Unless you associate every social interaction in your life with sex, yes.
Too many people doing that and it's annoying.
Gender is so much more than sex, lol. Your entire physical presentation including body language, speech patterns and so on, deal with gender. Your haircut, your clothes, your voice, your face, your body shape, the way you move and talk, the way you sit, the way you greet people, the way you relate to other people around you, both adults and children, ALL of it deals with gender. Claiming otherwise just sounds ignorant, tbh.
Gender isn't just your physical bits and I wish people would realize and stop conflate gender as a means of social expression, gender as in your actual sex and gender in how it relates to one's sense of self and identity. All of these things tie together to create a holistic idea of "gender."
Non-binary people stick out as sore thumbs because they choose to present themselves in a way that does not fit the binary system and will thus be far more likely targets for harassment. It's not something they chose because they express themselves in a way that feels true to them. They can inform people in their environment about how they want others to see them but frankly, it would be way easier if people didn't always get so hung up on it and chose to be dicks about it. It's like I go watch a Youtube video like this one:
And the first thing people do is bitching whether the singer is a man or a woman lol, because he chooses non-binary gender expressions that come across as androgynous so people suddenly got issues placing him within the binary system. I mean, really, is it
that difficult?
Thanks, that's pretty much what I was wondering.
I can also understand [MENTION=360]prplchknz[/MENTION]'s annoyance with people who whine and demand special treatment because there's no "non-binary" option on a driver's license application. I mean, they're not asking you what gender you feel like on the inside, whether it's male, female, or neither. All they're asking for is your physical gender.
I don't like specifying my race when filling out forms, because it's irrelevant. Also, there's no "English-Scottish-Mexican-Italian hybrid" option. But I'm not going to make a big stink about it.
Sigh, but no. It's not that simple, it really isn't. This issue isn't just for non-binary, but this issue applies as much to transsexuals as well. See, here's the deal: I transitioned but have yet to have had my legal gender change. Outwardly, I present as male and look like a male and 99% of the population thinks I'm male except in those rare situations that people either don't hear properly or need to get glasses and those happen to everyone, even cisborn,
but my ID says female. Does that make sense to you? Why do they need to know what parts I have in order to have proper identification? And the thing is, they don't. No one needs to know what parts you were born with in order to identify you. It's not a matter of them asking for sex and confusing it with gender, but it's the underlying assumption that sex = gender, which btw, is also seen in this thread here from the OP as well, and the bitching that comes with it when non-binary would ask for a little bit more leeway and jiggle room, which also benefits transsexuals and not just non-binary folks. Seriously, your genitals got zero bearing in people's ability to identify you as a person and there are only a few cases (mostly medical) where such a thing is necessary. So why keep it there? And let's take the subject of intersex individuals, where do we classify them when giving out an ID? A lot of intersex individuals cannot be easily classified as either male or female because nature itself doesn't work that way, so why the fuck does our society work that way? Why should the state decide your gender, not just including deciding the nature of your physical body, but also the nature of your identity and assume that your body = identity?
On top of this, there's an entire slew of juridical effects that come from the state deciding who you are: it includes how you are recorded when it comes to your marital status and changes (if your legal gender is male, it's going to say husband in the papers), it decides what names you can choose to pick from if you would desire to have a name change; it in many cases determines what kind of medical access you can have which, especially when it comes to people who choose to transition, can hinder them in their process because it refuses them to gain access to surgery and treatment that they need in order to alleviate dysphoria and this is just the tip of the iceberg, really.
The introduction of a third option serves many purposes, but mostly, it serves the purpose to help governments make a transition from a binary to a non-binary system. This is strictly speaking from a judicial point of view and doesn't consider individual feelings and the like into account such as what may happen when a trans person decides to travel to another country without having had a legal gender change and may get stopped at the airport and accused of counterfeit ID and the like, and in worst case scenario, is charged of terrorism. It's not the first time that has happened and it certainly won't be the last.
Having a third option not only a) recognizes people who experience themselves to be non-binary e.g. agender, genderqueer and whatnot people to have that as an actual legal option which again, affects a lot of legal stuff such as what pronoun you are being referred to in legal papers, b) but it helps governments to deal with people who for various reasons cannot currently fit into a binary model e.g. people in transition or people born intersex. This isn't just a matter of opinion and thinking that the binary system is sufficient to deal with people's identities and their relationship to their bodies, but this is very important at an actual judicial state level to recognize that there is in fact a need to have a third option available and that gender or sex, both or neither of them, serve little to no purpose when it comes to ultimately identifying an individual because visual identification a.k.a photo, is still the most relevant form in order to match whether a person is who they claim to be. People are again, not going to look at your bits and there are many ways to conceal the outwards visibility of bits (binding, tucking), so again, the problem with the binary is actually that it comes with a lot of underlying assumptions about what and who someone is because it says M or F on your ID, assumptions that are not always true and may even potentially hurt and damage individuals. And again, that is not accounting the potential dysphoria a trans person, non-binary or binary, may experience by being constantly reminded that the world at large does not recognize their internally felt experience and who they feel they are.
Now, am I advocating that the state should recognize over 9000 different gender identities? No, that's not the point and frankly, I don't think you are going to run into a lot of these people in the first place who seriously advocate this, even within the trans community. Ideally, I think legal gender as a construct should be abolished because I think it causes too much unnecessary bureaucracy which could be resolved in a much more efficient way, but that's my personal opinion.
Asking to be recognized and be respected is not the same as claiming snowflake status, it really isn't. Claiming on the one hand that a) I don't have a problem but b) stop make so many demands on rights to have is really contradictory and bigoted as fuck. It's the same problem I run into when I see islamophobes saying, "I'm not racist, I just don't like Muslims" and think that just because their ethnicity is categorized based on a religion, it somehow means they are not making a racist statement. Seriously, get real.
