{"id":571,"date":"2021-05-13T10:00:29","date_gmt":"2021-05-13T08:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.projectswitch.eu\/?p=571"},"modified":"2021-05-15T12:35:05","modified_gmt":"2021-05-15T10:35:05","slug":"interview-with-a-non-binary-person","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.projectswitch.eu\/index.php\/2021\/05\/13\/interview-with-a-non-binary-person\/","title":{"rendered":"INTERVIEW WITH A NON-BINARY PERSON"},"content":{"rendered":"

Interview with O.M.<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Margherita Graglia<\/p>\n

Psicologa, psicoterapeuta<\/div>\n
Sessuologa clinica<\/div>\n
Formatrice<\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

What is gender for you?<\/em><\/p>\n

I believe it is a word that can have multiple meanings.<\/p>\n

One is the ‘social’ meanings we give to gender: on the basis of how we are read (men or women), we are subject to different behaviors and \/ or discrimination.<\/p>\n

However, there is a gender identity in people that is not influenced by how we are perceived.<\/p>\n

I don’t know what gender is, not having one (I am agender) but from the experiences of others I think I can define it as a \u201cfeeling of belonging (or non-belonging) to a certain social group, which can have (but not necessarily) influences on expression of gender and on the behavior of the individual\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

How do you live your being an agender?<\/em><\/p>\n

I have defined myself as non-binary for two years now, even though the process of \u201cquestionin\u201d my gender started earlier. I am not one of those people who ‘always knew’ or who felt discomfort seeing, during puberty, their body develop into a certain way. I would say that I have always quite ignored the existence of gender and of the differences (especially social) between the sexes, until at about 20 I started, thanks to Facebook and other social networks, to meet people who defined themselves as non-binary.<\/p>\n

I began to realize (or should I say accept and therefore feel?) a lot of annoyance in seeing myself and being seen as a \u201cwoman\u201d (having been assigned to the female gender at birth).<\/p>\n

I want to specify that when I say that it bothered me to be seen as a woman, I don’t mean that I felt dysphoria towards my physical appearance. The annoyance was directed at \u201csocial identity\u201d.<\/p>\n

So I had no problems or dysphoria towards my body seen as female, only discomfort towards expectations, behavior towards me because seen as a woman and to socially group myself with ‘women’.<\/p>\n

But imagining myself as a man (in this case I mean both as a physical aspect and as just a social identity) gave me the same sense of strangeness, that wasn’t right either.<\/p>\n

It took me a while (months) to define myself as non-binary, although I already knew the term and knew people who defined themselves as such. I think the reason it was difficult for me to accept it is that I didn’t think I had enough ‘proof’ to define myself as something other than what was imposed on me.<\/p>\n

And also for a problem of \u201clack of representation\u201d: I said that if non-binary people were so few in percentage (at least that was what I thought), how many chances was there that I was one of them?<\/p>\n

The definition of non-binary is very broad, and grouping all non-binary people under a single definition is somewhat limiting. Non binary only means \u201cnot only man\u201d and \/ or \u201cnot only woman\u201d, but it does not include what one is, only what one is not. There are non-binary people with a fluid gender that changes over time. People who have two genders, people who don’t have any gender, etc.<\/p>\n

I recognize myself in the category of agender, meaning that I don’t feel I have a gender identity. And that perhaps explains why I didn’t care much like that until I started getting bothered by what was assigned to me.<\/p>\n

I decided to apply this definition to myself after a while I had used the word non-binary, and I still define myself as such because non-binary is a broad term, while agender is a more specific definition. It was difficult to understand that I was an agender because I was looking for another identity to \u201cfeel\u201d with which to replace the term woman, but I could not feel any belonging to gender categories. After a while I gave up and realized that if I couldn’t find it, it probably wasn’t there, and therefore I was agender.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interview with O.M. By Margherita Graglia Psicologa, psicoterapeuta Sessuologa clinica […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.projectswitch.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.projectswitch.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.projectswitch.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.projectswitch.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.projectswitch.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=571"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.projectswitch.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":579,"href":"https:\/\/www.projectswitch.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571\/revisions\/579"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.projectswitch.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.projectswitch.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.projectswitch.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.projectswitch.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}