A misconception I've seen illustrated today on here and that I feel is too common is that being "nonbinary" is fundamentally distinct from being "transsexual" and that nonbinary people are generally seen to be these annoying people who believe in this hard gender/sex split and who are all about "identifying" as what they are.
When I first considered medically transitioning some years ago I linked up with German and German-language trans communities to ask for help in how to get access to transition resources. A unanimous piece of advice I got in almost any communities I required into was "don't, under any circumstances, tell your doctor that you think you might be nonbinary". Doctors here have treatment standards for "binary" trans people (which I'm not gonna pretend are great) and if you don't fall into their categories of "trans woman" or "trans man" they mainly consider you a linguistic problem, someone for whom to sometimes place a tick on some checkbox but not someone who is in need of medical transition care. This is not random, if you read the DSM-V for gender dysphoria, it does nominally mention nonbinary genders but mainly it is formulated in a way that is predicated on people conceiving themselves as or desiring to be "the other gender" than the one they were assigned at birth, with nonbinary options tagged on as an afterthought rather than an option equally valid to the more easy to define identification with "the other" gender.
This is not to start with insurers who are maybe the largest bottleneck in terms of transition care. There are standards of treatment for diagnoses like "Transsexualismus", which are very binary-centric as well. If you want to resemble "a woman", you have a strong case that you might want ffs or hair removal or other interventions. If you want to resemble a gender that has a less socially codified appearance, you are risking that insurances deny your claims as you have less of an argument that would make these procedures "necessary".
If you see so many nb people who "don't transition" (tbc I don't believe that every single nb person "has to") or "binary" trans people who self-describe as nb, ask yourself if that is a neutral observation or if you are seeing that people who openly describe themselves as nonbinary are discriminated medical contexts.
I personally know multiple nonbinary people from informed consent states who take low-dose cross-sex hormones because it is an option that is offered to them. I myself have tried different regimens that include SERMs and/or low-dose estradiol without medical supervision, and I am still on DIY because I could not live with subordinating my medical transition to a system that excludes what I want out of it. I'm considering saving up for top surgery in a few years because I know it won't be covered by insurance without doing a whole song and dance about how I'm actually male and "detransitioning".
What I just want to be known is that "being nonbinary" isn't just a funny identity to also claim for yourself but something that is actively made hard to express by a lot of systems. It's not just an escape from having to "fully" identify as your gender. Beyond having it as a checkbox in official forms in more "progressive" places, nonbinary people aren't much respected or taken seriously at all.
When I first considered medically transitioning some years ago I linked up with German and German-language trans communities to ask for help in how to get access to transition resources. A unanimous piece of advice I got in almost any communities I required into was "don't, under any circumstances, tell your doctor that you think you might be nonbinary". Doctors here have treatment standards for "binary" trans people (which I'm not gonna pretend are great) and if you don't fall into their categories of "trans woman" or "trans man" they mainly consider you a linguistic problem, someone for whom to sometimes place a tick on some checkbox but not someone who is in need of medical transition care. This is not random, if you read the DSM-V for gender dysphoria, it does nominally mention nonbinary genders but mainly it is formulated in a way that is predicated on people conceiving themselves as or desiring to be "the other gender" than the one they were assigned at birth, with nonbinary options tagged on as an afterthought rather than an option equally valid to the more easy to define identification with "the other" gender.
This is not to start with insurers who are maybe the largest bottleneck in terms of transition care. There are standards of treatment for diagnoses like "Transsexualismus", which are very binary-centric as well. If you want to resemble "a woman", you have a strong case that you might want ffs or hair removal or other interventions. If you want to resemble a gender that has a less socially codified appearance, you are risking that insurances deny your claims as you have less of an argument that would make these procedures "necessary".
If you see so many nb people who "don't transition" (tbc I don't believe that every single nb person "has to") or "binary" trans people who self-describe as nb, ask yourself if that is a neutral observation or if you are seeing that people who openly describe themselves as nonbinary are discriminated medical contexts.
I personally know multiple nonbinary people from informed consent states who take low-dose cross-sex hormones because it is an option that is offered to them. I myself have tried different regimens that include SERMs and/or low-dose estradiol without medical supervision, and I am still on DIY because I could not live with subordinating my medical transition to a system that excludes what I want out of it. I'm considering saving up for top surgery in a few years because I know it won't be covered by insurance without doing a whole song and dance about how I'm actually male and "detransitioning".
What I just want to be known is that "being nonbinary" isn't just a funny identity to also claim for yourself but something that is actively made hard to express by a lot of systems. It's not just an escape from having to "fully" identify as your gender. Beyond having it as a checkbox in official forms in more "progressive" places, nonbinary people aren't much respected or taken seriously at all.
