adam zivo: many 'non-binary' people are often just attention-seeking heterosexuals
in the world of contemporary gender theory, you are non-binary simply if you say so
7 minute read
a person standing on asphalt road with gender symbols of male, female, bigender and transgender. concept of choice or gender confusion or dysphoria.
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let’s be real: many of the people who’ve begun identifying as “non-binary” over the past decade are simply chasing social and professional clout. while the worst offenders are “spicy straights,” who want to feel special and oppressed, this charade is also employed by some gays and lesbians who yearn for more moral capital within progressive circles where homosexuality is no longer in vogue. this doesn’t mean that all non-binary self-identification is just attention-seeking behaviour. there are, of course, some people who struggle with genuine gender dysphoria and for whom the thought of being either a man or woman is unbearably distressing. this subpopulation should be treated with compassion and given reasonable accommodations that alleviate dysphoria while recognizing the realities of biological sex. the same goes for intersex people, however rare they may be.
yet, these two groups only represent a minority of the non-binary movement. though some queer-friendly organizations claim that 1.7 per cent of the worldwide population is intersex, a 2002 article published in the journal of sex research placed the true prevalence at around 0.02 per cent — almost 100 times lower than suggested.
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in the 2021 canadian census, which was the first to gather this type of data, approximately 59,000 of canadians (0.15 per cent) identified as transgender while another 41,000 (0.11 per cent) identified as non-binary. when broken down by age, the data told an interesting story: individuals in their twenties were more than ten times more likely than older canadians (age 50+) to self-identify as non-binary, and did so at such high frequencies that, in this cohort, there were actually more “non-binary” respondents than transgender ones.
meanwhile, a 2021 report published by the williams institute, relying on survey data gathered between 2016 to 2018, found that only 19 per cent of non-binary us adults identified as homosexual — almost a third vaguely defined their orientation as “queer,” while another third claimed to be “bisexual” or “pansexual.” notably, 51 per cent of the survey’s non-binary respondents self-reported struggling with serious mental illness, with 93.8 per cent having considered attempting suicide.
these figures suggest that the struggles of gender dysphoric and intersex individuals, while legitimate and complicated, are apparently being diluted by a flood of pretenders, who are neither gender dysphoric nor intersex, for whom being non-binary is an expedient fad.
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the underlying problem here is that queer theorists have adopted an expanded definition of what it means to be “non-binary,” wherein one does not need to experience dysphoria or demonstrate any particular gender expressions (or lack thereof). “since there’s no one way to be nonbinary, this identity can match all kinds of bodies,” wrote susan weiss, a “non-binary” writer who also identifies as a heterosexual woman, in a 2022 article for teen vogue. mirroring popular internet discourse, she went on to assert that it is possible to have multiple gender identities at once, so that one can simultaneously claim to be non-binary and a woman (or man) — even though these categories are, by definition, mutually exclusive.
in the world of contemporary gender theory, you are non-binary simply if you say so, with no need to prove anything to anyone. yet, this produces a meaningless and circular definition: “a non-binary person is someone who says they are non-binary, and there is nothing more to being non-binary than identifying as such.”
uncoupled from dysphoria, behavioural expectations, and intersex biology, the “non-binary” identity becomes little more than an invisible badge: cheaply acquired, cheaply discarded. despite its vacuity, the badge grants easy admission into the lgbt community. those who wear it can lay claim to a special layer of oppression and accrue the associated cachet.
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this system is, of course, wildly vulnerable to abuse.
for decades, there has been a subset of straight people who have wanted to identify as lgbt because they think that it makes them more interesting. veteran lesbian activist julie bindel, for example, has written about how this phenomenon emerged in the 1990s and was, at first, dominated by young women kissing each other at bars and then claiming to be bisexual. the problem only worsened as social acceptance of the lgbt community expanded and queer people, in compensation for decades of persecution, were showered with praise and, in some contexts, given preferential treatment. we became trendy. fetishized, really. as early as the 2000s, celebrities noticed that faux-lesbianism could be exploited for publicity — the infamous 2003 kiss between madonna and britney spears stands out as a seminal example.
as the perks of being lgbt exploded throughout the 2010s and the associated social costs further receded, the number of straight pretenders appears to have commensurately grown. this should’ve been unsurprising because their behaviour, though irritating, was perfectly rational. it is simply human nature to chase new incentives. anyone who has followed the surge in canadian “pretendians” (people who fake indigenous heritage to access special privileges) can see that pilfering minority identities is no barrier to the pursuit of self-interest.
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but just as pretendians were, until recently, constrained by clear regulations governing indigenous identification, so, too, did spicy straights face their own hurdles: gay sex and gender dysphoria.
when the lgbt community was predominantly concerned with same-sex attraction and old-school transexuals, admission into the club was not easy. one had to actually have gay sex or undergo a substantive, often medicalized, gender transition to get in. most interlopers were unprepared to do these things, which could not be convincingly faked, so they remained outsiders.
the expanded definition of “non-binary” upended that. suddenly, poseurs could claim to be lgbt while doing absolutely nothing. they did not have to have homosexual sex. they did not have to act or dress a certain way. they did not even have to give up their original gender identities. some of them, like weiss (the aforementioned teen vogue writer), openly declared that being non-binary led to no discernible changes in how they lived their lives.
it was ingenious: attention-seeking heterosexuals had discovered a way to insert themselves into the lgbt community by fiat. worse yet, their solution allowed them to demolish critics, who questioned these intrusions, with accusations of prejudice and discrimination. though many lesbians, transsexuals and gay men, like me, mock some aspects of the non-binary movement behind closed doors, publicly expressing these beliefs remains grounds for cancellation in many spaces.
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upon infiltrating the community, the spicy straights ornamented themselves with our traumas and appropriated the valour of our painful struggle for equal rights. they have since pretended that their mild, self-inflicted inconveniences are equivalent to our historical hardships, and, in doing so, have trivialized the suffering experienced by homosexuals and transsexuals throughout the world, where beatings, imprisonment and lynchings remain a risk for many. by demanding that the public indulge their inane theatrics, they have discredited the lgbt community and made us seem frivolous, overbearing and unreasonable.
there are “non-binary” people who claim, with great seriousness, that their relationships with their opposite-sex partners are “queer.” seeing this makes me want to roll my eyes out of their sockets. the integrity of the lgbt community should not be compromised because some milquetoast straight couples, who feel insecure about their own conventionality, want to cosplay as oppressed. their presence is unwelcome, and i shudder to think that my existence is now associated with them.
worst of all, some of these tourists have even had the audacity to lecture homosexuals about their own rights. from what i’ve seen in my own life (i was a deeply-involved lgbt activist in the late 2010s and still orbit that scene), they feel entitled to do this because they typically move within radically progressive circles that look down upon simple gays and lesbians. we are too vanilla for them. too disobedient in our relative moderateness (unlike them, we have nothing to prove). our oppression is insufficient, apparently. the woke homophobia festering within the far left, which denigrates gays as a politically unreliable fifth column, finds new life in their mouths.
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and so they berate us about our “privilege” and the necessity of “radical queerness,” blissfully unencumbered by any self-awareness. we bite our tongues and listen to these enlightened teachers, whose expertise on our lives is reminiscent of rachel dolezal, and in those moments the world turns upside down.
some sympathy should be extended to them, though, because they are only copying what they see elsewhere. as alluded to earlier, some gays and lesbians play the non-binary game, too. like their heterosexual counterparts, they are, for the most part, radically progressive, suffocatingly bourgeois and haunted by their own moral insecurities.
as they see themselves as insufficiently oppressed (aka: cisgender, and often white and university-educated), they eagerly seek pathways to sanctimonious victimhood. unable to opt out of their own socioeconomic status or race (“non-racial” is not a recognized identity yet, thankfully), they purge themselves of gender, instead. through this rebirth, they imagine that their moral authority has been restored.
unbeknownst to them, many of us within the lgbt community recognize that the emperor has no clothes. we quietly groan when certain “non-binary” homosexuals, who showed no signs of gender discomfort until it became trendy, disparage the evil of “cis gays.” when the press adulates same-sex attracted celebrities — like sam smith and demi lovato — for coming out as non-binary, we see careerism.
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we fought for decades to be taken seriously, and now we have to deal with this farce.
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