So helpful, thanks Ada!

I think your definition of non-binary is similar to what I was trying to capture with my first account of non-binary as a third gender category (or in a "beyond the binary" model, as the only gender category).

What is interesting to me is that this account of non-binary relies on someone's experience of gender and on their relation to a socially imposed gender. This raises questions about all the variation, which you have brought up, and maybe this could result in different accounts of non-binary that still all fit under one umbrella concept.

The way I look at it, is that if a particular label is helping you navigate the world and your relationship with your own sense of self, then it’s the right term, and other people’s opinions on the “right” label don’t come in to it.

Yes, of course - I think the history of medical gatekeeping (like the Benjamin Rules) and the fact that trans folks are essentially gender outlaws, constantly under the threat of enforcement of a politically dominant gender hegemony, puts us on the defensive about our labels and identities.

In the context of our societies our identities are automatically questioned and doubted, considered fictional or unreal, and considered "wrong" or suspicious. In that context it makes sense to prioritize the authority of the individual to self-identify, and this is a smart move relative to our particular form of political hegemony, which is dominated by an ideology of liberalism which has a rich history of individualism to appeal to. We are able to weave our trans individual autonomy into the broader strands of individualism already present in our society.

To that point, I guess I will speak for myself and to my experience - I have watched myself take and let go of many labels, and it is interesting that the thing that changed was not so much me as much as my understanding, or more to the point, the meanings I had for words. I would have identified with a label like non-binary years ago, where I took that label to mean I did not perfectly conform with the gender I was assigned. The definition sounds very much like your definition, and yet I do not understand it now the same way I would have then. Living as a man then I was unusually soft and failed to conform to my gender in many ways, I would even wear a purse and refused to call it a hand-bag (as perhaps the example of my biggest and most persistent form of gender resistance, which most people found easy to ignore, asserting the binary role of man onto me with ease). Yet for all intents and purposes I lived as a man still and being non-binary was like a technicality for me, something that was true but irrelevant as I was living as a man. There is some amount of shame I experience now in telling this, as I feel I was living as a cis-gendered and cis-sexual person then. Now I have a much richer understanding of non-binary identities, and I know that the in-congruence I experienced before was likely a sign of being trans more than being non-binary (though they are often one in the same). And now as someone who has socially transitioned and would now be described as belonging to trans-gender and trans-sexual (i.e. medically transitioning) categories, I have come to see myself as potentially non-binary in a different sense. Rather than non-binary as a way to describe my incongruence with my assigned sex, now non-binary is a way to describe my incongruence with my chosen gender. I am probably in the ambiguous boundary between binary and non-binary space, and while for practical intents and purposes identify publicly as a binary trans woman, I think of myself as technically non-binary still. All these changes can be unsettling to one's sense of reality, and I have lost confidence in my ability to know my gender, so everything is left a bit open and ambiguous.

Even now I feel like I am still learning, hence why I'm here asking for new ways of seeing.

Makes sense, I think being an umbrella term makes it a rich environment for a wide variety of meanings. I guess it's not surprising then that we would end up with radically different accounts of what it means to be non-binary.

Sometimes it seems to me that "non-binary" as the broadest umbrella term might technically fit everyone, since there are always ways that people diverge from a strict set of gender norms.

Ah interesting, I think that might be like the political meaning of non-binary, someone who rejects the gender binary, but maybe for other reasons besides political reasons? The only reason I can think of is maybe someone just doesn't believe anyone can be binary, like that there is some kind of empirical fact of people's gender identities and none of them are binary.

That's exactly what OP did. No attempt to shove people in a box was made. There's no need to fly off the handle.

Not every inaccurate statement about nonbinary people is made in bad faith.

hey, it seems like I've really caused some upset here.

First, I should reiterate what I said in my OP, this isn't about debating non-binary people as whether they are trans or not, whether they are legitimate or not, etc. I think it's sufficient to just take seriously how people identify.

Not all non-binary people identify as trans, so your assumption that they are inherently trans may be reasonable but I want to point out that this is not the only way to think of being non-binary. (This isn't just theoretical, I know multiple people who identify as non-binary but not trans.) Personally I would say anyone who is non-binary is typically trans by definition (and this gets into definitions of trans, which is its own post), but again I let people tell me how they identify and I listen and take that seriously.

As for why I used a butch woman as the edge case, it's not some AFAB fixation, I was just thinking about the various scenes in Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues where trans and butch identities collided. Feinberg's book is a powerful work, so it has rightly anchored itself in my mind when thinking about non-binary identities. Feinberg after all is one of the primary foundational figures in developing the "beyond the binary" model of gender (along with Kate Bornstein).

A lot of this thinking and the reason for my post comes from recently reading Talia Mae Bettcher's paper "Trapped in the Wrong Theory" (here's a PDF). I'm essentially digesting the way she introduces a kind of pluralism through the "multiple worlds of sense":

Worlds are all lived and they organize the social as heterogeneous, multiple. I think of the social as intersubjectively constructed in a variety of tense ways, forces at odds, impinging differently in the construction of any world. Any world is tense, not just in tense inner turmoil but also in tense acknowledged or unacknowledged contestation with other worlds. I think that there are many worlds, not autonomous, but intertwined semantically and materially, with a logic that is sufficiently self-coherent and sufficiently in contradiction with others to constitute an alternative construction of the social. Whether or not a particular world ceases to be is a matter of political contestation. No world is either atomic or autonomous. Many worlds stand in relations of power to other worlds, which include a second order of meaning. (Lugones 2003, 21)

It is also coming off some experiences where I was challenged in my assumptions about what non-binary could mean. Just a week or two ago I met two people who identify as non-binary but who, as I said in the OP, have cis-gender expressions are cis-sexual. Their understanding of what it means to be non-binary was new for me, and did not seem to involve a gender identity as I had previously thought of it (such as a phenomenology of your gender, or having a sense of gendered self that is incongruent with one's assigned sex, etc.).

OK, with some hopefully helpful background, let me respond to your comments.

Categorizing non-binary “Butch women”, as you put it, separately from non-binary “femme cis-sexual women” is also just…ick, dude.

Hmm, I can understand what you mean, but I'm not attempting to impose a categorization for the sake of separation. What is relevant is not that a butch enby is different than a femme enby, but the reasons those people have for identify as non-binary in the context of the meanings I have. The examples are there to help me think through how a similar person from an internal sense of gender and external expression of gender might have radically different ways of identifying, just as I am seeing in real life and is being discussed in the literature.

This is somewhat a separate issue, but I would prefer you not use masculine gendered language when communicating disgust with me. I get the disgust and why you are communicating it, but in that context of no-trust a label like "dude" is not familiar or warm but feels like you are intentionally misgendering me, which feels a bit degrading. It's the internet, I get it, but in case you didn't mean to do that I'm giving you feedback that this didn't feel right to me.

... if you are actually curious about why we identify the way we do why not just ask instead of trying to preemptively categorize “women” as either being in a legitimate third category or making a political statement?

I am essentially asking, that's what my post is about, but I'm not merely asking why people identify as non-binary, I am trying to understand the underlying "world" of meaning. So in that sense I don't so much care why someone identifies as non-binary as much as I care about the underlying meanings or theories that might emerge from those discussions. This is why my post is titled "What does 'non-binary' mean?" and not "Why do you identify as non-binary?". I don't take these to be the same.

Also, I wasn't "pre-emptively categorizing" as much as I was sharing the meanings I had already encountered. The fact that different meanings of non-binary can be used to categorize is somewhat irrelevant, since that's not their purpose in this post.

The example of the butch woman who may or may not be non-binary is to function as a concrete example and an intuition pump within each meaning, to understand the different ways something may or may not apply. None of this is objective or meant to function as a way of categorizing people, though I understand how it might feel that way. Instead there are multiple ways of looking at things. The theorizing and categories are descriptive and a means to understanding the way people think of themselves and others. Sure, people can try to use a particular meaning to then categorize others, but that's not the point.

What's your definition for being trans?

Interesting notions, it sounds like a lot of your notion of "non-binary" is similar to the second meaning I had in mind, basically the idea of being genderqueer or gender non-conforming.

I can really relate to some of what you are saying about not feeling awful being nominally gendered male by others, I had a sort of indifference to gender and felt like if people wanted to call me he/him that it was on them, not me. They were gendering me, so I didn't have to take it that seriously.

When I watched the Transition Channel videos, especially the Common Excuses to Transitioning video, I realized I might be more trans than I had previously considered (I thought of myself as nominally non-binary and "gender non-conforming" before, not really thinking of those terms as being trans per se), and most importantly that I might have been suppressing myself and ignoring dysphoria. It was a good coping strategy while growing up since transitioning was never going to be an option then, and it was unsafe not to conform to the assigned masculine gender.

Like Natalie Wynn and Mia Violet describe, I too found living as a boy not too bad. I didn't really have thoughts that I was a girl before puberty hit. Even living as a man wasn't that distressing as I could just ignore gender and dissociate to cope.

Anyway, your description of your gender reminds me a lot of myself before I transitioned (not that this means you will be like me, I just can relate to what you are describing). It's hard for me because transitioning is so difficult, there is still such a strong desire in me to ignore this problem and not prioritize it. I feel selfish for prioritizing it, and I also feel like it's a huge risk for something that I have been able to live without for so long.

That said, HRT changed the balance - I'm not transitioning so I can live as a woman primarily, I'm transitioning because repressing and having androgen dominance turned out to be impacting my mental health in ways I didn't know until I tried HRT.

Interesting, so there is this notion of non-binary as applying a spectrum to previously binomial things, like sex, gender, and sexuality.

It's also interesting that you position non-binary less as a label or identity but more as a fact about someone (that they may or may not know, or identify with). For example, a trans woman who does not want bottom surgery is considered less feminine, then, on the spectrum.

See, I wonder if you couldn't take the same distinction and apply it to even more refined categories. I think of Helen Daly's paper "Modelling Sex/Gender" (PDF), in which Daly proposes a "many strands" model of sex and gender, whereby sex or gender is not thought of as a set of categories whether binary (as man or woman) or ternary (as man, woman, or non-binary) nor as a spectrum between two extremes (man on one end, woman on the other, and "non-binary" being anything in-between), but rather as a set of characteristics that may be spectral or not.

This is suggested as a way to help policy makers navigate the complexity of sex/gender, for example when deciding whether someone qualifies to compete in men's or women's sports.

Personally it seems this thinking ignores the potential for policy makers to have a transphobic bias when choosing relevant characteristics to include in defining someone's sex or gender for the sake of a given decision, but what I do like is that it does give a helpful model for approaching contextually different notions of sex and gender.

So in a medical context a doctor could use the many-strands model to approach better care for their patients. Rather than focusing on whether a patient is a man or woman, they can focus on facts like whether a patient has a prostate or not, whether they have a uterus or not, etc.

So the question comes back that in what context would an otherwise binary trans woman need to be labelled non-binary for being no-op or pre-op?

The label can function various ways, but there seems to be something wrong with labeling an intersex or trans woman as somehow less feminine or less of a woman due to having the "wrong" genitalia.

I think this intuition probably comes from the weight we give to someone's internal sense of themselves, and that the brain and mind are the ultimate authority of who someone is and what their authentic identity is.

Anyway, I know you weren't attempting to foist the non-binary label onto binary-identifying trans women, but I'm thinking about the theoretical limitations of a model like that, which seems to impose that kind of meaning onto them regardless of how they experience gender.

I could also be wrong about my assumptions, I admit there might be an empirical aspect to these questions that is being left out (as dangerous or politically unsavory as that kind of biological determinism can be).