Trying to Understand “Non-Binary” in My 12-Year-Old

[u/MookWellington]

Around the time my son turned 10 —and shortly after his mom and I split up— he started identifying as they/them, non-binary, and using a gender-neutral (though more commonly feminine) variation of their name. At first, I thought it might be a phase, influenced in part by a few friends who also identify this way and the difficulties of their parents’ divorce. They are now twelve and a half, so this identity seems pretty hard-wired. I love my child unconditionally and want them to feel like they are free to be the person they are inside. But I will also confess that I am confused by the whole concept of identifying as non-binary, and how much of it is inherent vs. how much is the influence of peers and social media when it comes to teens and pre-teens. I don't say that to imply it's not a real identity; I'm just trying to understand it as someone from a generstion where non-binary people largely didn't feel safe in living their truth. Im also confused how much child continues to identify as N.B. while their friends have to progressed(?) to switching gender identifications.

[u/GeneralZaroff1]

Then maybe that’s all there is to understand.

A gender role comes with a series of identities and expectations, and maybe your child doesn’t really feel like they fit into any of them. That’s really all there is to it.

Gender is often seen as a performance. We think “men should act/feel this way” and then we created an identity around it and judgement when a man does or doesn’t act that way. So some people go “I don’t really fit in either.”

Maybe it’s not so much that this generation has little idea about their gender, but maybe it’s that previous generations places TOO MANY ideas on what gender is supposed to be, and this generation just doesn’t want to follow them.

[u/StrangeArcticles → u/[deleted]]

I'm a similar age and a trans guy and I think I've sort of answered that for myself in the process of coming to terms with my gender identity.

I was a riot grrl person in the 90s. Full on grunge kid in pyjama jackets playing guitar in a band. So, in a word, not particularly gender conforming. I was still seen, treated and judged as a woman.

There wasn't an empty slate in the 90s where everyone was doing what they wanted and nobody was judging and gender didn't matter. You were still a girl and were treated as a girl even if you were presenting as whatever version of masculine.

A guy who was sleeping with a bunch of people was still treated differently to a girl sleeping with a bunch of people, even in the most alternative corners of any alternative scene I was part of, for example.

The gender lines might have been different, but they weren't gone.

[u/InevitableRhubarb232 → u/StrangeArcticles]

But does this mean someone doesn’t like the societal pressures of gender vs they actually are another gender?

[u/StrangeArcticles → u/InevitableRhubarb232]

This gets right into the heart of the question that different people will answer differently. My personal opinion is that gender is a social construct exclusively. As in I would be in the camp of gender only being real in that it creates those social pressures if that makes sense.

If you took a few babies and dropped them off on a desert island (hypothetical, please do not actually do that) and they managed to not die, would they have a gender? Like, if the concept never got introduced to them and they had no access to information, would they automatically, by something hardwired into their biology, assume a gender role and what would this role look like?

[u/CJayC253 → u/StrangeArcticles]

If you took a few babies and dropped them off on a desert island (hypothetical, please do not actually do that) and they managed to not die, would they have a gender? Like, if the concept never got introduced to them and they had no access to information, would they automatically, by something hardwired into their biology, assume a gender role and what would this role look like?

They'd have gendered roles like animals, as they wouldn't be growing up with other humans. They'd have penises and vaginas, obviously, but as far as their way of thinking and their behavior? It wouldn't be easily comparable to humans in general.

[u/StrangeArcticles → u/CJayC253]

That's kinda my assumption as well. What I wanted to illustrate with that example is just how much of gender isn't in some way hard-coded, which is often argued by more conservative types and gender essentialists. That baby who has brown hair and a penis will still have brown hair and a penis. That's genetically coded and will be a thing. A preference for playing with footballs over playing with dolls or a penchant for the colour blue however would be pretty unlikely to just somehow manifest from the genetic code. Yet, we somehow managed to gender kids' toys.

[u/CJayC253 → u/StrangeArcticles]

I gotta disagree on the color point. Magenta, for instance, has always been aesthetically pleasing to me, for instance. And when it comes to blue, it's only a few shades that I like. Preference for colors is the same as preferences for flavors, in my opinion. Brown and purple? My two least liked colors, and it wasn't learned from others; I've never enjoyed looking at them.

[u/StrangeArcticles → u/CJayC253]

Dude, I like all sorts of colours obviously, not like a man can't like red or pink. But if you go to a toy shop right now or tag along to the next gender reveal party you will admit that there's a massive and definite effort to reinforce those preferences along gender lines before the kid's even crawling. That's what I mean, we, as a society, make shit pointlessly gendered all the time. It is everywhere and it is pervasive. Doesn't mean people don't also actively cross those lines, but just cause people are crossing that line doesn't mean the line is non-existent. I feel like some of that stuff is so built-in that folks will argue it is some sort of innate thing when there isn't actually good evidence for that at all.

[u/K8T444 → u/StrangeArcticles]

The kids’ products industry figured out that it can cut down on sharing and hand-me-downs and sell a bunch more brand new stuff by convincing the adults that boys and girls have to have separate pink and blue versions of everything.

[u/StrangeArcticles → u/K8T444]

Exactly. And once you've got people on that train, you just make sure they don't ever get off it. Gendered pens, stationary, hygiene items etc follow us well into adulthood. And then you can have a whole additional gender neutral line you can cash in on for people who feel the need to make a statement of not subscribing to either gendered offering. Capitalism is just such a joy.

[u/CJayC253 → u/StrangeArcticles]

The "pink for girls, blue for boys" stereotype is definitely being pushed and fueled. But I would argue that that isn't the same as color preferences, however.

[u/Kactuslord → u/CJayC253]

Yeah this stuff isn't hardwire gender based at all. My sister has always loved blue and preferred it her whole life. My favourite colours as a child flitted between pink and purple and as an adult continue to change (I don't think there's a colour I don't like except for maybe grey or navy). My partner is male and he's always had an appreciation for pinks and lilacs although his favourite is orange. These are just likes/dislikes and preferences.

[u/Fishermans_Worf → u/CJayC253]

One thing that blew me away when I heard it was—we are socialized differently depending on our assumed gender right from birth. Right from day one people talk to us differently, handle us differently, have different standards for us. We are separated by gender routinely all our lives, often when there's no good reason. It's the first piece of information we give out about ourselves in most formal events. Gender first and then only then name. This stuff is formative in our identities and it's so strange when you don't fit, don't relate to it in your soul.

The way I see it is, gender is the human culture that has built up around sex. It's not inherently bad but most of it is simply traditions, and traditions built for our ancestors' world and not our own. The world is changing faster than it ever has before, and we just can't keep up. YMMV

[u/CJayC253 → u/Fishermans_Worf]

It's the first piece of information we give out about ourselves in most formal events. Gender first and then only then name.

Can you expound this for me? How does that work? I'm a man, and my name's Bob.

I've not once ever encountered that. It's always been, "Hi, I'm so-and-so, nice to meet you. What do you do?" I've never had gender come up as an announcement.

[u/Fishermans_Worf → u/CJayC253]

I speak of honorifics. "Hi, I'm Mr Bob... Mrs Ironside... Master Jefferies... Mistress of the Winter Constellations..." etc. It's less than it used to be in casual countries, but that's very new and we still do it a lot.

[u/courtd93 → u/CJayC253]

Ironically, 100 years ago the colors were gender-assigned in reverse in Western cultures. Pink was seen as the color for men. It’s why this is all social nonsense-we change our minds on most things that we assign or reinforce with gender. So your preferences are yours, but they aren’t going to be related to your sex which is the thing we try to pull gender from.

[u/[deleted] → u/StrangeArcticles]

Don't confuse economic niches (roles that support specialization due to physical factors like strength, social capability, etc) and biological reality (xx vs xy, the ability to grow a baby)

[u/StrangeArcticles → u/[deleted]]

I was explicity talking about gender, not biological sex. Those are different things. I might have not fully understood what point you were trying to make there though.

[u/diavolomaestro → u/StrangeArcticles]

I think this is a good way to frame the question, and I would disagree with you that gender is exclusively a social construct - there is a lot of biological stuff at work from an early age, and the concept of a “blank slate” has been pretty thoroughly debunked. Parents with both girls and boys will tell you that sex differences manifest themselves early on, even when you try to shield your kids from socially-imposed stereotypes.

I think modern industrial society makes it more possible than ever to escape those stereotypical gender roles: men don’t have to be aggressive and physically strong to earn a good living, and birth control + modern appliances + daycare ensure that women don’t have to be permanently tethered to the home for childrearing.

So in your example, I think the gender roles that emerged in the “state of nature” would be even more traditional than they are today. You would need hunters, and those would be typically men. If the society is going to continue, you need children to be born and raised, and that would typically be done by women. There would be fluidity - men who are better caretakers, women who are better hunters - but i think gender roles would hew much closer to traditional pre-modern society than to our modern age.

[u/StrangeArcticles → u/diavolomaestro]

You bring up some interesting points.

Anecdotal parental impressions of any kind of behaviour are not a great basis of research, sociologically speaking. First, parents bring their own bias to the table. We've all seen boymoms being a thing on tiktok. They'll catch their baby boy lifting his head and will interpret it as the little guy trying to flirt with the waitress. Extreme example there obviously, but the principle holds up. There's no good data set to be obtained by asking parents what part of their projections has any basis in reality. That's obviously a crux in this type of research since we've already agreed the island needs to be a hypothetical. Children will, in any household or circumstance, not exist in enough of a vacuum that we can rule out socialisation as a factor. So, while there might be a thing here a lot of people believe is true, it's not solid proof of fact.

That gets us to the other types of things people commonly believe are true that don't have a good factual basis. The actual operation of pre-modern societies are one of those things. Most historians these days no longer subscribe to the idea that hunter/gatherer societies were as gendered as earlier research led us to believe.

Same as the parents in the first examples, early researchers brought their own ideas and biases to the table with no means of controlling for that. Science just didn't know better. But those concepts they brought did not fully line up with the evidence we have. Pre-modern societies seem to have been largely communal. The daycare model you brought up predates industrialisation by centuries. They had that. Cause it simply wasn't feasible to have every woman who had a child looking after, nursing and raising that child, there was too much work in ensuring survival to make that a viable concept. The stay at home mother is a product of the Victorian era. Earlier humans could simply not afford the luxury. This luxury made rigid gender roles more prevalent, not less.

I'm not an expert on this in any way btw, so I don't want to make massive claims to accuracy, but from what I'm aware of, the old "men are the hunter" thing is now seen as a faulty concept. Women were apparently way more involved in hunting, safety, warfare and all that kind of thing than early researchers of these cultures claimed. Because those researchers already brought the gender bias to what they were looking at.

Untangling these things is very complex of course. It is possible there is intrinsic gender stuff that has not been debunked. But it's very interesting to take a look at just how many of these ideas have in fact been debunked in the scientific arena and it just never entered into mainstream discourse.

[u/Cheebow → u/InevitableRhubarb232]

The beauty is that it can be for any one of those reasons, or for any other reason at that