Hey, cis people: Most of you have never met a xenogender person or been in a situation where your actions mattered to them, right?
Here’s a word of advice: When you meet your first xenogender person, the way you treat them is your attitude on ALL xenogender people until proven otherwise. If you attack the first xenogender person you’ve ever met for having a “silly” gender, then you’re a transphobe. It doesn’t matter if you think you’re somehow protecting trans people, because hatred and dismissal and erasure is the way you treated 100% of the xenogender people you’ve ever met.
I really don’t understand why this is so hard to grasp. As a cis person, if I meet someone with a gender identity that I don’t understand, I just go “Oh, whatever, glad they’ve found an identity that’s working out for them.”
It doesn’t affect me in any way what someone else I meet identifies as, so there’s no need to get bothered by it. Weird how a lot of the libertarian types of libs insist that they want people to have freedom to behave how they want, but seem to be some of the most likely to mock and belittle non-cisgendered people for doing exactly that.
Unfortunately most cis liberals don’t explore strange new gender identities, and they don’t seek out new life or new presentations. So their only experience with the strange is from transphobic jokes. You see, transphobes seek us out. They want to meet us, so they can make fun of us and use us in propaganda before we get around to representing ourselves.
So a liberal sees a dronegender person, and their thought process is “I’ve never seen that in the queer spaces I’ve never been to, but I’ve definitely seen that in 4chan threads attacking trans people. This gender identity must be an attack on trans people.”
I guess they aren’t really “meeting” you so much as they are “using you to confirm their preconceived notions about people different from them in order to compensate for their own issues with self-esteem, while also pretending they are brave heroes fighting an imaginary enemy.”
Which is something I do have experience with. It really sucks when you’re just quietly being yourself and having some asshole insult and mock you for existing.
I never really understood the suppression of Xenogender people from more liberal trans spaces until now, so thanks for helping to educate me!
Hey, uh, as someone who’s not familiar with the term can someone explain xenogender?
The description lgbtqia Fandom site sounds to me like it could be inferred as including the “apache helicopter” types, but I’m more than inclined to believe that’s not the case sense that’s essentially a slur.
Not trying to cause any shit, I just want some clarification.
A xenogender is any gender which isn’t male or female, and doesn’t fit along the male-female axis of gender. So, for non-xenogender identities you have: man, woman, demiboy, demigirl, agender, bigender (male and female), genderfluid (male and female), genderfae (female and agender), genderfaun (male and agender), androgynous, and, you know, everything in that whole space.
Xenogenders are genders which don’t exist in relation to binary gender or the absence of gender. Unfortunately, they’re harder to name, because you don’t get to pick a name that relates to existing terms for binary gender. The most common path is to name a gender through analogy. For example: suppose you were trying to explain male gender to an alien creature who’s never heard of maleness or masculinity. So you say “Men are meant to be strong, and to have camaraderie, and to be protectors, and to have interest in athleticism”. So you try to come up with a single word to relate all this quickly, and maybe you settle on the term “shieldgender”. So in the absence of the word “man”, you have that. Now imagine trying to explain a xenogender to a binary person. There’s cloudgender, and seagender, and robotgender, and pretty much any set of interrelated concepts you can imagine.
For my xenogender, it’s more literal and less analogous. People of my gender relate to one another through a swarm dynamic instead of a nuclear family, so we’re swarmgender. It’s just a description of how we work.
Ok that does it clear it up some. It is a fascinating way of looking at it like your example of not having the word for man. I’ve been trying to get a better grasp of the ideas of gender identity vs expression and to some extent I come back to the idea that gender as a thing is kind of bullshit. Like making little boxes with labels around stuff and behavior, you know? Just let people be, and don’t assign that they’re then allowed to ABC, and not allowed xyz. I don’t mean it in any kind offensive way so I hope it doesn’t come across that way.
I don’t think I’d be able to explain my identity to other people if it wasn’t a gender. I tried understanding it for myself before I knew it was a gender and I missed a lot of important stuff. Knowing it to be a gender helps me understand it from so many more angles to make sense of my own behaviour and feelings in different situations. For example, I used to think I was asexual, and I couldn’t square that with the deeply sexual feelings I had when I mind melded with a swarmmate. It just didn’t make any sense. Then one word suddenly made sense of it all: gay. I’m gay. One word, and suddenly the logic of it all comes into focus. If I can’t understand it without it being a gender, then I doubt anyone else can.
Yeah, fair. It does provide a neat little package of certain attributes you likely have. I guess I was thinking more of the angle of enforcing roles.
I love my xenogender comrades.
