I'm thinking of back when I came across a cis person on Tumblr who was saying that you shouldn't be afraid to add "gendered" elements to nonbinary characters because the haters will misgender them no matter how androgynous they are so why not live your best life
And I added that an important element to this is that real life nonbinary people can't 100% choose their bodies and so often aren't "perfectly androgynous" even if they want to be, so it kind of sucks if real nonbinary bodies are considered "not androgynous enough" to represent their community in fiction (implied: and we should interrogate what that means about how we view those real people if we are avoiding representing them in an attempt to appease the haters)
And the cis person responded basically saying she thought what I was saying was unrelated to the topic of nonbinary characters and that she didn't want to talk about it because she didn't want to speak on behalf of actual nonbinary people
And I just had to sit there thinking of like, okay how do I handle this without saying what I want to say, which would have involved the words "ignorant" and "privileged" (both meant literally, NOT a stand-in for "entitled idiot" or something, but you know how people get) and therefore gotten me a lot of unwanted attention
Cause it's like
- I'm nonbinary so anything I say is being said by an actual nonbinary person???
- You can amplify marginalized voices and opinions without claiming to be their spokesperson; there are many strategies for this but a popular one is often known as "quoting"
- Literally How are cultural depictions of "acceptably nonbinary" bodies not relevant to real nonbinary people and the societal pressures they face
- Ah yes I don't want to speak for a community and therefore when the community tells me something I will argue that it doesn't count, which is totally different