I so appreciate the many bright lights in our fandom weighing in on the continued biphobia from a small but very loud contingent. However, I wanted to address something else - the idea that Mary Read "should have been portrayed as a nonbinary character".
I have seen this statement from several people - not just one of the OPs of the most recent biphobic blow up (and I won't be addressing that saying Mary should have been nonbinary somehow invalidates Ed as bisexual, since bisexual means attraction to all sexes, not just two) - and, as a nonbinary person, I really wanted to address it.
Very strong disclaimer that: nonbinary looks a lot of different ways. My experience of nonbinary may not resonate with other nonbinary people. Maybe Mary Read WAS nonbinary for whatever definition of that would have been understood by an 18th century pirate. But why HAVE some people gotten it into their heads that OFMD is being disrespectful by not portraying her that way?
Read has an extensively sourced and researched wikipedia page which demonstrates how little we know about the historical figure of Mary Read (and it's a really interesting meta-article about how her supposed sexuality was constructed by later authors). It also notes that the likely inaccurate but first popular depiction of her has her dressing as a boy when she was young in order to receive money from a relative. Then she and Anne Bonny are both said to have dressed as men in order to sail aboard pirate ships. And that's… it. So why, exactly, should Read be portrayed as nonbinary? Even leaving aside the disputed accuracy of these sources, is it because she's said to have dressed as a boy from a young age, but then is also said to have saved herself from hanging by claiming she was pregnant? That's all I can think. And that seems like a gross misreading of what it is to be nonbinary - without even getting into a discussion of what gender identities and sexualities were like in the early 18th century Caribbean.
Being nonbinary begins with an internal understanding of gender outside the highly contextual, socially constructed binary of "man" and "woman". Being nonbinary doesn't mean you dress as a different gender sometimes, or move between gender presentations contextually because it might benefit you. In fact, I'd say that it is very, very difficult to decide a historical figure is nonbinary without having some knowledge of their interiority and self-perception - sadly, things we just don't have for this historical figure.
Yes, this, and: the choice they did make about Mary is portraying her as *butch*. One of the things I love about butch as an identity, the reason my gender is butch first and anything else second, is that butch is a category that straddles all these other ways we now think about gender. Butch can be cis or trans, butch can be male, female or nonbinary, and that's all equally valid.
Butch is also a gender with a long history and a lot of contested argument. Butches are celebrated in many places, but they've also been criticised as bad representation, as giving lesbians a bad name, as abandoning the fight for women's rights by trying to emulate men. For all these reasons and more, it's really hard to find depictions of true butch characters in popular media.
OFMD's depiction of Mary Read is important to me for what it is, not what it isn't. Mary uses she pronouns and I use he and they, but to me we're both butches together.
