The problem w people trying to fit nonbinary people into like a binary “gender as two separate classes” situation is that in the first place like there’s nothing that says that classes have to be inherently binary. Even if you are using a transferred simple Marxist analysis, Marx acknowledges that there are more than 2 classes wrt capital. We can also see in other axes of oppression that like these don’t have to function strictly in a binary (or there might be multiple binaries simultaneously at play). So like saying that no other class of people can exist needs a lot more justification than an appeal to an inherent binary structure of class relations.
But even accepting the existence of an exclusively binary class dynamic (which imo is generous), it assumes that someone will always and in all ways be situated within the exact same gender class across situations, and ie “what you are *really*”/male aligned or female aligned binary framework of nonbinary.
But the reality for at least a decent amount, a non negligible amount of nonbinary people doesn’t align w that. Like, of course in our world we are being interpreted as a binary gender in some form in individual interactions (or not, Ive heard a lot of children out in the world debate my gender), but those individual interactions for at least some of us don’t aggregate cleanly along one binary gender. They might not even last consistently thru one interaction (read, getting clocked, or declocked). At least for my part, even when I’m not purposefully trying, I can be read as different genders (even just within the binary, not even including whether my transness is being read!) in the space of walking 5 minutes.
What I mean to say here is that there are at least some people within this system who aren’t consistently gendered as either binary gender across days, hours, minutes, whatever. And like I personally don’t think it makes much sense to try to make some sort of gender treatment calculus to determine where they fit in some sort of a priori gender binary class. That’s what I think is an underlying issue w trying to situate nonbinary people within a binary gender alignment- it doesn’t acknowledge that for at least a certain section of people that that alignment is constantly shifting sometimes w literally no effort put in, because gendering is a spectators sport, a voyuerism, in the eye of a million different beholders
Yeah, and pretty much all the efforts to sort non-binary people into ‘categories’ of privilege have been terrible. Afab-amab, femme-masc, passing-nonpassing, transman-alligned, transwoman-alligned, etc etc. It all resulted in extremely inadequate attempts to generalize nonbinary experiences that were meant to allow bullying and exclusion against one group of non-binary people (the supposedly more privileged half) in the name of protecting the other half.
The truth is non-binary people have complicated experiences and neither their starting point in terms of birth assignment nor the ‘direction’ of their gender expression can be pinpointed as a sole defining factor in how much violence they will face for being non-binary.
What has been ignored every time is the impact of being something that isn’t recognized by the dominant state, and the precariousness that brings with it. How not having your identity recognized creates an endless wave of microaggressions, how a lot of violence is born in confusion, and how the constant not knowing how you’re going to be treated this time creates a background noise of stress and fear every day of your life.
And the thing is, precariousness is greatly underappreciated as a factor in class oppression too and it is becoming a defining factor of the working class in the 21st century, as I have written about here: http://queeranarchism.tumblr.com/post/113724339523/precarious-capital-and-privilege
QueerAnarchism 