I had a discussion the other day with people about being non binary. Just for the record: none of us are actually non binary so I think that would explain the upcoming question.
The discussion was about gender norms and how they need to be abolished. We all agreed on that. The people I was talking to didn’t understand why then there would be a need to declare yourself non binary. Their reasoning was that if all gender norms were abolished, and ‘man’ or ‘woman’ would no longer carry stereotypical behaviors and expectations, why would there be a need for people to declare themselves non binary.
To make it more clear, their question was: What is difference between being non binary and between having no gender norms tied to being a man/woman? Where does abolshing gender norms end and being non binary start?
I couldn’t really answer this question because I am not non binary myself and therefore do not consider myself to be an expert on the topic. Now, I don’t ask of you to validate being non binary to me. That, of course, is unnecessary as non binary people are perfectly valid in their existence. I was just wondering how a non binary person would respond to a question like this.
Being non-binary just means not wanting to be identified with one of the binary genders. It doesn’t matter how one presents or acts, or even their pronouns. In your hypothetical world with equal norms you still have two categories.
Personally I wasn’t like “I’m non-conforming, I guess I shouldn’t call myself a boy anymore.” I was like “oh wait, trans people exist, and it sounds cool to be on estrogen. I’ve never really identified as a boy anyway. I could just continue to be a gender nonconforming cissie, and challenge gender norms that way. Shit, I really don’t want to be a man, but neither a woman. All these labels I see online are interesting, but not too valuable. I’ll just call myself nonbinary because the flags cool and I just feel like rejecting binary gender.”