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I have no personal animos in this regard, I generally like and get on with people and try to be polite and accommodating, but I just don't get the pronoun thing, nor non-binary identity for that matter.
No-one has to identify with their sex (it is a mere fact) -your expression is entirely up to you, but getting me to do something to support your identity misses the point of what society is. I disagree entirely with the belief system that undergirds non-binary identity and resent even your compromise position of people not having to use certain words to describe you. I don't want the layer that this sits at to be important in my engagements with people - I don't want any baggage around identity to sit between our person to person engagement. You deciding on a special layer feels like a power-play to me, that you have the upper hand. And it denies the primacy of scientific facts, which don't require social proof. Sex labels are actually more freeing than locking into a particular gender identity. If this is what your non-binary identity means, not being locked into any particular style, presentation, then you still don't need the label. Just be it.
What would the world be like if everyone insisted on being referred to in a certain way, how cumbersome - none of us are deserving of that kind of special treatment.
Now language can change and certain languages have honorifics etc. You can make a case that gendered languages could bake in certain cultural assumptions. But English is not particularly gendered and male/female need not have any assumptions baked into them.
Sorry this has turned into a kind of rant/scold but I never get to say this in the open, which I think is the great bit about anonymous posts. In a workplace I would be forced to accommodate you and you wouldn't know how I felt about it.
I'm sorry in advance that I don't have anything more interesting to respond with here, but I just wanted to say this is a good reply and I'm glad you replied. I actually think most of your intuitions here are basically directionally correct and I share a lot of your frustrations at a lot of the current conventions surrounding gender identity. As you say, much of it is, at best, not useful for human connection, and at worst, detrimental to it. Maybe I'll write more deeply on it here someday.
Great, Id be keen to hear one day- some of my comments probably could be a bit more nuanced. I mean there is a gender layer between sex, culture and psychology - I wouldn't reduce it away entirely from the inter-personal space but the underlying framework around it we have currently I find limiting.
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