Q&A: “have you seen that discussion about a word for the prejudice against enbies…?”

anonymous said:

have you seen that discussion about a word for the prejudice against enbies on vergess’ blog? what do you think?

no, i hadn’t seen the discussion prior to this ask.

i assume that you’re referring to this discussion which seems to have been triggered by this post? i’m going to reblog the latter post later because what everyone’s saying there is really, really important, but for now i’m in a hurry, so…

the condensed version of my thoughts: i think it’s great that @vergess and others are trying to coin a word to describe the unique challenges, prejudice, etc that non-binary people face, which i whole heartedly agree is different from what binary trans people face.

personally, i’ve always used ‘non-binary erasure’ and ‘(gender) binarism’ to discuss such things, so i haven’t felt a strong need to coin a word for it.

that said, it is true that in years past there were people within the Tumblr non-binary community arguing that ‘binarism’ is a word that should be a POC exclusive, which is why most of the non-binary community steers clear of the term today. however, i have always strongly disagreed with this assertion of POC exclusivity. i’ve been meaning to write a proper post about it for forever now, but keep putting it off because of not wanting to deal with the backlash that i’m likely to face from other POC over it.

anyway, yeah. even though i personally like terms like ‘non-binary erasure’ and ‘(gender) binarism’, word coining is always cool. i’d probably go in a bit of a different direction with it than vergess, but that’s just me. 🙂

vergess and others involved or interested in this discussion may be interested in looking into the term ‘enbyphobia’, which is another word that some people have been using that is relevant to this discussion.