On the Circling of the Wagons

I have been meaning to write this post for quite some time, but have put it off until the point where the constant itch cannot be ignored. I try to avoid getting personal on the blog, but here goes: the most personal thing I have written on BSE so far.

The Ghibelline eagle is my own addition.

When I started coming out as a nonbinary person, I was afraid, but not of something concrete like bigotry from self-appointed protectors of "traditional values" or ridicule from macho pinheads. Far-right thugs being a quite marginal phenomenon where I live, they were even lower on my list of concerns. The fact that my country's government does not yet officially recognize that we exist also didn't faze me at all. I suppose what scared me the most, looking back, was the prospect of never-ending conversations with well-meaning liberal types who most of all wish to "understand", and for me to guide them to a supposedly higher state of wokeness. I was socially awkward to start with, and then all of a sudden I was supposed to talk to people about bathrooms and pronouns and whatnot after having been very well used to keeping these things to myself.

I cannot state in clear enough terms that overall, people have been supportive or at least accepting. The only explicit hostility I have encountered so far during this ongoing process has come from cis-women. It always goes down the same road: I am not femme, I dislike wearing makeup and I usually prefer male clothes for their sturdiness and many good pockets. This leads some folks (who are literally always women) to insist not only that I am a male, but also that I am simply appropriating the nonbinary label since I "don't present as queer enough." Curiously, this hostility is not specific to TERFs or even straight people.

A lot of it has to do with strategic essentialism - women are feminine, femmes are oppressed by patriarchal mechanisms, queers experience the same oppressive structures in their daily lives, ergo queers must be femme to "really count", especially if they were assigned male at birth. The wagons thus circled, us weirdos are in effect tossed under the bus. Misgendering hurts so much more when it comes deliberately from supposed allies than when it comes from the usual snowflakes who desperately need for there to be only two genders just so as to keep their fragile cosmos from falling apart.

A related phenomenon is the expectation, common among activists, that we all gather in the same narrow segment of the so-called intersectional left. I find this difficult since as an Anarchist with more "old-school" Marxist leanings (and active membership in a Social Democratic party), I do not believe in the strategy of stacking victim roles on top of each other and rewarding whoever holds the biggest pile. Sure, systems of oppression often overlap and strengthen each other, and I agree that leftists should recognize this, but so-called intersectionalism depends on the same essentialist thinking it claims to attack (albeit for strategic purposes) and ultimately comes off as the same bourgeois, divide-and-conquer identity politics which has hampered the left for decades. Say any of this aloud in the wrong place and prepare to get called out as a shill for racist imperialism - especially if you are a queer person.

On good days I say "Screw it, let them think I'm a man" and brush it off like a stranger's cigarette ashes. On worse days it's like stepping on a dog turd - you manage to scrape it off your heel, yet the stench lingers for a while. I cannot help but wonder what all the fuss is about. I don't even want to use their damned bathrooms.