All the problems, mistakes tips, tricks and anecdotes I've collected over my long journey with gender identity.
(I don't own any rights to the cover art, and will gladly remove it if the original artist has an issue with it's use)
There is almost no representation of nonbinary people in the media and the ones we have are almost never humans. They are almost always shapeshifters/aliens/robots/not-humans.
To illustrate:
Loki- genderfluid; shapeshifting god (not-human) (if you want to know more about Loki, the Norse God, I have put up a chapter on him in my book Queer History)
Alex Fierro- genderfluid; shapeshifter
Double trouble- genderqueer, shapeshifter
Crowley- genderqueer, demon (not-human)
Janet- 'not a girl', robot
I can only name 2 regular human nonbinary characters; Syd from One Day at a Time and Hange Zoe from AOT (and I can't even confirm that one given that I still have to watch AOT).
Obviously, that's problematic because we exist and are actual, regular humans. The fact that the only representation of us is as non-humans can be dehumanizing. On the other hand, aliens are cooler than humans and a shapeshifting nonbinary character can be wish fulfillment for a lot of us (many nonbinary people would like to shapeshift, for obvious reasons). Like many tropes, the problem with it is its prevalence. If we had more human representation of nonbinary characters, it would be wonderful to see fantastical, magical nonbinary characters.
So my conclusion is that the problem is not with the trope but with the fact that there are so few instances of characters outside of the trope.
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This was really badly written, I had a bad day and am now completely exhausted, but I wanted to do this chapter. I will probably rewrite it.
Also, here's a list of nonbinary characters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_non-binary_characters
