Coming Out to a Larger Circle essaysonattentionpaid.com
@mbkriegh I'm glad you had a good experience. I sent an article to my colleagues a few weeks ago How to use gender neutral language in work and in life. It did not go well. Puzzling since our workplace is prodominantly women, but they are ciswomen. I responded by sticking gender neutral pronouns on my email signature and Zoom, and all of my emoji are the nonbinary version of whatever the person is doing.
@mbkriegh My favorite part was two weeks after that, I got a news article about the EEOC's new positiopn on misgendering and bathroom access. I sent it in with, "Told ya so!" attached.
@Changeling it’s very satisfying to be right:-)… interestingly, I recently decided to change my pronouns to him/her he/she. I am not overly fond of they. My lesbian friend was in agreement on that, but we are both in our 60’s. Could be generational. When I think about myself it is more often as he/him than she/her, but i am always happy when presenting femininely to be identified as she/her. Someone addressed me as “mam” a while back and I really liked the feel of that.
@mbkriegh okay. Just to give you an idea of where I am, the part of your post that talked about your friend wanting to create a lesbian-exclusive community resonated with me, except I caught myself briefly invisioning a nonbinary-exclusive community. Not making serious plans or anything, but there it was.
I also tend not to correct people even though it appears for people in my age group and younger that it's an expectation that we do so and noisily. Except I'm also chronically ill and blind and already have enough to worry about without correcting people's thought patterns. I'm 36 for context.
@Changeling to be clear, my friend and I were not so much in favor of lesbian separatism in our conversation about it, though as a lesbian, she had much more standing to say so. Also, the article seemed to be advocating a pretty strident separatism, almost on the order of a convent. For example, in some of these communities, women who have a male child are asked to leave the community or not admitted.
I very much understand the need for separatism for just about any community that gets steamrolled by the dominant culture. My stance isn’t so much no to separatism, as it is no to extreme separatism (which also goes for any form of extremism). The dominant culture will always have to be dealt with. So, a non-binary exclusive community sounds good to me as a place where a non-binary person can find complete safety, but i wouldn’t like the idea if it were a place one rarely left.
Human beings are a rainbow of ways of being. I am choosing to openly be a different color within it.
Sorry to hear about your chronic health issues. I hope that they can be well managed. My wife has very poor eyesight. Functionally blind in one eye, and not the best sight in the other, though she has done amazing things in her life given the vision limitation.
Thanks for reading and replying to my post. I am enjoying the conversation!
@mbkriegh I completely understand. I'm not actually in favor of an exclusive community. there are blind people who feel that way, and I have pretty much disagreed with them since day 1, even as the dominant culture frustrates me to tears. That's why that part of the discussion resonated with me. I can tell following you is going to lead me to some great conversation.
@mbkriegh It is great that you had a good experience and I hope that this continues. I find reading about your experience very interesting as I have not seen/read about this process before.