hot take, 'identity' as the principle way of thinking about trans & non-binary people is a liberal trap, a desperate recapitulation of the trans & nonbinary threat to the 'innate' categoric mandate of gender.

ANY intellectually-honest account of gender must acknowledge that it is constantly being forced to grab gender by a different hand-hold, that gender shakes off its analyst like a bull shakes off its rider. if you start by talking about reproductive capacity, gestation & insemination, you are forced by infertility and intersexing and castration and celibacy and non-reproductive sexuality to begin talking instead about clothes, or division of labor, or burial rites. every 'defining' aspect of gender explodes upon too-careful observation.

I refuse to demonstrate that my womanhood is 'no threat' to the integrity of womanhood as a category by appealing to a secret truth. I am a woman Because the category of womanhood lacks integrity. you cannot threaten what never lived & cannot die.

a gender identity is a great, reasonably-short way to explain what "your whole deal" is to friends and family, if you can get it

it is a very heavy weight to shackle to the ankle of a gender theory if you have to *start* from the Cliff's notes

if you wish to get anywhere with a gender theory, you gotta get comfortable with the thing you're studying you throwing you just, a whole lot. you have these messy, fuzzy categories with histories attached: man, woman, eunuch, butch, [homophobic slur starting with an F]...

at different times, in different places, some of those categories are more visible and talked-about; others are submerged, discussed only in codes and ciphers, never acknowledged as being on the same level (at least potentially) as the Big Categories. and in some times and places, you have wholly different sets of categories in play; part of the legacy of colonial violence is that many indigenous systems of gender more complex than the colonial gender binary were suppressed, marginalized, or wiped out.

so flex with it. use a framework when it works; when it stops working, acknowledge that you're moving to a different model. try to think about When a model fails; see if you can be principled in your inconsistency.

it is useful to point out that one crucial way that gender transition "works" is that it makes people treat trans women like shit, in the way that they treat women-in-general badly! correspondingly, studies of trans men transitioning at work show that people take these men more seriously with their true face on, sometimes directly and cluelessly comparing their work favorably to their pre-transition facade's, even as they treat them badly as part of transphobia.

(transition also "works" in that some of us can pass for cis— but holding *both* passing & oppression as lenses for gender in mind lets us note that passing is a form of safety, not proof-of-right)

but it's *not* simply-true that to be a man is to be safe from gendered violence. 'male socialization' for effeminate children can mean vulnerability to childhood sexual abuse and homophobic violence from peers, authorities, & family. & white supremacy gives white women violent, gendered power over Black men as well as Black women.

one place where people tend to double-down on identity-as-first-principle is around nonbinary people. I think some of this, also, has to do with the reductive approach to gender that comes out of white, heterosexual feminism: men are always empowered, women always oppressed by them, and we don't know how to break from that analysis even when we stray out of the heterosexual bourgeois white household where these theories were developed. we fall back on analysis-from-identity because we're at a loss, trying to find any other place for nonbinary people in an analysis of gendered power.

so let me stop here: there's nothing more 'real' about men & women than about nonbinary people, and the concept of identity is as drastically-simplifying of nonbinary experience as it is of men & women's.

identity is one lens we should hold in mind when we think about nonbinary people. it is noteworthy that people identify out of male & female; it only makes sense, in the light of other ways we fall out.

I mentioned effeminacy, above, and I think it's an important thing to keep in mind when we look for nonbinary people in gendered society's brutal logic.

Take the lens of socialist feminism. Socialist feminism finds gender in production and re-production of society, in the division of labor. Our modern concepts of gender stem from a long history on the one hand; on the other hand from the very-modern needs of the capitalist model. You need a worker who shows up every day for long, grueling work. When he leaves, he needs to have clothes, food, a sanitary home; this work, the re-productive labor of the 'private sphere', was designated for women.

But before even the invention of agriculture, division of labor has been a crucial part of gender for a *long* time.

Fashion design. Fashion retail. Cosmetics retail. Floristry. Wedding planning. Nursing. Interior design. What gender is associated with this cluster of jobs, this division of labor? Not masculine, not feminine: effeminate.

Here, under a label like 'nelly' or 'fairy' or [much-worse homophobic word starting with F], we find a gender category which goes largely unacknowledged or only joked-about out in the open of gendered society, yet which gendered society pushes into specific forms of labor— that is, which gendered society makes *use* of even as it abuses them and reasons them out of existence.

This is unsurprising, by the way, from a cross-cultural perspective. One of the most common 'third-gender' categories is a gender of effeminate wedding planners. Colonialism chose as one of its burning brands the concept of a "scientific, civilized" gender binary with which to wipe out "barbaric, confused" extrabinary indigenous systems of gender; but if that meant not having [F-slurs] around at home to do the historically-appropriate forms of dirty work of ~Western civilization~... well, we don't have to go *that* far. So this non-binary gender goes unacknowledged, but still exploited and abjected.

This is something which identity-as-first-principle bars us, full-stop, from understanding.

Some effeminate people, marked for their gender variance from childhood and pushed into specialized forms of labor, living with the particular oppressions and wounds of that gendered embodiment, identify as men. Others will identify as non-binary or some more specific term; some of us, like me, are even women in addition to being [F-slurs].

Some, like me, will label ourselves with words like 'nelly' or the F-slur; for others, those words are extremely uncomfortable! This is not a category which is defined around a shared, overt label for an identity; instead, it is a category that, as analysts of gender, we single out because there are oppressions which affect us, specifically, and because we are treated together as a group by gendered society.

A non-binary category like [F-slur] cuts across identities, not to disrespect them but to analyze something which identities are not well-suited for.