I had three non-binary friends. Notice the word “HAD”.
I couldn’t deal with their bullshit. I want to write about how silly they are because I love to laugh at illogical nonsense.
I’ll be using fake names for them.
Kim is first. She says “down with gender norms!” I agreed until I heard the shit that comes out of her mouth.
Kim is 32 and has been in a relationship with the same man since she was 18. They live together and are like any other heterosexual couple. Except it’s a “queer relationship”. Why? Because Kim identifies as “genderqueer-non-binary”. Why? Because she wears man’s checked shirts and military-style boots and every few years, cuts her long hair short.
That’s it. That’s what makes her “on the trans spectrum”. Her personal style apparently makes her feel enough a part of the LGBTQI+++++++++++++++++++++ that she puts a pride flag up in the window and on social media.
A lesbian questioned her when she said she’s LGBT. “How are you part of us? Because it isn’t about gendered clothes. You are a straight tomboy.”
Kim said, “Don’t call me a tomboy. That’s so ignorant!”
And after a bit of a back and forth about what makes someone queer, she stuttered that she is bisexual.
I don’t believe her. All she talks about is her celebrity man-crushes. She paints them, writes fanfics about them, nonstop. She has never once mentioned a female celebrity, much less expressed lust for one. It’s nothing but an attempt by a heterosexual to appropriate a movement for same-sex attracted people.
Sometimes I dress like Kim too. It just makes me a woman who likes man’s shirts. Yes, sometimes I am mocked for it and some people ask if I am a lesbian. I don’t care! It’s not discrimination. I have no need for the rainbow flag and neither does heterosexual tomboy Kim.
Now I will talk about NB 2: Roka, whom I met through online gaming.
Roka, aged 29, again dresses similar to me, well 15-year-old me! A skater girl look. She has a bit of pink in the front of her black hair (yes, I, for shame, have “gender hair” that I’m not ready to let go of yet).
Roka genuinely is LGBT, for she is bisexual and lives with her long-term girlfriend. Like Kim above, Roka is obsessed with male celebrities and can’t stop openly lusting for their penis in the most filthy way. I have a dirty sense of humour, so I found this funny, especially as we had a crush on the same man at one point.
Roka went to a screamo band concert one night and dropped our mutual celebrity crush like a bag of poo and went 100mph into her new obsession with the frontman.
Despite happily cohabiting with her girlfriend, she openly expresses her desires to date the frontman but also wants to be his friend. She wants him to be sexually attracted to her…but also does not want to be sexually objectified. So, to achieve this - bear in mind she has never even met said frontman - she decided to identify out of womanhood and is now a non-binary they/them. That way, he would see her as one of the lads whilst simultaneously wanting to fuck her(!).
If Roka feels the only way to be respected by men is to identify out of her sex class, then she has been hanging out with the wrong men. I know lots of men are shitty, but she just needs to look a little harder. She’s an extrovert so it will be easy to find them. The last thing she should do is pretend she’s not a woman, because how does that fight the patriarchy? It actually exacerbates the problem. It won’t work anyway because she is 5’2” with a very slight build and a little 12-year-old’s face, with pink under-cut gender hair and the obligatory circle-framed large spectacles. Her look is actually nothing more than a gender ideologist they-person stereotype. If your male friends see you as one of the lads, it will be because of your personality - and perhaps theirs, not your presentation.
My third “enby” is Jude who started as an online friend, then real-life friend, until she faked a suicide attempt.
Jude is one of those people who lists all their ailments and disorders in their social media bios. I don’t know why she followed a TERF like me, and I rolled my eyes when I saw her they/them pronouns on display. I begrudgingly followed her back because we had an interest (obsession is probably a better way of describing it) in common and she seemed determined to befriend me and when she ingratiated herself with a 40-something friend of mine with the same interest, we ended up meeting in person.
She was using her autism as an excuse to get front seats at an event she was attending, on the grounds that she needed the audience clapping to be behind her because of sensory issues. I questioned it, because as an autistic person myself, I have never used my condition to pull rank. When she found out I am also autistic, instead of saying “oh, you have it too?” she attempted to trump me with “Yeah I am also BPD, PTSD, OCD, <insert other medical disorders inc. PCOS>”. These were irrelevant to her seating arrangements so were nothing more than “Oh shit, I’m not the only autist in the conversation, better throw the alphabet in, so I can continue to be the special, unique one”.
There is a decade age difference between us, which wouldn’t have bothered me had she not been exceptionally childish. She edited photos to do with our obsession with pastel colours and glitter and cartoon animal GIFs and spewed mawkish statements all the time. Instead of talking to a mid 20s woman, it was like being with an early-teenager.
Our mutual friend Jo did as she was told with the pronouns stuff, which was so jarring to read. I struggle with pretending and illogical rules, so I always called her female without thinking about it. Sorry-not-sorry, but how can I pretend this pink and glitter and cutesy animal loving female is not a woman? She is the archetypal image of “little girl”, made even more ridiculous by the fact Jo (heterosexual) is a masculine woman, who is non-maternal and loves stereotypically male activities, like assault courses, motorbikes and archery and has really short, cropped hair. I am slightly gender non-conforming myself so here we were, a tomboy, a half-tomboy..and a pink glitter & fluff woman who believed that out of the three of us, she was not the woman!!!! For fuck’s sake, most women wouldn’t be seen dead with the frilly pink stuff and arse-length plaits she has.
She claimed her parents forced this upon her (I must emphasise, she is in her mid-20s and apparently has no control over her hair or clothing) which brings me to my next point. Her family refuse to recognise that their feminine daughter is a “masc presenting trans non-binary” even when she wore her male friend’s jumper, the horror! So she “took an overdose” and was in a “coma”. I won’t go into it all because it’s so ridiculous, but I don’t believe it was real because she claimed celebrities were video-calling her to wake her up and all my information about her condition was coming from “nurses” who were writing to me about her condition, through her social media, which surely breaks confidentiality? What nurses use someone’s phone to update friends who aren’t even close? So I binned her because of that and the fact she kept sharing stuff by Mermaids and giving out instructions on how to treat NBs that changed by the day.
To conclude, they have “not like other girls” superiority complex that I grew out of as a teen, except that they have done nothing to cast off the female socialisation we have heaped upon us. Fangirling, screaming and “squee-ing” over celebrity “boys”, being nasty about other girls for their clothes and expressing the desire to be mothers are all feminine gender stereotypes and for some people (sexists), these things epitomise being female! By thinking that clothes and haircuts are your innate gender, they are reinforcing the gender stereotypes they claim to be escaping. It’s all very childish and makes being female less colourful.
To be a woman you just need to be an adult, human and female. The rest is your personality, interests, likes and dislikes.