One of the fun parts of being nonbinary is trying to find a frame of reference that uses established concepts to communicate and explain identity while hammering those old concepts into a new shape.
So, there's the good old deconstruction: unpacking the two buckets of conventional binary gender, tell people what's in them is largely arbitrary. A social construct - not meaningless, but at the same time infinitely changeable and renegotiable.
There's one problem that remains: While we may deal with a space of unknown dimensions, we're seemingly still left with only two defined points, and the intuitive approach is, draw a line as axis through that, and try to put any nonbinary gender somewhere on that. Which leaves the whole thing rather... one-dimensional, literally. And enforces a certain androgyny as nonbinary "ideal" as inbetween. Which is wrong.
So, reconceptualizing that male-female axis is in order. Let's find some new axis for the same old things.
We can put both male and female as endpoints of their own axis between those, and their lack. Like, 0 - 100 on both of them, independently. And instead of connecting that on one axis, take the two, and make 0 on both axis an origin of a Cartesian grid. Suddenly, we're moving in a plane of known things instead of a line. A lack of "female" doesn't mean a gain of "male" anymore. And we can suddenly express more by dropping that.
Of course, that still doesn't describe every nonbinary identity, but it does describe better every identity that consists exclusively of male and female components. #nonbinary#howToExplain
