This narrative that we should focus on cis women's issues and "address the nonbinary question" in the future is so pervasive, entrenched, and troublesome. What it shows is that many feminists are fighting for cis supremacy, not the end of patriarchy (there is a difference).
If you were really interested in ending patriarchy you would recognize that relying on the gender binary to advance your political claims and secure justice means that you are not fighting for total and complete liberation.
Challenging the gender binary helps EVERYONE, not *just* nonbinary and gender non-conforming people. This is not about a disgruntled minority overstepping our bounds and speaking for a majority -- this is about a concerted effort by people of various genders to dream and imagine a way of living in the world where our personhood, our safety, and our dignity are not linked to gender.
Your body -- every body -- should have an intrinsic worth for being, a right to self-definition and authorship, a right to choose your own gender, a right to existing outside of the mandate and mechanisms of gender itself. No doctor, no politician, no parent, no document, no policy should be able to decide your gender for you.
The reason trans and gender non-conforming people critique feminism is not because we are "divisive," it is because we know intimately how detrimental the gender binary has been not just in our own lives, but in the lives of the communities that we are from and the people that we love.
We believe you -- and we -- are worth so much more than having our bodies belong to gender and not ourselves. We believe that you -- and we -- are worth so much more than having all of our uniqueness, our differentness, our complexity be glossed over in the service of homogenizing billions of people into one of two categories. We believe that your -- and our -- existence is so complicated, so nuanced, so textured, so vast, so incredible that no one category can hold all of our multitudes.
Do you?
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