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It is absolutely delicious that the same political suspicion directed towards "transsexual" by genderqueers in the Anglo-American 90s - as somehow complicit in oppressive power - is now being directed by online transsexuals towards "non-binary". A well-deserved volte-face!
This discussion - "two transsexuals talk non-binary" - is good and lovely, and neatly sidesteps some of the gaucher politics of authenticity to get into the current instabilities and insufficiencies of "non-binary": https://twitter.com/gp_jls/status/1388218214446927876
Given that a lot of the eyebrow-raising towards non-binary I've seen, including from myself, has come from transsexual women with a non-binary history, I wonder if it might be helpful to talk about how much of this has to do with personal griefs and failures.
That discussion talks a lot about the lack of space for "non-binary trans femme" in white and Anglo trans cultures, and in social legibility more broadly. A lot of us experience this very personally! Trying to be and finding that it's impossible, generating sorrows & resentments.
How much of it is "I tried to be a non-binary trans femme and it was socially impossible", and how much is "turns out I just needed to be a woman all along"? Is it even possible or meaningful to tease those thoughts apart?
Another curious reversal: in the Anglo-American 90s, a not-uncommon story was of transsexual women later coming to identify as genderqueer. (Indeed, "genderqueer" is popularised precisely by such stories!) I still meet plenty of older trans women on that same trajectory.
Looking at my own experience, I do feel let down by the promise of genderqueer. I was told it was cool, radical, desirable! And it turned out to be tiring and painful. It would be a mistake to build a whole politics on that, and a mistake to ignore it.
I remain delighted that, in UK law, non-binary people are transsexual. (This is statutory, in the Equality Act, and has been successfully tested in employment law.) This turns out to be a surprisingly productive interweaving of the social and material.
In creating "non-binary transsexuality", UK law lobs an illegible grenade into current gender discourses. And doesn't that show us what's really at stake in all these terms? -- not how they accurately portray internal life, but how they move power, and are moved by power.
