Non-binary gender identity as gender role dysmorphia

TW: Potentially controversial take on non-binary gender identity

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I see 2 drives that leads one to identify as non-binary. The first is body dysmorphia, which I won’t talk about in this post.

The second and the one I want to talk about is gender role dysmorphia, or the rejection of an identity based on traditional gender roles. My prediction is that most people who currently identify as non-binary fall into this second category.

The idea behind what I’m calling gender role dysmorphia is that growing up, these folk rejected most or all traits and behaviors assigned to their corresponding gender role. Rather than reject the gender role traits, they end up rejecting the gender identity entirely. And because they don’t resonate with the opposing gender role traits either, they land on a third category. One that is defined as being in opposition to the other 2 categories and indeed to the idea of there being only 2 categories.

I see this as fundamentally an error of associations (you could also call it a bucket error). These folk couple 3 categories into 1 concept: gender as a social identity, gender as a prescriptor of role and behavior, the actual specific gender role traits and behaviors

The progressive leftist movement has attempted to solve this gender role dysmorphia issue by splitting off gender from sex. From the lens of gender role dysmorphia being the underlying issue, I see their logic, but I still find this solution to be non-sensical and sub-optimal.

I imagine the statement they’re wanting to say to be: I reject your notions of what traits a man/woman should exhibit and what behaviors a man/woman should enact. I reject the control I feel at the effect of from normative gender-role-based social scripts.

Their solution is to recontextualize gender from an objective trait to a subjective identity. I assert that this renders gender useless as a category. It ends up simply identifying those who reject traditional gender roles and those who do not. Gender as a useful tool becomes a casualty in the war of self-expression.

This is especially prominent in the request (and sometimes demand) for specific gender pronoun usage. Gender as an objective trait means I can for the most part walk down the street or hear a stranger’s voice and reference them with a gendered pronoun. By co-opting gender into a subjective identity, we’re severely hampering that ability (assuming a value for accuracy).

I argue that this is a misuse of gender. Gender is the social component of the biological sex of the body one inhabits. Rather than sever the link between sex and gender, sever the link between gender and traditional gender roles.

Rejection of gender identity is doing this:

Sex -|- gender identity -- traditional gender role/traits

I propose the following instead:

Sex -- gender identity -|- traditional gender role/traits

Rather than reject existing gender categories entirely, I encourage anyone experiencing gender role dysmorphia to reclaim their gender identity by redefining the personality and behavior traits associated with that gender role. You can still be a “man”/“woman” without the internal pressure you’re putting on yourself to be a traditional man/woman.

“I am a man, therefore how I am is what it means to be a man.”

If you want to go further down the rabbit hole, I encourage doing shadow work to reclaim some of those specific traits that you found so repulsive when you were younger. That is almost certainly a path to more freedom and empowerment.

And then I encourage everyone else to stop with the misogyny and misandry, and overgeneralizing gender groups. No wonder people start to feel disidentified with gender.

Ultimately, I want to point out that something exists that is the difference between men and women. Some of that is biological (sex) and some of that is social/cultural (gender). I also acknowledge there are gray areas but the vast majority fall into 1 of those 2 categories. If we want to overthrown traditional gender roles, rather than bastardizing our existing system for gender (ask yourself: at it’s core, what does it mean to call someone a they?), which is already strongly associated with genetics, reproductive organs, body shape, etc, let’s do the more productive and categorically sensical thing and reclaim what it means to be a man/woman. Including if we want to weaken the idea of gender roles/traits entirely (“I am a man but that doesn’t imply my role in society”, or “there are no personality traits that make you a man, but rather you are a man and therefore your personality is one of the ways that it means to be a man”).