often cisgender people and binary gender people dismiss nonbinary and gender variant people for being "too complicated." we are told that people are just "ignorant" and that if we keep advocating for ourselves to spread awareness then we will have justice.
yes it is absolutely important to meet people where they are at. yes a lot of the particular language that has come to be associated with gender variant experiences (especially in the west) is new and can be difficult to digest. yes divesting from gender binarist thinking takes time and is a struggle (for all of us!), but i worry if we continue to accept that it is nonbinary people who are "complicated" and that it is cisgender and binary people who are motivated by "ignorance," then we will do little to actually have meaningful justice (let alone safety) for nonbinary people.
nonbinary people aren't complicated, the structural conditions of misogyny and colonialism that have so thoroughly ritualized our invisibility are complicated. nonbinary people aren't complicated, the mechanisms and institutions of gender binarism are because they work in deeply insidious and deeply entrenched ways at every level -- intellectually, socially, culturally, economically, politically -- to perpetuate and normalize the myth of two genders. nonbinary people become seen as complicated because we make explicit how complex the systems around us are.
also the ongoing erasure and brutality against nonbinary and gender variant people isn't the result of ignorance. gender binarism has and continues to be a conscious strategy to discredit, criminalize, and annihilate ways of being and living that are outside of the western gender binary. part of the way this project works is by keeping individual people ignorant of its own strategies, histories, and devices. so then we should understand this not as *ignorance,* but as a particular type of enlightenment/consciousness that has been imposed as part of a bigger project.
the problem is that nonbinary and gender variant people continue to spread awareness to no effect because people are only seeing our knowledge as information, not as an alternative paradigm.
granting full dignity to nonbinary people requires a transformation of how you understand race, gender history, progress, and more -- not just an awareness of the words we now call ourselves.
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