender identity’ cannot possibly include non-gendered.

Furthermore, how exactly is this (underlying) message of inclusivity to be conveyed to others, governments, corporations etc.? We, as a ‘category’, are presented within a bundling of ‘categories’ under an overarching ‘trans’ umbrella and collectively referenced under ‘gender identity’. Is it not fair to expect others to assume that all who are being referenced should possess a gendered identity? Where does this leave the non-gendered transperson? Nowhere – as ever!

Exclaiming ‘fact!’ in front of statements like “An identity that is neither male nor female is NOT a ‘gender identity’ in a societal structure comprised of two genders: male and female” doesn’t make them any less misrepresentative of the experiences and self identities of those who have gender identities other than ‘female’ or ‘male’.

There’s a big difference between arguing for recognition that not everyone has a gender identity and stating as a matter of absolute fact that everyone who is ‘neither male nor female’ cannot have a gender identity. I don’t have much of a strong feeling of any ‘gender identity’ myself, preferring to identify my gender with nebulous umbrella terms and the way I wish to be treated, that doesn’t mean I feel the need to deny other people theirs (or pretend that I don’t still have some form of ‘gender identification’).

And as such I find much of the tone and content of Pr Elan-Cane’s writing deeply problematic, ironically due to doing precisely what per argues ‘the establishment’ are doing to non-gendered people - forcing a rigid transgender narrative onto others who don’t feel it fits them.