Ziba and Happy's Minds Meet

I debated again what to share; I'm thinking next week I'm going to share one of Happy's blog posts that may or may not end up in the finished book. This week, I decided to share a snippet of Happy and Ziba chatting. While it may not seem sexy in a standard way, to me with my noetisexual orientation, it is the ultimate of arousal. So a humor, horror for the authors here- Ziba and Mairead are in Amsterdam and Dublin, respectively, Happy in Bangor, Maine, and Iovita in Georgia- I have notes to myself about fixing time zone stuff in the rewrite.
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"That must be interesting, to have such a large urban area from which to choose where you will eat."

"Yes, that is nice. I am Dutch and Indonesian by birth and so I'm able to mix and match my food choices in a way that respects my ancestry and upbringing. So we were led off on the tangent of our time difference. We talked some about polyamory. Have you read much about non-binary genders from the links I gave you? Do you feel compelled to settle on a specific identity?"

"Bigender would seem to best encapsulate how I feel about my own gender. I definitely do not feel without gender, as in being agender. I keep falling back on the fact that I was assigned male at birth and it seems that in identifying as non-binary that I am trying to appropriate someone else's oppression."

"Did you by chance end up on some feminist sites from what I shared with you? Because I have to be honest- your gender presentation in the picture on your website does not show a conventional male. I would question how much access you have to any systemic privilege based on your assigned gender."

"You caught me. Certainly in the community I have lived so far, gender roles were far from as obvious as they are in mainstream US society. It was not even questioned when at fifteen that I wanted to be called Happy instead of the name my parents gave me at birth; I'm not sure... maybe that I was content to stay with he/his/him pronouns made it easier? I have been trying to remember if anyone behaved in a non-binary way, even without the label."

​"And I will respond with some truth-telling of my own; please let me know if I need to define any terms for you, although I'm going to define some terms as I go. A fatwa is an Islamic religious ruling. While there are fatwas about binary transgender people, there are no fatwas that specifically deal with non-binary people as the concept has solidified currently. While that could be dealt with Muslim scholars considering the Qur'an and issuing a fatwa, I am not sure I would accept it. Too many Muslims have come to a place of rigidity where they forget that Islam is supposed to be of the current time. So all of that is to explain why I do not refuse to interact with you, being a non-binary person, as many conservative Muslims would."

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