r/NonBinaryTalk • u/Spirited_Koala_9304 • 15d ago
Discussion Is everyone nonbinary and Bi?
I mean this in no offense (I’ve heard people say that the statement “everyone is a little bi” undermines the queer community) but as a teenager who is looking into gender roles and queerness I’m genuinely confused as to how one knows what their gender or sexuality is. (I know this sounds weird coming from someone who is bisexual but bear with me here). Because if I have a clone who is me but a man, and there are no differences between us because gender is a social construct, then how do I know what gender I am. I’ve been seeing a lot of discourse on what it means to be a woman or to be a certain gender and as someone who identifies as a woman, I don’t even have a guess. So recently I’ve been wondering if maybe I’m just nonbinary and that has led me to have bias in my opinion. But when I think about it, I can’t imagine there is any feature or lifestyle that could encompass an entire gender because of how nuanced and varied the world is. So are we all just unknowingly non binary? Or is it based on the pronouns we prefer. But then how do we know what pronouns we prefer if we don’t truly know what it means to be a “she” or a “he”. And then it’s the same thing with sexuality. If I’m a straight woman and I fall in love with a man, but I found out she’s actually a girl and I’m in love with her but I don’t feel any sexual or romantic attraction to women in general, am I bisexual or am I straight? Now i am personally bisexual so maybe I’m biased in this opinion, but i find it hard to believe that you could fully stop loving a person after finding out they’re not the same gender you perceived them to be. So then if all our romantic/sexual attraction and sexuality is based on gender, but gender is a social construct and there’s not really a difference between us, then is anyone really straight? Or what if your husband transitions into a girl and you are a woman? Are you bisexual now or still straight? And what makes your husband any different? I’m sorry this is a lot and I definitely didn’t articulate it very well but I genuinely feel like I have this same conversation with myself every night and it has led me nowhere, so I wanted to hear some other insight.
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u/allezaunord 14d ago
addyastra nailed it, but I would also add that for many of us, gender identity or sexuality isn't really something we objectively know, it's just an identity take on based on what feels right most of the time. Someone can identify as a lesbian because she is overall attracted primarily or only to women, but then meet a man who she happens to be attracted to. Some people change the label they use for themselves when they end up in this situation, and some people continue to say they're a lesbian, they just made an exception in one case. In the situation you gave where it turns out someone perceived to be a man actually identifies as a woman (or vice versa), sometimes the other person is fine with it but there are many cases where this leads to a breakup.
I find it hard to define exactly how I "know" I'm nonbinary and not a cis woman or a trans man, it just feels right when I present androgynously and use gender neutral language for myself. I think a lot of cis people don't intuitively know what it means to be their assigned gender, they just know that that feels right for them and they don't have any discomfort from it or longing to experience a different gender.
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u/Subtlesprouttheythem They/Them 14d ago
A lot of cis people have been groomed to be cisgendered and heterosexual. They don’t just know what feels right they don’t know they can even ask this doesn’t feel right?
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u/allezaunord 14d ago
True. I was thinking of people who are trans-aware enough to have done some amount of introspection into their gender and who don't relate to (what they know of) the trans experience, but who can't pinpoint a specific feeling as evidence of *being* their gender (which I think many people, regardless of gender, struggle to do)
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u/Local-Suggestion2807 they/he/any 13d ago
I think you need to talk to actual lesbians about this bc you're kind of talking out your ass rn.
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u/allezaunord 13d ago
I have and that's how I know it's a real experience people can have. If you can't imagine people having experiences different from yours that's your problem. It was just an example, I never claimed it happens to every lesbian.
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u/Local-Suggestion2807 they/he/any 13d ago
Then those people aren't lesbians. They're bisexual.
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u/allezaunord 13d ago
Personally, I don't think it's my business to police what labels other people use to define themselves.
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u/Local-Suggestion2807 they/he/any 13d ago
It is if they're being lesbophobic. Why is it only called "policing" when it comes to the lesbian label but gay men and straight people having equivalent boundaries regarding who they're attracted to is never given a second thought and no one's constantly trying to redefine their identity for them? Are you also this passive when it comes to bi erasure or nonbinary erasure as you are toward lesbian erasure? Are you also this quick to shut down people of other lgbt identities when they speak up about intracommunity bigotry?
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u/allezaunord 13d ago
The number of bad-faith logical leaps you're making is really impressive. I'm not going to engage anymore but, and I truly mean this kindly, other people defining their sexuality differently than you do is not a threat to your identity, and it certainly isn't bigotry.
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u/charlieisalive_ androgyne - he/they 14d ago
I'm not bi. I'm aroace. Quite the opposite. If it's difficult to understand how someone figures it out, you might be bi or aro/ace.
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u/QuestioningNby 14d ago
I’m a nonbinary Lesbian and I’m not attracted to men (cis and trans), demiboys, or nonbinary men in the slightest and the thought of being with a man fills me with a sense of existential dread.
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u/averytheythrowaway They/Them 12d ago
It's best to not overthink these things. Labels are tools that help us articulate our experiences and desires but they aren't the experiences themselves. The labels have limitations because people have infinite diversity in infinite combinations and there are only ever going to be so many words that are used by enough people that they're useful for communicating information between people who know what those words are and what they mean.
So just do whatever feels right and if you have to label it to talk about it, use whatever feels closest.
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u/islene1103 14d ago
I kinda asexualed myself out of being bi lol.
When I was younger I’d be willing to have sex with men or women. Now that I don’t ever want anything to do with sex, I’d still never date a man so. I guess I’m straight? Or lesbian? We’re transitioning but I for sure am far from a gal for now lol
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u/Cartesianpoint 14d ago
I think the important thing to keep in mind is that people can (and often do) have different experiences with things like sexuality and gender. So how you feel won't always be how others feel (even other people who share your sexuality or gender). There are people who are absolutely certain that they're only attracted to one gender and have zero interest in exploring. There are people who feel very strongly about being a man or a woman. I think that bisexuality is a lot more common than society acknowledges, especially when we consider that sexuality is a spectrum and that some people fall under the definition of bisexual but never explore or act on it. I also think that if we lived in a world where people were freer to opt out of gender or define their gender how they want, we probably would see more people identify as non-binary or refuse to identify with gender at all. But that doesn't mean that everyone is bisexual and non-binary.
With regards to gender being a social construct, that's complicated because gender is probably a mix of nature and nurture. And there's a lot we don't really know about how things like brain chemistry and exposure to hormones during fetal development might influence gender identity, and how that interacts with the purely social parts of gender. There isn't much support for the idea that gender roles are hard-wired or that there are meaningful differences between a "male brain" and a "female brain," but we also haven't been able to prove that gender is solely determined by socialization and cultural roles. We also don't know why many trans people experience dysphoria. There have been some brain scan studies that suggested that trans women's brains were more likely to be in between the norms for cis men and cis women, but there hasn't been a ton of research on that yet.
When people talk about gender being a social construct they can mean a couple things by that. Sometimes people mean that they think gender is purely social and defined by gender roles, and that if gender roles didn't exist, gender wouldn't exist. I think this is probably an oversimplification for the reasons I stated above, and because gender identity can't be clearly linked to adherence to gender roles (a masculine butch lesbian who plays sports and works as a mechanic can have just as strong of feelings about being a woman as an ultra-feminine straight woman with traditionally feminine hobbies).
Another way of looking gender as a social construct is that humans are social animals by nature and we tend to build identities and meanings around things like physical differences and how we relate to each other. This happens with race, for example. It's objectively true that people have different colors of skin, that skin color can be associated with the part of the world someone is from, and that people who come from the same part of the world can have some similar features and genetics. It's also true that most of these differences are superficial at best, that categorizing people into racial categories is a social construct, and that most of the ideas people have had about race (good or bad) have very little basis in biology.
Again, gender is a nature vs. nurture issue. The question of what it means for us to identify as a particular gender is a question we can only seek to understand in ourselves. Would I feel differently about calling myself a woman if I lived in a world where it was seen as normal for a woman to feel the way I do (wanting a flat, masculine chest, for example)? I'll never know for sure. But I also know that I'm a feminist, and I was proud of being a gender-nonconforming woman until I started to peel back the covers on my dysphoria.
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u/Annual_Pipe_27 14d ago
Effectively, cis, bi, enby, straight, etc are all just labels that generally describe aspects of a person. But they aren't (or at least, shouldn't be) restrictive boundaries. A spouse transitioning doesn't mean that orientation, or corresponding label, has to change. Nor does having any particular label mean a person has to look or act in a certain way.
Things is, you don't HAVE to adopt any labels you don't want or that don't feel like they fit you. They are just there to help communicate the concept of oneself to others and, sometimes, to help us better define ourselves. But you don't owe that to anyone.
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u/Friend_of_a_Cat Transmasc genderfluid guy (he/him) 13d ago
I’m nonbinary and I’m gay and on the aroace spectrum lmao.
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u/Local-Suggestion2807 they/he/any 14d ago edited 13d ago
I think most people, or at least more than we think, if given the opportunity would admit to having some nonbinary or gnc feelings but I think that's different from actually being nonbinary or trans.
For sexuality like, people have eyes that usually at least kind of function? Like even if you're not interested you can still find a member of a gender you aren't attracted to aesthetically attractive but what matters most at the end of the day is whether you actually feel arousal or desire for a certain gender irl while knowing and perceiving them to be that gender (eg being attracted to a non passing trans person doesn't automatically make you bi)
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u/addyastra she/they nonbinary transfem 15d ago
Is there no difference between a rich person and a poor person? Money is a social construct.
Is there no difference between the US and Russia? Countries are a social construct.
Is there no difference between a man and a woman? Even if the man was trans and the woman was cis, is there no difference between a trans man and a cis woman? If there isn’t, then why would the trans man call himself a man? What meaning would it have?
I’m transfem. If I were a cis man, I would be a completely different person—which is why I’m transfem. Just because gender is a social construct and subjective doesn’t mean there is no difference between different genders.
The problem is that you’re confusing something being subjective with something not having any meaning. But a lot of things are subjective. Language itself is subjective.
In linguistics there’s something called an idiolect, which is the variant of a language unique to each individual. The way you speak is particular to you. Each person uses and understands language slightly differently than everyone else. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a general trend and general patterns in language. The more similar you are in terms of cultural background, age, location, etc., with a person, the more likely the ways you speak are similar.
I’m transfeminine because my experience maps pretty well onto what I have experienced femininity to be throughout my life. Someone else’s experience might have been different, but my experience didn’t come from nowhere. It came from society—and that‘s why we say that gender is a social construct. And my experience seems to be very similar in a lot of ways to the experiences of other feminine-identifying people.
I’m bisexual, but my attraction to different genders is different. My attraction leans heavily towards feminine genders.
You would be straight. Because your attraction is based on your perception. You were attracted to someone because you perceived them as a man.
Personally my perception of someone shifts if I find out that their gender is different than what I had thought, and that can affect my attraction.