A lot of #discourse on this site and unfortunately, even if not discussed with the same terms, in the world around us, wants to pigeonhole nonbinary trans people as either “male-aligned” or “woman-aligned” in order to have any access to orientation labels and communities that we might identify with. The idea of non-binary people finding anything in identifying with a binary term while still remaining non-binary seems to baffle some people so much they had to take opt-in terms made to help some NB people express a binary connection and make them opt-out requirements to forcibly classify NB people into yet another binary.
Let me break something down for you.
I’m a nonhuman being in a plural system, one who does not have a concept of gender, was not assigned a gender, and who now only experiences any sense of gender because I’ve spent long enough fronting and interacting with this world that I’ve had to, in some sense.
And while I’m firm in my being nonbinary and neutrois, Im also a butch lesbian, and whenever you ask me my gender, Im gonna tell you “butch.”
Because I’m not “woman-aligned.” Womanhood is foreign and conflicting to me. I wasn’t raised with it*, I do not know womanhood. And being a butch adfeminine person, I’m alienated from womanhood regardless of being raised with its messages or not.
But I am *lesbian-aligned.* I came to my understanding of my current working gender through loving a NB femme, through experimenting with our relationship in the terms of being a lesbian one. I related to butch feelings, found myself in butch dress and attitude, felt like I could “keep” my masculinity while allowing myself the freedom to explore a lesbian relationship and find a sense of gender in the butch/femme dance I read about and experienced myself. And to see myself reflected in another butch partner I love deeply is all the more wonderful.
My lesbianism has never been about aligning myself with women, and if cis lesbians are allowed to use gender nonconforming language and call themselves “lesbians/butches/femmes/studs/etc, not women” then why can’t actual nonbinary trans people call ourselves lesbians instead of women, too?
No more “you must be woman-aligned to be sapphic/lesbian.” Let’s just maybe learn to accept that nonbinary people know ourselves best and make informed decisions on the binary language we adopt to describe ourselves. If we’re calling ourselves lesbians** then trust that it’s because we have a common experience with lesbians and let us just be lesbian-aligned.
* And no, the body’s assigned gender does not mean that I magically go back in time and get some human childhood memories of assigned gender and the social messages that come with it. I walked into a 19 year old body with no real concept of gender and didn’t develop one till we were 22. That’s just how it be.
**or gay-as-in-mlm, I’ve seen some of this kind of drift that way, but it feels more like it comes from the t.erf rhetoric of “men invading women’s spaces” and that’s why I’m addressing it more as a lesbian issue. That and it’s from a lesbian perspective, I can’t speak for other sapphic NB people.
~mod badger