#(Blogger doesn’t use the tag but an abbreviation instead) OKAY. FINE. I SEE. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

transgenderteensurvivalguide · 5 years

Note

Hi, I was told by someone that I shouldn't use "NB" to refer to myself or others as nonbinary individual because "NB" already means "non-black". Is this, like... true? I always preferred using it over "nonbinary" or "enby"

Lee says:

The acronym “NB” does already stand for non-Black in some contexts, yes. But NB can also stand for non-binary in other contexts.

As someone who is both Black and non-binary, I’ve seen it used both ways and I’m usually able to figure out which meaning of the acronym is being used depending on the context.

Of course you should clarify how you’re using the term if the context doesn’t make it evident, but I don’t think that either group has exclusive claim over the acronym- it’s okay to use it to stand for either thing.

Take New Brunswick, for example. The postal abbreviation for the province is NB. Should we be throwing hands with all the people in New Brunswick and the post office because of that?

There are lots of times when two communities independently come up with an acronym to describe something and it just so happens that those acronyms overlap. Does that mean that one group is “stealing” the acronym or shouldn’t get to use it?

I get the old western movie vibes from this kind of conversation like “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us” but in this situation we aren’t two groups of people in the same town fighting for space, we’re in two separate towns which have the different names but the same nickname, and one town is suing the other because they said they came up with the nickname first so they get to copyright it, and the other town says they came up with their nickname independently and it has a completely different meaning so they should still get to use it. And the people living in the two towns are just like “Ok we get it, it’s slightly confusing, let’s just,,, move on with our lives because neither town is using the nickname in a way that’s harming the other!”

[Edit: turns out there are two New Brunswicks, one in Canada which is where I was referring to and one in New Jersey that I forgot about bc... it’s Jersey... (I’m from NY so i legally have to say that) but this is actually a good example of exactly what I’m talking about y’all! Multiple things, same name, it’s okay!]

So if you think that the way you’re using the “nickname” (ie acronym) is confusing because you don’t think the context of the post makes it clear whether you’re referring to non-Black or non-binary people, just… spell it out as the words “non-Black” or “non-binary” to introduce the term. Then feel free to use an acronym if you’d like to.

Enby is a shortened version of the word non-binary (pronounced “enn-bee” because it’s how you’d say the acronym NB) but there are non-binary people who don’t like being called “enby” because they feel it’s infantilizing for some reason.

I guess maybe they see it as analogous to the childhood form of the gender, like girl/boy/enby versus the adult form of the gender, like woman/man/non-binary person, but I don’t really know because I also haven’t seen a big push for it to explicitly be recognized as an age-defined term that’s explicitly meant to be used for younger people and exclude adults so I think it’s just the connotation of the word (as mentioned in a 2014 post on our blog here).

Some people are proposing trying to create different abbreviations for non-binary instead of using the NB acronym or enby version, but of course then you run into the “nobody knows what you’re talking about” issue because there aren’t any standardized abbreviations the whole community is aware of and supports.

But yeah, as a Black non-binary person myself, I don’t think it’s honestly a big deal because it doesn’t hurt us in any way that I can think of. It’s not like NB is a slur or offensive word referring to the Black community that non-binary people have decided to appropriate as a self-descriptor for their own identity, it’s just a way to say the phrase “non-Black”.

And while using “NB” to mean non-Black has definitely been a thing in both academic writing and community discourse, people haven’t been using it as a hashtag on a large scale. So nonbinary people dominating the content posted in the NB hashtag hasn’t erased our organizing or our conversation on the topic or suppressed our voices in some way because that was never a particularly popular hashtag in the Black community to organize with, so it isn’t like the non-binary community came by and “colonized” the tag.

The fact that a different community uses the same acronym to mean something else doesn’t mean we can’t discuss the ways that non-Black folks discriminate against and oppress Black folks anymore.

I do have to say I find the usage of both NBPOC (non-Black people of color) and NBPOC (Non-binary people of color) is more of a potentially irksome overlap as NBPOC is a tag that was used more often with the original race-related meaning, but overall I feel like there’s a lot of things that we could be doing to uplift the Black community (and to specifically support Black non-binary folks) that is a better use of our time than trying to put the genie back in the bottle with the gender-related NB acronym because it’s so widely used at this point and trying to undo that doesn’t actually provide a vast tangible benefit that I can see. So why spend our activism or mental and emotional energy fighting over this issue?

This is just my opinion, as one Black non-binary blogger, so I can’t speak for the whole Black and non-binary community in its entirety. But that’s the point; there isn’t a huge consensus on this topic in the Black community and one person can’t speak for all of us about what we believe because we have different beliefs! Some folks have strong opinions on the NB acronym on either side of the argument about whether it should be used, but even more people (like pretty much everyone else in my family IRL, especially the Black adults) simply don’t care or think it’s particularly important.

Saying “listen to Black people about Black issues!” is the right concept in a way- it applies when the majority of the marginalized group of people is on the same page about the thing, and it helps to recenter the lived experiences and need of the marginalized group in question instead of speaking for them or over them, but what do you do when you’ve got three different Black people who are all equally affected by the issue telling you three different things about the topic and then three more who couldn’t care less?

Sometimes you can look at the other opinions the person holds and see if what they believe with generally matches what you believe and see if they’re informed on the topic to decide if you think their opinion should hold more weight than the other people’s opinion, but there are people who will have great takes on a lot of issues but just don’t get it right on That One Thing, so what then? Usually people end up just listening to the Black person who is telling them what they already agree with.

Hypothetical: You’re not part of a marginalized group. Within the marginalized group, there are two groups of people, both equally affected by the thing in question, with one group of people asserting opinion A and one group of people asserting opinion B.

Assertion A says “X thing is harmful, do Y thing instead!”, and assertion B says “X thing isn’t harmful, and I have no issues with Y alternative either”, then I’d follow the wishes of group A if you genuinely can’t tell which situation is occurring and don’t know if the thing is harmful.

That’s because listening to group A means you potentially avoid a negative outcome whereas group B believes nothing negative will occur either way so you’re hedging your bets to do the thing that’ll create the least harm.

So if the alternative Y isn’t bad then it doesn’t hurt to switch to it and avoid potentially creating harm. But if group A doesn’t propose an alternative Y to the X thing, or there’s an issue with alternative Y that makes it problematic itself, then it gets confusing again.

Following that logic, if you’re NB (as in not-Black lol) and genuinely can’t figure out what you believe, when in doubt, you can just spell out the words “non-binary” and “non-Black” instead of abbreviating it because typing out a few extra characters avoids the whole issue altogether!

So even though I personally believe it’s fine to use NB either way and that the whole fuss is kind of silly when you put it perspective with the actual issues we should be advocating for, it’s fine if you want to use an alternative acronym or abbreviation to refer to non-binary people. (Followers, feel free to suggests alternatives that you’ve heard of!)

It’s also true that replacing the term “non-binary” with an acronym isn’t necessary in the first place; you can just write “non-binary” or make a shortcut on your phone (this will expand your acronym or abbreviation of choice into the entire term) if you don’t like wasting time typing.

#Lee says #nb #transgenderteensurvivalguide #trans #transgender

517 notes · View notes