this is sort of vague because I'm not sure if I can make it make sense but I wish more 101 nonbinary activist materials focused less on just "gender isn't binary" and more on "the fact that gender is a social construct means it is constructed differently in different cultures and is in a constant state of change like everything else about a culture"
like...it's not just about updating the gender system to recognize non-binary genders but also about recognizing that the social construction of gender is extremely responsive to time/place and this is true even for "man" and "woman" which means that there's no reason to invalidate anyone's expression or feelings about their gender, no matter what gender it is or how familiar it is to you
a further thought: this is also why I don't think gender abolition is a useful goal, because, as Rikki Anne Wilchins put it, gender is primarily a system for creating meanings, and if you actually tried to totally erase the concept of any gender at all from the world, that would involve erasing a huge amount of cultural meaning, probably without actually fixing inequality tbh
on the other hand, if you acknowledge that there are as many gender systems as there are cultures, and that there are probably as many variations on even the normative genders as there are people in that culture who belong to them, then gender essentialism loses the vast majority of its power because if the meaning of gender changes across cultures (even across relatively small cultural shifts), then that means they're not inherent moral truths of the universe, they're ways of performing particular cultural meanings
and this makes non-binary genders, and nonnormative gender expressions, no less concrete than binary genders with normative expressions, not by saying "actually a non-binary gender is a concrete object with xyz characteristics" but by saying "all genders are arbitrary", which creates room for essentially infinite space and self-determination
I have no idea if any of this makes sense, I just visualize, like, a garden
