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Comment by lostcolony | Hacker News Reader

>> If someone doesn't fit into one of those boxes

That's kind of the point of using them though. The goal is to -stop- saying "you either fit into this gender binary, or you are 'other'".

It's kinda like normalizing the use of "partner" instead of "husband/wife" even for the straight married people; it helps normalize relationships that fall outside of monogamous, state recognized marriage, and doesn't force gender definitions (what if you're in a committed relationship, or married, to an NB person?) or force releasing sexuality just to indicate you're in a relationship (i.e., the person maybe doesn't want the fact they're gay to come up in this setting).

Providing your own pronouns, even if you're cisgendered, is a form of allyship; you're normalizing it, and helping create space for those whose pronouns don't match how they present to provide theirs.

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Yeah I think I understand the push towards that. I'm saying it's not really a "normal" thing. I live in a pretty liberal area and have yet to hear someone announce their pronouns. I sometimes see it listed in someone's slack or twitter bio or something though. Generally we're just running on context clues and stuff.

It's definitely not normalized the way Mr/Mrs/Miss(/Ms) is, agreed. But that's the goal, and the desired outcome, and there are definitely places where it has seen heavy adoption and normalization. Just not super widespread (yet).

But that said, what is super normalized is referring to others by their pronouns. "Becky? Oh she's..." etc. Providing pronouns in a place you don't need them avoids awkwardness, mislabeling, and normalizes it to where it's safe to ask for your preferred ones. I.e., "Hi, I'm Becky; my pronouns are she/her" makes it safe for those whose gender doesn't match what they present (or is ambiguous) to clarify how they wish to be identified, and is easy to roll with even for those who "aren't woke" or whathaveyou, whereas "Hi, I'm Becky; I'm a woman" would have no beneficial effect (it doesn't break the binary, since "non-binary" is still calling out the otherness from what is expected, and it also invites challenge by those against transness, i.e., exactly what we see GOP bills doing, demanding examination of a girl's privates and etc), and would likely cause you to be stared at like you're an alien for most situations.

Non-binary only makes any sense in a society where men and women are defined by cultural notions of masculinity and femininity, rather than by sex.

It's one step further down the line from men and women being expected to behave in what are considered, respectively, masculine and feminine ways - the typical conservative viewpoint.

I find it quite bizarre that this is regarded as a progressive stance. It's like they've internalized the conservative view and come up with entirely new categories to work around it. When the sensible thing would have been to just reject the idea of gender stereotyping entirely.

Only partially. You're right in that some of the binary is cultural, but you're saying, what, "people should just identify as their physical sex, while rejecting the social/cultural norms"? Plenty of people do that. But, sex itself isn't a binary. What makes a person "male" or "female"? "Chromosomes" is the most common statement, and yet, there exist people with XXY chromosomes. There are people with damaged chromosomes, chromosomes that didn't express the way you'd expect, etc. While it can be said accurately that "the majority of males have an X and a Y chromosome" and "a majority of females have no Y chromosome", those generalizations aren't absolute. We don't actually have a biological indicator of sex that is accurate 100% of the time. So trying to define a sexual binary doesn't really make sense either.

So what a person is saying when they say non-binary can vary, and is also quite personal. Which is another reason to use the pronouns they provide (so you can respectfully refer to them using the categorization they provide), and to recognize that what is going on with their genitals, their chromosomes, etc, is not relevant to you.

Someone with XXY chromosomes, assuming a functional SRY gene and the genes downstream from that, will be male. Klinefelter's syndrome is a condition that only applies to males. The biological indicator of sex isn't the chromosomal configuration - that's just a proxy. The indicator is which pathway of sexual differentiation was triggered during development.

Sex is a binary because that's how anisogamic sexual reproduction works: females embodying the reproductive role organised around large gamete production, and for males, small gametes. This still accounts for disorders of sexual development too: a male with underdeveloped testes is still male, and a female with non-functional ovaries is still female. In some extremely rare occurrences of chimerism, a person could reasonably be said to embody both.

But that's not what anyone means when they use the term "non-binary" as an identity - it's expressed by people who are unambiguously male or female, but who feel that they don't fit into the cultural gender stereotypes of masculinity or femininity.

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