it feels as if pronoun culture has contributed to nonbinary becoming just the third gender after male and female, more static and concrete than its original fluid intentions. The same nonbinary person who complained about nonbinary stereotypes lamented to me, “I don’t want to be a homogeneous normcore mashing of the two genders.” Ben hoped, “If man or woman can mean so many things, then so can nonbinary.” We all became nonbinary to escape gendered expectations, and now we’re stuck again.
Highlighted the most relevant part of the article (at least imo). I think this ties into one of Senkaku's points in the OP:
Senkaku wrote:This is where I'll branch back out from this piece into the general discourse: failing to examine capitalism's role in creating a form of queer politics that makes lots of people unhappy but doesn't substantively advance liberation is a terminal problem in our conversations around pronouns and a host of other queer issues.
I would go further; it seems pretty clear that capitalism cannot exist as currently constituted without the discursive ideal of gender/sex. Every person must be possible to categorise into one of a very limited number of heuristics (two, three) in order to fulfil a particular role in the reproduction of labour. Attempts to escape the binary heuristic thus inevitably end up either categorised back into it ("non-men", "women and femmes", etc) or, in the most progressive of spaces, into a third heuristic. Since all of these gender/sex heuristics are discursive rather than material, based on an image and a perception rather than reality—one could, I suppose, call them noumena—every person finds themself just as alienated from the category they have been assigned as they were before seeking to escape the binary.
Because non-capitalist societies would necessarily entail a different relationship to the reproduction of labour, there's no reason this discursive ideal should be perpetuated within them. Biological differences among human beings do not
need to be classified into archetypes in the way we've been doing. Doing so only promotes a) continued alienation and b) the existing, deeply flawed, capitalist reproduction of labour. Therefore, yes, it is relevant to continue to insist on the importance of both the degendering of the public sphere and the access to means of changing one's physical sex characteristics even in the face of all the more immediate issues that also need to be focused on.
On a more basic level, I do put a lot of effort into making sure that people assume a particular set of pronouns for me, and therefore feel uncomfortable when people ask me for my pronouns, due to the sense that if they're not "obvious" it's a sign of failure on my part to assimilate into the societal gender/sex binary. That said, this is also partly because no set of pronouns "feels" "correct", which is in part because of this sense of alienation I mentioned brought on by the fact that every theoretical gender identity represents an ideal from which any real person is a deviation. I use pronouns on
this site for several reasons: as a form of exposure therapy, a notification to the small number of people who remember me from back in the day, and an easy way to figure out which of those people belong on my block list.