I wrote this:
From my personal blog:
So I’ve recently been focusing on finding the right type of activism. I’m back on focusing on visibility. I might have been a poor poster child for asexuality but for non-binary gender, a visibly androgynous person who refuses to make concessions to the binary, while getting on with their life without apology, that’s a pretty good example. That’s a case study for the people who refuse to accomodate non-binary people because “everyone sees them as men or women anyway”. That’s an example of what’s possible for questioning non-binary people who can’t feel any hope that what they know they have to be is even possible.
I’m also focusing on practicalities, on presentation, expression and behaviour. Historically the non-binary gender community has tended to focus on identity, on carving out ever more specific identity divisions and celebrating the diversity of our differences. But in our day to day lives, those of us who present ambiguity have more in common than we do different. If we’re presenting ourselves to the world as something other than female and male, women and men, it doesn’t make much of a difference if that’s because we see ourselves in terms of a gender continuum, as non-gender or as something else entirely. We deal with the same reactions from others, we have the same difficulties with gendered spaces, with forms and language, with mandatory gendering.
That’s why I started Practical Androgyny, and that’s why I’m excited to see other people taking the same focus on practical day to day living for those of us who present our non-binary genders to the world. This is the right path for me, this is activism I can believe in. And I hope it’s one that will become a movement, that has its own visibility campaigns and activist weekends. If you want to get involved, please get in touch!I’m currently working on getting the getting resources in place on PracticalAndrogyny.com, I’m aiming to do a ‘shallow pass’ through all the resources pages and make sure there’s something written for each, with links to articles by other people on the subjects.
I’ve been looking at the questions people have been typing into Google to find the site and I want to make sure there are clear answers to all of those questions, even if it’s just a word of hope and a link to other places to look.
