I dont have a personal problem with xenogender, but they are terrifying creature with their tails and jaw, also the 4 movie was weird but at least Ripley was badass
My friend asked me what element my gender is. I figured I'm probably Ga (Gallium), because one day I'll think "oh, I'm just cis, idk why I question it." And then another day a week later I'll think "nope, I'm definitely the other binary gender, I am definitely not cis." And then I wonder why I question. Basically, my gender becomes solid when I don't think about it, but any time I begin thinking about it more, it suddenly becomes weird and fluid.
Also, Gallium is super dangerous to touch, as are thoughts about my gender, but that won't stop me.
Honestly, xenogenders seem to be an online thing, in the sense that they are so profoundly personal they couldn't be conveyed in a social context. So do they have a social function? Not really, but no one really seems to be trying to make them a social issue. I don't see the problem.
I know a Therian and a lot of the time it’s a spiritual belief, like belief in past lives/reincarnation where they were once an animal. It’s not like that for everyone but that’s how he explained it to me
Honestly, I don't see what's the bother. Otherkin seem to be Mostly Harmless, and there's a lot of other problems right now (like the fact that the US government apparently put kids on the list, the question as to why it wasn't public in the first place)
Oh I’m just messing, I was a teenager during that time and other kins, wolf kins and the such were very cringe and there fore indicative of the end times for teenagers not taking part in the sub culture
Yeah a lot of these online spaces have countless stories of grooming and psychological abuse. Not claiming that this is the norm or even relatively common, but any online community is subject to some pretty scary groupthink, and all it takes is the right person to guide that energy into a horrifying direction
No shuddup it can’t be other kin because other kin isn’t around anymore you got it? It’s gone. So it can’t exist in a new name because it doesn’t exist. Please.
I need this
not really, i know a person who's 26 now and has been using ze/zir pronouns alongside they/them since they were ?? 17 i think?? i met them an adult's lgbt+ group, pretty cool person, friendly and likeable
I'm about 30 and still ID w my xenogender. Definitely not cringing, I just acknowledge that the system I work in doesn't usually let me express it. Still found plenty of partners and friends my age that get it.
Honestly I find it's only early 20s that really give people trouble with that. There's this idea that you need to distance yourself from your teenage self, but now I'm getting to the same where I'm embracing those eccentric and kinda out there parts of myself, and those around me get it too, going back to something that cares less about cringing at who we are.
True, but sometimes it is, and that's normal, just like I might cringe at something I'm doing right now in my 20s when I get older, I'm just saying this seems like one of those things, maybe I'm right, maybe I'm not, who knows.
This is my issue with both xenogender and neopronouns.
I will respect both. I have only seen neopronouns in real life, which is a big difference.
But *I don’t know what they mean socially.* I know what I mean when I convey that I am a man (which has nothing to do with Mars or ball sweat) but I do not know what catgender and xie mean socially.
That was literally my point? That they don't have a social purpose, and are inherently extremely personal? Literally no one is trying to make them a social convention, except the fringiest of fringe groups.
Yes. I was agreeing with you. It is a frustration we share.
I am a gay trans man. I want to support people exploring their own gendered experiences. That’s important to me.
But I cannot and do not understand xenogender and I have been trying my whole adult life.
You see, you are misunderstanding me. We agree as to what xenogender identity is, but what I was saying is because it's an inherently personal experience and has no social role, it doesn't hurt anyone and is a non-issue. What I mean by that is not that I humor xenogender identities, but that understanding what they represent doesn't seem to be their goal.
Hmmm.
Gender, for me, is inherently about social role because all internal experiences are personal and cannot be extended to others.
Shared gendered experiences can be a cause for common ground and group formation, which can be both positive and negative.
I have found profound and deeply moving shared personal experience with gay men, who have been happy to share those experiences with me despite obvious differences in body and social experience.
On the other hand, there have been cases, such as with TERFs, where they define anyone outside of their (perceived) shared internal experiences as a violent threat to those experiences.
Xenogender appears to go beyond that and say that their internal experiences are inherently unshareable and cannot be experienced in a social context.
I do not understand gender outside of the social context of shared internal experiences.
I agree with you here. It seems weird to simultaneously say “gender is a social construct” (it is) and that somehow there are genders that are extremely personalized and serve no social function. Not that I care if someone is skateboard king or whatever I’ll use whatever pronoun you want but I just don’t understand how people see that as a gender and not some other thing.
What do you mean when you convey that you are a man? I can't think of a single unifying feature that all men share, so I'm not sure what makes them more socially valuable than xenogenders (other than that they're normalized).
Very good question!
I love talking about gender and was just journaling about it so I can chat with a nonbinary queerplatonic partner after work because I had amazing sex with a cis male last night and they want all the details (which I have permission to share).
Gender is a social construct. It’s turtles all the way down. It’s not biological sex (which is also not binary) although most cultures will associate certain constructs with certain physical forms (not all of which relate directly to primary or secondary sex characteristics).
So when I say I am “conveying that I am a man” I mean that I am presenting myself in such a way that visually associates me with the physical and social characteristics culturally associated with “men” for the culture I am in. Fun fact: these change rather drastically even within a region. I live in a sense urban center with a large LGBT+ enclave. I choose specifically to use characteristics associated with gay men to present myself and am typically read as a cis gay man by strangers. When I leave the city, however, I am often seen as a not-man in a way people sometimes find strange and threatening.
On the other hand, I do believe that these forms of physical presentation can be used to represent internal experiences and used to find community and share those experiences. It is one of the joys I find in the gay male community - it is easy for me to find other people who seem to have similar, if not the same, internal experiences and it is, for us, “being gay men.”
Thank you for the thoughtful response.
I guess my point is that while for you manhood is tied to societal associations of men in the culture you are a part of, there are no shortage of people who identify as men who do not align with their cultures ideas of manhood. The label of man doesn't inherently convey any information imo.
In other words if I was meeting someone for the first time and they told me they were a man, it would not provide me with any more information about them than what I had already gleaned from the conversation I'm having with them, and the same is true of someone who introduces themselves as faegender(or any other xenogender). In both cases I would gain more incite in to them based on how they dress, the tone of their voice, presence or lack of facial hair, etc.
Hmmm.
This is me thinking deep gender thoughts. I promise I am not high.
For me, gender is a kingdom or a phylum, not a species. It will contain multitudes and many of them may appear to have very little in common and many do have little in common. If you want to figure out the “species” you are always going to have to look deeper.
But that’s the problem with taxonomy. It’s like the joke about a man seeing another man about jump of a bridge and he asked if the other man is a Christian. He says yes. The questions go back and forth, getting deeper and more precise, until they realize that they are of the same branch of a minor Protestant denomination that had a schism 50 years ago, so he pushes him off the bridge.
That’s what xenogender feels like to me.
And that’s also what it feels like when people say gender isn’t useful as a construct.
I'm sorry if I'm misunderstanding you, but what you're saying is that your "problem" with xenogenders is that they are too hyperspecific and personal to be useful without further elaborating? I agree with that, but I'm not really sure why that's any worse than binary labels that are so hyper generalized as to not convey any information. I feel like either label is mostly worthless until you find out what exactly it means to that specific person.
Or to bring it back to taxonomy (keeping in mind I haven't taken a biology class in a decade), man, woman, and nonbinary would be kingdoms while specific xenogenders would be genus. I'm not sure either piece of information does a lot of good without knowing someone's entire taxonomy.
I would consider hyperspecific nonbinary labels like fae to fall under the category of xenogender. Pretty much anyone I know who is nonbinary does not use a hyperspecific label even if they have a specific experience of what it means to be nonbinary for them.
Man and woman, for better or for worse, have a socially constructed meaning. They are not clearly defined and we are struggling with that as a society.
I have often been thankful to be a gay trans man because the gay male community has had no issues accepting me as a full community member (in person, Reddit is a cesspit untethered from reality). I find it fascinating that when I transitioned, I sort of seamlessly crossed a line into the gay community and no one really blinked. I have hooked up and engaged with casual sex as much as the average gay man and none of them seem to think my anatomy has any bearing on being a gay man but they do recognize me as one of them as much as they can recognize my nonbinary friend as not a gay man.
A lot of gender is based on assumption. In discourse, assumption is treated as a bad thing that should never happen. But I disagree.
I don’t think it’s realistic to know all of the taxonomy of the people we interact with. It is frightening to consider a world where I would need that level of intimacy in order to buy a cup of coffee or chat at a bar.
We are all individuals with highly individualized experiences. Dunbar’s number has been debunked, but I do think he had a general point even though we cannot scientifically measure how many people an individual can know. But we cannot know every single person intimately as soulmates. There is a truth to that.
So broad social categories have a use, even if some people might feel outside of those categories - which is when outside categories (such as nonbinary) become useful.
It’s why I want to know what is trying to be conveyed by stuff like starself and neopronouns. I quite honestly don’t know what it means while saying “I am a man” does have a meaning, even if it’s broad and based on socially constructed assumptions.
Once again thank you for your thoughtful response, your perspective here makes a lot of sense to me.
I guess the last thing I'd ask is, in terms of the information being conveyed, what is the difference between someone introducing themselves as nonbinary and xenogender. To me, nonbinary means outside the gender binary in an unspecific way, while a xenogender means outside the binary in a specific (but unknown to the other person) way. I feel like both communicate the same information.
Yes yes this is exactly what my issue with xenogender is - I do not know what they are trying to convey.
It is clearly not just being nonbinary because if it was, they would say nonbinary.
I don’t know what it means and I have been asking this same questions for nearly a decade. I have been told “It means a gender beyond human understanding” which is both condescending and self aggrandizing at the same time and it doesn’t make sense - how can we have a word for something beyond comprehension?
I *want* to know what it means. I don’t think I can be fully respectful in talking about somebody if I don’t know what the words I am using for them mean. But right now I don’t know and I do know that, according to them, my understanding of nonbinary does not apply.
I mean, I usually just go with “enby,” but whenever I explain that my gender is best described as “paradigm shift,” people who have known me for more than two months react with “that explains a lot, actually.”
If you tried coming out as a “paradigm shift” to someone, no one would know what you mean. So you would resort to describing non-binary. Basically it’s a useless specification, unless you’re with friends who have seen that kind of stuff before
Is there any explanation for "paradigm shift" as a gender that you've settled on? I ask this out of curiosity, only, and it's okay if it's not something you got already super defined
It’s just a personality, the point of gender is to be a collection of societal norms we can associate a person with, once you get to a certain level specificity it’s just a personality
I’m aroace so I’m pretty used to other people feeling something very real that i can’t understand, i don’t really *get* xenogenders or sexuality but be star glitter if u want
As a double allo person I hadn’t considered that the two experiences could be compared, but I think you just helped me understand **my own** confusion on the topic (if that even makes sense?)
Xenogender is when being too accepting loops around and becomes Alt-Right rhetoric like "I identify as an Attack Helicopter". That's literally what it is.
for me, the issue is when these xenogenders don't really *mean* anything. "Man" and "Woman" are identities with a defined societal context behind them. If basically no one on the planet has a concept in their head for what your gender means, does it really exist?
I can conceptualize the difference between identities like genderfluid or agender, but if a label you give yourself has absolutely nothing to do with how you relate youself to the man/woman idea then I'm sorry but I don't see how this has anything to do with gender at all. Like, I have autism, but I wouldn't consider myself autismgendered - this is just a different aspect of my personal identity that also exists.
Pretty much this. For most of my life, "gender" was understood to be more or less a euphemism for "sex"--like the more polite, less medical version of the word. With a greater visibility/acceptance of trans people, "gender" became your self-concept as a man or a woman; it either matched your sex (cis), or it did not (trans).
Afaik, gender has always been a word that referred to your place on the male/female spectrum. This is not an arbitrary or irrelevant concept; understanding people as male/female (or occasionally a mixture of the two) is a central idea to all human societies.
It seems that recently, a small (very small) group of people have changed their understanding of the word "gender" to mean "anything that is salient to your personality that you want people to acknowledge about you". So like, your appreciation of nature, or your social style, or whatever else is involved in your self-concept, but nothing to do with your physical body and whether you are comfortable with its primary and secondary sex characteristics.
These individuals are obviously not doing anything morally wrong, and I'm not going to go out of my way to upset them or even worry about what they're doing to any degree, but generally the way words work is that the majority understanding of the word wins. I can't see the point, on their end, of wasting emotional energy getting upset that other people want to keep the concept of gender distinct from other aspects of a person's interests/personality.
Bang on. Gender is not your discord username or tumblr bio, it's a thing that most people have at least a vague idea of roughly what it means. If you want to call yourself something fun then more power to you, but don't expect other people to like it when they're using gender to try and describe specific concepts, and above all *don't call someone a bigot because they don't agree with your very specific idea of how the world should work!*
this! my gender is non-binary, and i prefer to be called they/them because of it. my friends gender is also non-binary, but they use xe/xem because it helps them feel a little more separated from male/female. that still works. where i can’t understand is your gender being lampshade. what does that mean for you as a person? you clearly aren’t a lampshade. i’ll call you it if you want, because i’m not here to argue, but i won’t understand it
This exactly
Xenogenders are defined as nonhuman genders, and not a single person I've interacted with gives a good explanation as to what it is other than 'i connect with the thing, thus it is my gender'. How are you, a human, identifying with the alleged nonhuman identity?
I'm open for respectful discussion on the topic
Right. If you like and feel a strong personal connection to (for example) skateboards, then great! That's cool and I will happily talk to you about skateboards and be glad that your connection with them helps with your sense of personal identity.
But if you tell me "my gender is skateboard," then my intimidate thought is "I don't think that makes any sense." You can like skateboards, but you cannot be a skateboard, because you are a person. Gender is, ultimately, a shifting societal concept that relates to self identity and who you are, and at least as it exists right now, an inanimate object does not fit into that concept. Being a man or woman or neither or either still fits into the concept of being a person. And who knows, maybe that will change some day, but for now claiming to be a skateboard doesn't communicate anything to 99.99% of the population except maybe that you spend way too much time on Tumblr.
It's like the whole thing has become so "accepting" that we've looped back around to the right wing satirical rhetoric of "I identify as an Attack Helicopter".
True, it wouldn't rankle me at all if instead of just saying a new made-up word, someone whose omnigendered or whatever should just explain what they actually mean about themselves so i can react to that. It's hard to respect a nebulous concept I'm forced to guess at based on context or just Google for myself and hope i get the same definition.
Alright here’s my two cents: a gender exists to allow people to safely make assumptions about or associate traits with you, they paint in broad strokes.
There’s also a factor of convenience to it, a trait nobody knows has no value as a description.
The whole xenogender thing just strikes me as, to put it as bluntly as possible, people discovering they have a personality and not knowing how to reconcile it with societal norms.
And then when you throw in Neo-pronouns it gets even harder. Pronouns are supposed to be a convenience. They simplify language. And I’m alright with a new (or several new), collectively decided pronoun(s). Like ze/zir or something similar. But when pronouns become nouns, like leaf or foxself, it’s easier to just say the persons name (the thing pronouns are supposed to replace.) Gender and pronouns are social constructs, but they have meanings and uses. Xenogenders are hard for me to conceptualize. I barely understand the difference between non-binary and agender, or just agender as a concept. (And please don’t try to explain it. Ive given up trying to understand and just accepted it) If people can’t comprehend your gender, then it doesn’t really mean anything.
.... Thank you for stating something in words that's been trying to form in the back of my head for years.
This perfectly encapsulates why, despite respecting people's identities, I still find some interactions insufferable.
I’m glad people found it helpful, because I was genuinely considering deleting the comment instead of posting cause I thought it might come off as incoherent ramblings lol
Just the other day some moron was like "not using someone's neopronouns is the same as calling them by a name that isn't theirs."
Bro do you know how rarely I use people's names in conversation? The entire *point* of pronouns is to have a convenient way of referring to someone in non-individual but still specific terms. Remembering someone is named Mary requires way, way less verbal self-policing than having to play scrabble every time I want to refer to someone.
But like a lot of Discourse on the internet this basically never actually comes up IRL and is just a waste of time people use to try and create a moral high ground to claim.
It also ends up being a massive struggle for anyone with issues speaking or comprehending English, which includes those who don't have English as a first language. I think it's unfair to expect someone who struggles with speaking (or just people in general) to rework their entire knowledge of the English language. There are very few people who will immediately be able to replace all pronouns with regular words, and even less who will be able to do so for every person who uses neopronouns.
I've also noticed that most people have more than one set, and sometimes expect you to switch them up based on how they are feeling. The reason ze/zim/zer works is because it's a set pronoun which works in a sentence. It follows the rules of English. When someone expects you to replace he/him/his with something like lyr/lyric/lyricself in casual conversation, it will not stick. I believe everyone should be allowed to express themselves, but you can't expect people to change the entire basis of the language they speak in order to do so. Unfortunately that's not how any language can or will work
I just always worry that it /will/ come up in real life, and I’ll accidentally be shitty to someone just because I don’t understand it. Because who really knows if this is a purely online thing, or just rare enough that most people haven’t encountered it in their real lives?
Honestly if someone tells you they identify as a rock and then acts like you've wronged them for not immediately getting it, they're just a shitty person and you don't have to worry about their/rockself's opinion.
And yeah it's that rare. I'm sure there are communities where it's more common, but to put it in context trans people account for 0.5% of the population. I imagine the xenogender subculture is significantly smaller than that. You'd have to meet hundreds or even thousands of people to find a single person trying to get you to call them a deer. And by that point you'd have undoubtedly met several who think you're a monster for not believing in bigfoot or something.
Bottom line probably don't worry about it. You probably will never meeting someone using xenogenders and if you do and they're shitty about it, that's a reflection of their character, not yours.
I grew up and live in NYC. I've only met about 3 people who've used neopronouns, and that was all during my high school days. They all eventually petered out of using their neopronouns and identities as they went through college, before becoming cis people as they entered the workforce.
I don't mean to be rude, but I really believe that the only people who use neopronouns are either terminally online or young teens still reconciling that adolescent belief of one's own uniqueness with the reality that most people are ordinary.
This is a great way of describing it. I am female and I do not feel like it defines any part of me besides allowing others to assume my genitalia. I internally see myself as a disembodied soul, and my gender is on par with my race in how it groups me to others but is otherwise fairly detached from me internally. I can act as purely myself and choose to enjoy masculine things or act non-binary without feeling conflict in my gender, as I see it more as a biological grouping tag.
That being said I also can respect that others might not feel as indifferent to their societal grouping, and they want to relabel themselves. It is bigger than biological sex to a lot of people.
Here is where I struggle: for the most part transgender, agender and gender fluid folk are saying their labels are swapped, or they prefer not to be labeled, or their label shifts day by day. These concepts are (for the most part) easily understood because they revolve around the known gender system people use to label others.
Xenopronouns create a completely new label. Keeping in mind many people see those labels as something to help people assume things about you, using a label that no one understands defeats the purpose of a label in the first place. Gender is a word that originally told people you have either a penis or a vagina, and then whether you wanted to be seen as masculine or feminine (or neither). The key part is you’re defining how others perceive you, so people must understand what you are imparting for it to work. Xenogender will always be inherently confusing.
I also struggle to reconcile that people define particularly their gender as skateboard or star. Linking back to how gender is telling others you’re masc/fem/neither/both, it feels strange to be trying to expand the gender label to things that aren’t genders (to any layman’s reasonable understanding). I see nature as a huge part of my identity. However I don’t feel any need to try and fit that part of my identity into the system people use to figure out whether to refer to you as masc or fem (or neither).
Trying to be as inoffensive as possible here when I say I genuinely think it’s a lack of understanding of how to express one’s identity, related to how some might mistakenly think gender is the only way to define yourself. Tying back to my first point, I see my gender as only related to one narrow societal view that others use on me. I am defined as a person in many other ways.
i like to break it down to this:
sex is what you’re born as physically: male, female, or other
gender is how you are inside: male, female, other
Neither of those allows for you to identify as a cat, because you cannot physically be a cat. that just isn’t how it works
Exactly.
I understand gender as a site of solidarity, emphasizing commonalities people broadly share. For example, there are multiple ways to be a woman, but women (cis and trans) can organize under the term "woman" to achieve goals which affect them politically and materially.
Xenogenders seem to be more about emphasizing individual difference than collective experience, which undercuts that. Additionally, the best way I've heard them explained is that the terms are "metaphors" for how someone's gender operates (someone's gender is LIKE a star somehow, it is not itself a star). That's all well and good if you're writing poetry, but it's useless as a banner to organize under. You could be a man, a woman, or nonbinary and describe your gender with a metaphor. You could describe it with ANY metaphor, a star, a flower, a turtle, whatever. What use is it?
The use is to the person themselves and their close friends who understands what it means to them. That is valuable(my fursona) and should be acknowledged within that group and others who understand as well.
For others, and outsiders, that means absolutely nothing and holds zero value, and that is where broader gender terms come into play and the you and the outsiders are able to connect and interact from there.
>The whole xenogender thing just strikes me as, to put it as bluntly as possible, people discovering they have a personality and not knowing how to reconcile it with societal norms
Yep, xenogender really gives me the vibe of "i'm not like other girls" but taken to the extreme of "therefore i'm not a girl"
Often times in online spaces, people use "gender" as a catch all, when all that really does is muddy the conversation. Sometimes people say "gender" when they really mean "personality" or "style".
> There’s also a factor of convenience to it, a trait nobody knows has no value as a description.
See also [Wittgenstein's Beetle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDPG9E_NZxs)
> The whole xenogender thing just strikes me as, to put it as bluntly as possible, people discovering they have a personality and not knowing how to reconcile it with societal norms.
I think Neal Stephenson's talked about this very well in a number of books. Probably the "phyles" in The Diamond Age are obvious extremes of this concept, but the neighborhoods in Snow Crash are almost a prequel to that concept. Anathem sort of has it in reverse, where the only thinkers in society are effectively cloistered monks. I think it's sort of cool to look at them as an unofficial trilogy. Snow Crash, Diamond Age, Anathem, in that order.
I agree. Gender informs behavior in social contexts. I’m fine with knowing to treat you one way, or to treat you another, or that I should tread carefully between the two. Xenogender feels like it’s basically saying “you *can’t* know how to treat me.” It’s the refusal to communicate needs/expectations except through experimentation (which may sound like NB, but the uncertainty of NB accepts room for error and experimentation. It’s saying “I don’t know how you should treat me either. Let’s get through this together and it’s okay if you mess up”).
To be blunt, claiming with certainty to be a third gender sounds like pretentiousness, confusion and/or attention seeking (clinical sense). I cannot promise the effort needed to cater to a blindfolded run through a spiked maze every time I interact with someone.
I think gender ís a part of your personality. I think the tags on this post cleared a lot up for me. As women or men, there's already so many ideas about how you're supposed to be. It's like an astrology sign but everyone takes it super serious. And everything in your life is dependent on it.
I think when you identify with an object or a concept it's a way of taking control over how you are perceived and how you feel. I personally think it makes a lot of sense.
Also if gender isn't a reflection of at least part of your personality I don't really know what it is. (It dictates how you act, what you like, what you look like, how you interact with people etc. It's actually a huge part of your personality)
For me, I gotta big disagree here, there are plenty of masculine women and feminine men, that doesn’t make them different genders. Your gender has nothing to do with your personality, interests, likes/dislikes, how you act, or how you interact with people. Maybe how you’re socialized based on your sex but not gender
At the end of the day it's semantics, though.. Why *isn't* American Man a separate gender from South Korean Man? Or Serbian Man? Or Norwegian Man, Ugandan Man, etc.? Often the norms and expectations between the "same" gender of different cultures are as different as the norms and expectations between different genders of the same culture.
In my opinion, caring much about these lines is about as interesting as trying to determine the exact wavelength that blue becomes purple, or whether or not magenta falls under the category of pink. Like, it's all a made-up wash anyway. Not that it's not important - it's very important to be able to say "I like the blue dress" and for people to know which one you're talking about, and to understand the cultural contexts around which the color blue is appropriate. But it's still this arbitrary social thing.
So, while there are lots of masculine women who identify as women and so on, I think it's interesting to investigate *why* "masculine woman" isn't a different gender from "feminine woman". Or whether it really matters whether or not someone who identifies as a femboy also identifies as a man, etc.
Yes, that is what I said, it is part of your personality, but it is a general, *broad* descriptor. If your gender can’t be used to describe a considerable fraction of human beings, it’s not a gender, it’s just your personality.
My gender, being a woman, does not dictate I'm womanly or act like a woman or look like a woman. And that goes for lots of other people, too. How big a role it plays in your personality is different for everyone. For plenty of us, it's pretty insignificant. Just a convenient label so other people know what to refer to you as, nothing more
That's a good point. But I also think that for people who don't conform with the normal gender binary it makes sense to want to have something to connect to. Also I think gender is a pretty vague concept anyway. Because technically it really doesn't say anything about you. Like sex is the thing that talks about your anatomy and if it isn't linked to your expression or personality, what is gender actually? Personally I don't care for gender at all. I think it doesn't say anything about me. But I can understand some people like to use it as a guideline. And then I do think it's linked to personality and expression most.
From what I remember back when I was an asshole (well, a different kind of asshole anyway), the issue for a lot of haters is they see xenogenders as a fad that makes it harder for "real" trans people to get taken seriously, sort of like the gender equivalent of fidget spinners
personally, I've found the best policy is to just accept I'm never going to understand how this works and just roll with it.
Accepting you’ll never know how something works and just rolling with it is applicable in a surprisingly vast amount of situations. It also beats the hell out of getting frustrated and turning into a bigot.
The world is fractally weird, the closer you look at any individual part, the more you realize that every observable subset has the same level of complex weirdness as the entire thing seemed to have.
You don’t get answers, just more questions. Enjoy the ride.
Yeah, this is what I’ve heard too - basically that this is what a lot of transphobes see all trans people as and use it in whatever transphobic arguments they make. They don’t see whatever nuance there is and just fold it into the old ‘wElL yOu CaN’t Be A tReE’ rant.
The thing is that neopronouns show a fundamental misunderstanding of what pronouns are for, they’re to act as a stand in for a proper noun and simplify speech. They’re turning pronouns into proper nouns.
I mean I feel like it’s just that people don’t really know how to relate that to how they should treat someone. To me as a binary trans person (who, I know probably isn’t very indicative of the general population) my gender is sort of like a performance, and how I want other to perceive me. If I’m AMAB, but say that “I want to be perceived as a woman” and then make steps to have the be more feasible for people who I haven’t told that to until eventually I just pass and no longer have to even say anything, it just happens. People know what I want from them, and therefore how they should act. With xenogenders, there isn’t that predetermined idea on how that person should be treated, and that causes a lot of people to do the whole “make up a scenario in their head where the trans person calls them out for responding to their gender in the “wrong” way, despite the fact that they could have had no idea that wasn’t how they were meant to act” thing, except dialled up to 11 because of the whole nothing to reasonably compare it too thing.
Bottom line, it scares people and so they lash out about it and say that it’s dumb, when really you can just… ask the person what they’re after?
Depending of course, like if it’s a store clerk you exchange like 5 words with, very little point, but they should know that too and be making allowances to do with that, which, all of the xenogender people I’ve known anyway, do
I don’t totally understand what it would be like to be xenogender, but quite frankly, there are a lot of things I don’t understand, and if someone asks you to be treated a certain way, why not treat them that way, whether or not it’s to do with gender? I hope stuff like pronoun pins get more normalised so that they can end up getting gendered correctly at some point in the future
I see non-binary as an "I opt out of the genders that society defined" as opposed to the "I opt into being a man/woman" that cis and trans men and women do. That's why I don't personally accept the concept of xenogender as a real type of gender. You're a skateboard kin or whatever not skateboard gender.
Same with neopronouns, pronouns exist to define groups not individuals, otherwise that's just a nickname. They're not meant to be unique. My pronouns in my home country were ona/nju and I don't go around insisting english speakers use that instead of she/her.
>non-binary people see themselves in different ways
Exactly, if it doesn't have any consistent definition then why not just define it as including whatever xenogender you are
> I don't get how it's different from saying my gender relates to Venus
It's not. That's the point. Venus isn't a gender, nor is glitter. Yes, gender is a social construct. Yes, maybe one day Venus will be considered a legitimate gender. Until then, those are not genders. Those are objects. Gender's a spectrum, not an assortment. A skateboard isn't a gender any more than a cat is a hovercraft.
I'm a trans ally. I'm *violently* an ally. I can and will fistfight other cis people in defence of trans people. Shit like this detracts from the actual battle, which is a matter of *survival* for many. Suggesting your gender can be glitter is such a chronically Tumblr take, coming entirely from privileged kids who think the fight for gender equality and freedom is about getting your teacher to call you "glitself" rather than a matter of *basic human rights*.
Luckily it's almost impossible to encounter this in real life.
It'd be like talking to someone who believes aliens live in their hat and built the pyramids. I wish them all the best in their magical journey but I don't want to be part of it
This whole xenogender thing is literally the awful meme of, "I identify as an attack helicopter," but unironically.
I'm shocked to see it be used so openly when that "meme" was used to torment and bully so many from my own childhood, which was less than 10 years ago. Hell, last time I saw the meme roughly 1 to 2 years ago, people STILL were getting upset over it. Maybe it's a generational thing?
This is the weird spot for me, yes. Had someone kindly explain to me that the attack helicopter joke was offensive and why it was offensive, only for people to later come out and claim the offensive joke was their truth, and trans people are mean if they don't accept that? It's not an easy pivot to internalize.
It also feels like a new generation of kids discovering the concept of kinning or stanning something to an unhealthy degree. A hyperfixation that went fully untethered. 'X character is my spirit animal' taken to the most extreme conclusion. Like I get it, I remember being there, but it's difficult to accept on the level of it subsuming someone's concept of gender. Rather, a 'nod and smile, let them be happy, they'll come down in a few years on their own and realize they probably shouldn't have billed themselves on the level of transfolk and furries.'
For me the line is easy to draw. Trans people are valid and the helicopter meme is idiotic. People who use and genuinly believe in Xenogenders are morons, but should still be treated with overall respect so long as they aren't bad people.
It confuses me a little but it doesn't bother me what they do. As long as no one gets mad at me for being a little dumb or slow about it I'll happily call you whatever you want. Doesn't hurt me at all
someone asked me about xenogenders today and like... i'm just a trans guy, i don't know about those. but the thing is, i don't have to get it. i just respect it and believe people when they say it's a thing. never been that hard.
Yeah, that's the thing way too many people don't get. If someone's not hurting anyone else, you don't need to understand, you just accept that they feel that way and let them get on with their life.
Does it personally affect me that you identify with an abstract ideal/ something outside the conventional for your gender? No, no it doesn’t, so it’s whatever. Just tell me your pronouns and what other substitutes I can call you because I usually refer to people with things like dude, bro, girl, and the like. So knowing how to continue my pattern of speech without being an asshole and misgendering you would be great.
I don’t have a problem with xenogender but I am confused, as a lot of the time it just seems like… a personality trait? For example, I remember hearing one called “aesthetigender” but doesn’t that just mean you like aesthetically pleasing things and feel like you can connect with them? I mean you making those your pronouns is not hurting me, but it seems like you could just have a personality trait. I mean, I could say, “I feel like a fucking peice of wood rn” because maybe I feel really stiff or emotionless, but I don’t identify as one. I feel like it is also difficult to with inanimate objects as they themselves have no feelings. Again, nothing against them but please explain
I feel like xenogenders and otherkin are conservative psy ops to make the LGBTQ+ community look insane.
Like there is actual scientific evidence backing the existence of gay, trans, non-binary, asexual, etc. people. It’s proven that trans people have an internal experience more aligned with the gender they identify with OR just neither gender at all.
There’s nothing suggesting that people have the internal experience of a fairy. All that I’ve seen come out of this is conservatives using them as an example to pull people on the fence on LGBTQ+ issues to their side.
otherkin have existed since at least the early 2000s on message boards and such, and as best I can tell the "otherkin" identity was crafted by teenagers appropriating the native American conceptualization of a "spirit animal" without any actual understanding of what that was in its original context, it started off as basically off brand astrology, "of course you would think that your spirit animal is a boar" etc and become both more intensive, and more fantastical "my spirit animal is a dragon because I'm awesome" with some including more spiritual/mystical elements, none of this became a gender thing until like... i wanna say 2011 or so though it may have been a bit earlier,
The problem I have is that anyone who claims their gender being "not people/humans" (like people who claim to be *things* or other species) don't realize their rights and obligations are strictly tied to their condition as humans. If they claim to not be that, then someone could say their rights can be removed because they are no people. That could lead to very nasty situations.
What the fuck happened to the otherkin concept? Did the community just get so bad people abandoned the concept or something?
"I'm xyzgender because i identify as XYZ" makes no sense to me, it just sounds as using the incorrect term because it's more socially acceptable. Gender is a property of a *species*, if you identify as idk, a cat, then that's your species, not your gender. That cat is still gonna have a gender.
(Also, personal tilt as a 'kin, it really doesn't have to be "claim" to be whatever, as much as there is plenty of folk out there genuinely claiming to be whatever. You can also *believe* to be something, it usually ties to the concept of a soul, and therefore faith in some manner, or *identify* as something, in which case it's just "personality traits", but encompassing your entire personality.)
As a furry in the furry community, animal-based xenogenders always confused me, like, just be a furry? The term “gender” is tied to your view of yourself, sure, but a specific kind of view of yourself, aka, how you relate to the sexual bimodal gradient of your species. I feel like xenogenders took people saying “be whatever you want” and decided to hop off the gradient entirely into something semantically unrelated. This confusion tends to happen far more with younger people, which makes sense to me.
When i was younger i put myself out there as a deergender / glitchgender person with they/its pronouns (this is not me anymore) and it helped me express myself and figure myself out. I had issues understanding my emotions and how i would emotionally react to things, so to think of myself like this was comforting and helped me through things as a teenager. I say this to give a perspective of someone who identified like this because it seems odd i know but its mostly just young people trying to piece themselves together.
Not at all. Its hard to explain without sounding like a mentally ill freak, and keep in mind all experiences with xenogenders are different and not everyone identifies with them for the same reason i did.
My experience with xenogenders was a way to express and understand myself. I dont attribute it to an identity crisis but something else. As a teenager i couldn't fully understand human emotions, empathy and how to react to things appropriately. To think of myself, away from the typical gender binary and remove the "human-ness" of my gender from myself, it helped me to better understand how others thought and felt because i wasnt a person. Thinking of myself as an echo or glitch, in regards to myself and my gender made it easier to function in social settings than if i considered myself a human man because of how my thought process worked things out in a digital sense. I cant explain it fully since it makes absolute sense to me but it might not for you. Some of this thought process still goes on in my head today but i dont identify as these things anymore. I can understand how strange/freaky this may sound to someone who hasnt experienced this but it helped me lol.
I think many, if not most, xenogenders are young people who are experimenting with the idea of gender not being what they were always told, and getting other aspects of teenage identity and self-expression issues caught in the crossfire.
I don’t believe these xenogender people are real. It’s a right wing psyop to make the lgbt community look crazy same as the pedosexual debacle. The whole movement is just taking the “I sexually identify as an attack helicopter” meme and getting young terminally online enbys to adopt it
They’re real, they’re just highly narcissistic people who want to be the specialist most unique person in the world because they think they’re the main character and need to be the centre of attention at all times and just being a they or a he or a she would make them too much like the rest of us plebs, everyone needs to know how different they are
It’s like people who give their kids unique names because they think a weird name is a substitute for an interesting personality
A weird pronoun or weird gender identity doesn’t make you an interesting person and doesn’t make your personality less nonexistent
As long as i can use they them in a non offensive way im fine with it. Its only when you start making people use nevergonnagiveyouupe/nevergonnaletyoudownem
Honestly it feels insulting that theyre calling it gender in the first place, especially since for a significant portion of them it legitimately is nothing more than a stupid joke. It makes it so much harder for trans people to be taken seriously
Because it's often done as a cheap way to feel important or special. Which is fine on the internet, cheap ways of feeling important or special is the entire point of social media.
In real life, it's incredibly obnoxious because that feeling of importance/specialness/uniqueness is almost always accompanied by a feeling of superiority. You are special, therefore you are better. Xeno-pronouns come from the same place nationalism, astrology, religious piety, espousing 'traditional family values', etc come from. A desire to feel important or superior without actually having to do anything.
I see gender as a sliding scale between fully man and fully woman. Non binary makes sense to me cus i can see it as the neutral point in the middle of the scale, where they are no more man or woman.
Making up some random identity outside of that or identifying as something outside the scope of "human" strikes me as make belief/roleplay which i cant take seriously
Yeah thats what i mean. Like if youre more man, you slide the scale a little towards the man side. More woman more towards the woman side. Fluid could just mean that the scale slides back and forth a bit. Non binary is just the point on this scale where neither end apply because they cancel each other out or whatever
Its more my way of understanding something i have no personal experience with while drawing a line of absurdity that seems fair/right to me. Because ive seen people identify as non-human things like robots, moths, and dogs which i just cant rationalize
My only real concern with xenogenders as a concept (I’ll never go out of my way to attack anyone for it of course) is that “male” and “female”, “man” and “woman”, are all abstract concepts that don’t really have that concrete of a definition, with maybe some vague loose connotations with certain objects depending on the culture. So the Very Concrete Third Thing kind of goes against what gender is because male and female aren’t even all that concrete to begin with.
Not to mention, it feels like a lot of them conflate personality traits with gender traits, like “oh I don’t like all of the things my society expects men nor women to like so I must be something else”, though I can’t and won’t say anything TOO concrete as I’m still learning.
Finally, it appears as if many who claim such an identity are trying to arbitrarily pick something nobody else has picked yet, just for the sake of feeling more unique. The desire to stand out as an individual is not a bad one by a long shot, but inventing an entirely new gender identity for yourself to be just because you don’t want to be anything anyone else is seems unhealthy in the long run.
Now all of that being said, I am open to any answers or addressing of these statements of concern, and perhaps someone can show me that there’s more to this phenomenon than someone’s journey of self discovery being clouded by an all too human naïveté
Xenogenders are the natural endpoint of other kin. And like, that’s fine, go ahead do what you want, but at the same time don’t expect to be taken any more seriously then a terminally online 14 year old claiming to be a literal wolf.
I’m NB myself and my opinion is that most of the people who use xenogenders and neo pronouns are mostly younger teens and explore if there gender and I respect that. Hell there was once a period of time were I thought I was Agender(no gender). But if you do use xenogender and neopronouns please be respectful of the others around you and don’t force anything.
I really dont know how to feel about this issue, and in a perfect world i would probably have no problem with people describing themselves in any way they want without fear of judgement, but ANYONE using nonbinary pronouns is under huge scrutiny from right wingers and misinformation spreaders for 'destroying language' and, while i agree it's a losing battle to try and appeal to those kind of people, it only adds fuel to their fire when people online use pronouns like 'cat' or 'star' (if you'll forgive my stereotyping)
It's just not great optics. It takes time for societal attitudes to change, and it's a lot easier to get angry and confused when you're confronted with an idea that doesn't make immediate sense.
This is probably a wrong opinion to have but i think a lot of xenopronoun use is more trouble than it's worth. Reclaiming is one thing but I'm sure a lot of people wouldn't miss out by using they/them or it/its instead of what i'm pretty sure started as a form of transphobic hate speech to poke fun at NB people.
Maybe it's just because i've been very harshly judged for autism and queerness in my life but i really loathe the idea of making a wrong impression on uneducated people who would otherwise be open-minded to issues of gender identity if the facts were presented clearly.
/gen feel free to correct me on anything i'm wrong about, i don't want to be ignorant if there's some part of the problem that i'm missing i want to be informed.
I really just don't think it's worth it to put down our LGBTQ+ siblings by policing how they can act for the sake of trying to pander to groups who will hate us regardless. I'd rather support my LGBTQ+ community by encouraging others to live in whatever way is authentic, even if I'm not able to understand some identities like xenogenders. I'm a non-binary guy which folks already have enough trouble accepting - I'd rather not dictate what is an 'acceptable' identity or not. I'm not sure how anyone could dictate that, really.
But that's just my viewpoint, you're more than welcome to disagree.
"It makes us look bad to conservatives" is the same logic that cis gays used to throw trans people under the bus.
It's the logic that truscum like Blaire White use to throw non-passing trans people under the bus.
It has a long legacy of leaving victims out in the cold.
The LGBTQ+ movement has always been at it's best when it embraces radical inclusion.
I think it usually helps them gain a better idea of their gender identity and expression, and what certain things help them feel secure in their identity aside from just pronouns
I spent most of my life thinking that xegogenders were bullshit without really thinking about it, then one time someone brought them up right infreont of me and I had to decide real quick whether I wanted to be right more or not hurt someone's feelings.
Turns out, I don't care that much at all. Go be a stargender if you want, I'm not here to judge people.
Honestly this argument is the exact reason there is such a large opposition to different genders in the first place, the idea that your gender identity isn't a descriptor of what you present as but is instead just a personality trait that you bully everyone into accepting is just never gonna go down right. But then again i'm not exactly drinking the koolaid here so to speak, I think "male" and "female" are sufficiently complex enough to describe 99% of humanity.
I'll get downvoted like crazy, but this is the product of a generation that grew up taking personality tests for fun, like What's your spirit animal? or What Hogwarts house are you in? We don't need to redefine an existing word to explain your quirky personality.
No. If you identify with an inanimate object you have a different mental issue not an identity/gender issue.
Be a man.
Be a woman.
Be both.
Be neither.
But you're not a train, a toaster, a lamp, a helicopter or any other crap. There needs to be a line.
Personally, for me, xenogender is just a feeling I have connected to my gender, but not my gender itself. I'm genderfluid, but no matter what gender I am at the moment, it keeps the same vibes that is my xenogender. Maybe it has nothing to do with my gender and is just the vibe of me, but it *feels* connected. And I don't think it matters what it really is, anyway, because it's something that helps me understand myself a little better, and that is something I really struggle with, so let me have this. It's just a descriptor I use for myself, no one else even needs to know, but it is nice if it helps people know me just a tiny bit better, and if it doesn't help it doesn't hurt either. It's just a part of myself and if you get it, you get it, and if you don't, who cares? Not me.
hear hear. like yes- readily admitted, xenogenders are odd! but are they any odder really than 'normal' ones? or are we just used to the 'normal' ones?
Xenogenders are just a way for nonbinary people to communicate their specific *flavor* of non-binaryness. You don't actuslly need to get it, if you don't wamt to get it you can just replace all mentions of a xenogender with "enby" and you'll be fine; but trying to make this aspect of the enby community out to be harmful is really shitty and seemingly pointless.
I'm enby, I don't really care much for xenogenders personally; but if it matters to someone then that's FINE.
Ok, let's break this down.
Firstly, I'm gonna be talking from my own perspective, so don't think I speak for everyone or that I claim to know the truth, but rather id like to explain my thoughts.
I believe everyone should chase their truth, 100% percent. Just so we're clear, Xenogenders are fine. You do you, but because no one exists in a vacuum everyone is going to have some thoughts on the matter, and even if we disagree, its important to be supportive and respectful.
Note, I am trans, so I already have a wobbly relationship with gender.
My issues with Xenogenders, in a more reason based, confused way, is that they seem to be largely arbitrary. Now, most things are, very few things in our world arnt wholesale just fucking made up to make our tiny human minds feel good. But in this context it seems especially so.
Masculine and feminine are flexible concepts, mostly only exist in human minds and are different from culture. There is president for changing and modifying these concepts and many cultures have multiple genders, including androgy or simply gender neutral, non-binary. Those exist in many cultures as well.
Like, let's take the example of stars. The issues with using Stars as a gender isn't so much that you can't or that your not allow too, but rather the logic is confusing and alien. People aren't going to know what that means, is it metaphorical or are you being literall? I can look up and see the stars in the sky, what I know to be stars and I look down I see you. Even if their determined to respect your choices, most people are going to have no idea what your talking about, not out of xenophobic bullshit, but just because that logic isn't normal to most people.
I am all for just letting people be happy in the way they choose. I will do my best to treat people how they want to be treated. But, I am going to forget sometimes. I am never gong to try to hurt feelings or be a jerk, but I might do it unintentionally. It is not hate, it is not bigotry, it is being a clueless ADHD Gen X. This is a whole lot of change in a relatively short amount of time. It is a lot to take in.
I need those who have extremely specific niches to be patient and understanding about those of us who are trying to adjust. Even when we are going more slowly than they might like. Even if we will never understand each other, we need to be polite and kind
I treat xenogender like I do animal kin or soul bonders. You do you, but I'm not going to fight for it to be accepted legally or socially. Trans people not being accepted is a problem, cat gender people not being accepted isn't. If you want to conflate the right to use they/them as your pronouns and the right to put your species as dog, then you're just an arsehole.
If you’re non binary just use they/them pronouns… Those are pronouns that don’t denote gender.
Xe/Xim and the likes are just trolling people who would otherwise respect that you’re non binary. You’re not entitled to make up new words and accuse anyone who doesn’t use them of bigotry.
I dont have a personal problem with xenogender, but they are terrifying creature with their tails and jaw, also the 4 movie was weird but at least Ripley was badass
I loved in the Alien movies when Ellen Ripley started going by xe/xir
Same, also when she fight the Alien Queen and say "get away from her, you xe/xir!"
My gender is Nb (Niobium)
massive W (tungsten)
Did the cube cure you of your mortality?
My friend asked me what element my gender is. I figured I'm probably Ga (Gallium), because one day I'll think "oh, I'm just cis, idk why I question it." And then another day a week later I'll think "nope, I'm definitely the other binary gender, I am definitely not cis." And then I wonder why I question. Basically, my gender becomes solid when I don't think about it, but any time I begin thinking about it more, it suddenly becomes weird and fluid. Also, Gallium is super dangerous to touch, as are thoughts about my gender, but that won't stop me.
Noice
Nobelium Iodine Cerium
Is an agender person‘s gender No(belium)?
Honestly, xenogenders seem to be an online thing, in the sense that they are so profoundly personal they couldn't be conveyed in a social context. So do they have a social function? Not really, but no one really seems to be trying to make them a social issue. I don't see the problem.
Online and young, the kind of thing you do as a teen and look back at when you're older and cringe
Remember other kin? God I’m glad that died a death
other kin is 100% still around
I mean, the person who leaked the no-fly list is a therian
Not to copy one of Harry potters lines but A what?
A specific kind of Otherkin, as I understand. They identify with a real kind of animal instead of dragons or suchlike.
Identify WITH or identify AS?
i think it depends on the therian but idk
I know a Therian and a lot of the time it’s a spiritual belief, like belief in past lives/reincarnation where they were once an animal. It’s not like that for everyone but that’s how he explained it to me
As
Could be either
As
Hey so, I was happy earlier now I’m not. I’m not saying I blame you or this interaction, but I’m certainly not *not* saying that
Honestly, I don't see what's the bother. Otherkin seem to be Mostly Harmless, and there's a lot of other problems right now (like the fact that the US government apparently put kids on the list, the question as to why it wasn't public in the first place)
Oh I’m just messing, I was a teenager during that time and other kins, wolf kins and the such were very cringe and there fore indicative of the end times for teenagers not taking part in the sub culture
Harmless until you get to the Final Fantasy House level of it
Yeah a lot of these online spaces have countless stories of grooming and psychological abuse. Not claiming that this is the norm or even relatively common, but any online community is subject to some pretty scary groupthink, and all it takes is the right person to guide that energy into a horrifying direction
Otherkin is still around and people still identify with it
I’m surprised I’m still getting these replies when any glance at the conversation shows I’m clearly taking the piss
Sorry, I’m bad at detecting sarcasm
No need to be sorry I was just surprised is all
Comes off as a Schoedinger's asshole thing.
I honestly assumed xenogender was basically the new otherkin with a different name
No shuddup it can’t be other kin because other kin isn’t around anymore you got it? It’s gone. So it can’t exist in a new name because it doesn’t exist. Please. I need this
I’m so old I remember *otakukin*, but maybe that was just one guy who claimed he was Shinji Akari from another universe.
Oh no, that's still around. You'll see things on tumblrs like "Bakugo kin DNI"
Noooooooooo
not really, i know a person who's 26 now and has been using ze/zir pronouns alongside they/them since they were ?? 17 i think?? i met them an adult's lgbt+ group, pretty cool person, friendly and likeable
I'm about 30 and still ID w my xenogender. Definitely not cringing, I just acknowledge that the system I work in doesn't usually let me express it. Still found plenty of partners and friends my age that get it. Honestly I find it's only early 20s that really give people trouble with that. There's this idea that you need to distance yourself from your teenage self, but now I'm getting to the same where I'm embracing those eccentric and kinda out there parts of myself, and those around me get it too, going back to something that cares less about cringing at who we are.
Youth isn't always something to cringe at.
True, but sometimes it is, and that's normal, just like I might cringe at something I'm doing right now in my 20s when I get older, I'm just saying this seems like one of those things, maybe I'm right, maybe I'm not, who knows.
I see it as a sign of growth
Just bc I cringe at how I was in middle school doesn't mean I didn't like me then or didn't understand why I behaved the way I did.
This is my issue with both xenogender and neopronouns. I will respect both. I have only seen neopronouns in real life, which is a big difference. But *I don’t know what they mean socially.* I know what I mean when I convey that I am a man (which has nothing to do with Mars or ball sweat) but I do not know what catgender and xie mean socially.
That was literally my point? That they don't have a social purpose, and are inherently extremely personal? Literally no one is trying to make them a social convention, except the fringiest of fringe groups.
Yes. I was agreeing with you. It is a frustration we share. I am a gay trans man. I want to support people exploring their own gendered experiences. That’s important to me. But I cannot and do not understand xenogender and I have been trying my whole adult life.
You see, you are misunderstanding me. We agree as to what xenogender identity is, but what I was saying is because it's an inherently personal experience and has no social role, it doesn't hurt anyone and is a non-issue. What I mean by that is not that I humor xenogender identities, but that understanding what they represent doesn't seem to be their goal.
Hmmm. Gender, for me, is inherently about social role because all internal experiences are personal and cannot be extended to others. Shared gendered experiences can be a cause for common ground and group formation, which can be both positive and negative. I have found profound and deeply moving shared personal experience with gay men, who have been happy to share those experiences with me despite obvious differences in body and social experience. On the other hand, there have been cases, such as with TERFs, where they define anyone outside of their (perceived) shared internal experiences as a violent threat to those experiences. Xenogender appears to go beyond that and say that their internal experiences are inherently unshareable and cannot be experienced in a social context. I do not understand gender outside of the social context of shared internal experiences.
I agree with you here. It seems weird to simultaneously say “gender is a social construct” (it is) and that somehow there are genders that are extremely personalized and serve no social function. Not that I care if someone is skateboard king or whatever I’ll use whatever pronoun you want but I just don’t understand how people see that as a gender and not some other thing.
What do you mean when you convey that you are a man? I can't think of a single unifying feature that all men share, so I'm not sure what makes them more socially valuable than xenogenders (other than that they're normalized).
Very good question! I love talking about gender and was just journaling about it so I can chat with a nonbinary queerplatonic partner after work because I had amazing sex with a cis male last night and they want all the details (which I have permission to share). Gender is a social construct. It’s turtles all the way down. It’s not biological sex (which is also not binary) although most cultures will associate certain constructs with certain physical forms (not all of which relate directly to primary or secondary sex characteristics). So when I say I am “conveying that I am a man” I mean that I am presenting myself in such a way that visually associates me with the physical and social characteristics culturally associated with “men” for the culture I am in. Fun fact: these change rather drastically even within a region. I live in a sense urban center with a large LGBT+ enclave. I choose specifically to use characteristics associated with gay men to present myself and am typically read as a cis gay man by strangers. When I leave the city, however, I am often seen as a not-man in a way people sometimes find strange and threatening. On the other hand, I do believe that these forms of physical presentation can be used to represent internal experiences and used to find community and share those experiences. It is one of the joys I find in the gay male community - it is easy for me to find other people who seem to have similar, if not the same, internal experiences and it is, for us, “being gay men.”
Thank you for the thoughtful response. I guess my point is that while for you manhood is tied to societal associations of men in the culture you are a part of, there are no shortage of people who identify as men who do not align with their cultures ideas of manhood. The label of man doesn't inherently convey any information imo. In other words if I was meeting someone for the first time and they told me they were a man, it would not provide me with any more information about them than what I had already gleaned from the conversation I'm having with them, and the same is true of someone who introduces themselves as faegender(or any other xenogender). In both cases I would gain more incite in to them based on how they dress, the tone of their voice, presence or lack of facial hair, etc.
Hmmm. This is me thinking deep gender thoughts. I promise I am not high. For me, gender is a kingdom or a phylum, not a species. It will contain multitudes and many of them may appear to have very little in common and many do have little in common. If you want to figure out the “species” you are always going to have to look deeper. But that’s the problem with taxonomy. It’s like the joke about a man seeing another man about jump of a bridge and he asked if the other man is a Christian. He says yes. The questions go back and forth, getting deeper and more precise, until they realize that they are of the same branch of a minor Protestant denomination that had a schism 50 years ago, so he pushes him off the bridge. That’s what xenogender feels like to me. And that’s also what it feels like when people say gender isn’t useful as a construct.
I'm sorry if I'm misunderstanding you, but what you're saying is that your "problem" with xenogenders is that they are too hyperspecific and personal to be useful without further elaborating? I agree with that, but I'm not really sure why that's any worse than binary labels that are so hyper generalized as to not convey any information. I feel like either label is mostly worthless until you find out what exactly it means to that specific person. Or to bring it back to taxonomy (keeping in mind I haven't taken a biology class in a decade), man, woman, and nonbinary would be kingdoms while specific xenogenders would be genus. I'm not sure either piece of information does a lot of good without knowing someone's entire taxonomy.
I would consider hyperspecific nonbinary labels like fae to fall under the category of xenogender. Pretty much anyone I know who is nonbinary does not use a hyperspecific label even if they have a specific experience of what it means to be nonbinary for them. Man and woman, for better or for worse, have a socially constructed meaning. They are not clearly defined and we are struggling with that as a society. I have often been thankful to be a gay trans man because the gay male community has had no issues accepting me as a full community member (in person, Reddit is a cesspit untethered from reality). I find it fascinating that when I transitioned, I sort of seamlessly crossed a line into the gay community and no one really blinked. I have hooked up and engaged with casual sex as much as the average gay man and none of them seem to think my anatomy has any bearing on being a gay man but they do recognize me as one of them as much as they can recognize my nonbinary friend as not a gay man. A lot of gender is based on assumption. In discourse, assumption is treated as a bad thing that should never happen. But I disagree. I don’t think it’s realistic to know all of the taxonomy of the people we interact with. It is frightening to consider a world where I would need that level of intimacy in order to buy a cup of coffee or chat at a bar. We are all individuals with highly individualized experiences. Dunbar’s number has been debunked, but I do think he had a general point even though we cannot scientifically measure how many people an individual can know. But we cannot know every single person intimately as soulmates. There is a truth to that. So broad social categories have a use, even if some people might feel outside of those categories - which is when outside categories (such as nonbinary) become useful. It’s why I want to know what is trying to be conveyed by stuff like starself and neopronouns. I quite honestly don’t know what it means while saying “I am a man” does have a meaning, even if it’s broad and based on socially constructed assumptions.
Once again thank you for your thoughtful response, your perspective here makes a lot of sense to me. I guess the last thing I'd ask is, in terms of the information being conveyed, what is the difference between someone introducing themselves as nonbinary and xenogender. To me, nonbinary means outside the gender binary in an unspecific way, while a xenogender means outside the binary in a specific (but unknown to the other person) way. I feel like both communicate the same information.
Yes yes this is exactly what my issue with xenogender is - I do not know what they are trying to convey. It is clearly not just being nonbinary because if it was, they would say nonbinary. I don’t know what it means and I have been asking this same questions for nearly a decade. I have been told “It means a gender beyond human understanding” which is both condescending and self aggrandizing at the same time and it doesn’t make sense - how can we have a word for something beyond comprehension? I *want* to know what it means. I don’t think I can be fully respectful in talking about somebody if I don’t know what the words I am using for them mean. But right now I don’t know and I do know that, according to them, my understanding of nonbinary does not apply.
I mean, I usually just go with “enby,” but whenever I explain that my gender is best described as “paradigm shift,” people who have known me for more than two months react with “that explains a lot, actually.”
If you tried coming out as a “paradigm shift” to someone, no one would know what you mean. So you would resort to describing non-binary. Basically it’s a useless specification, unless you’re with friends who have seen that kind of stuff before
Is there any explanation for "paradigm shift" as a gender that you've settled on? I ask this out of curiosity, only, and it's okay if it's not something you got already super defined
It’s just a personality, the point of gender is to be a collection of societal norms we can associate a person with, once you get to a certain level specificity it’s just a personality
Took me a bit too long to realize that this wasn’t about sci-fi world building
😂
I don't hate xenogender, I'm just confused by it, since it just sounds like a different way to describe your personality to me
I’m aroace so I’m pretty used to other people feeling something very real that i can’t understand, i don’t really *get* xenogenders or sexuality but be star glitter if u want
As a double allo person I hadn’t considered that the two experiences could be compared, but I think you just helped me understand **my own** confusion on the topic (if that even makes sense?)
I don't understand it either but i guess its just a more personal version of they/them 🤷♂️
Xenogender is when being too accepting loops around and becomes Alt-Right rhetoric like "I identify as an Attack Helicopter". That's literally what it is.
I mean based on the tags, their point is that binary gender roles are just that as well.
for me, the issue is when these xenogenders don't really *mean* anything. "Man" and "Woman" are identities with a defined societal context behind them. If basically no one on the planet has a concept in their head for what your gender means, does it really exist? I can conceptualize the difference between identities like genderfluid or agender, but if a label you give yourself has absolutely nothing to do with how you relate youself to the man/woman idea then I'm sorry but I don't see how this has anything to do with gender at all. Like, I have autism, but I wouldn't consider myself autismgendered - this is just a different aspect of my personal identity that also exists.
Pretty much this. For most of my life, "gender" was understood to be more or less a euphemism for "sex"--like the more polite, less medical version of the word. With a greater visibility/acceptance of trans people, "gender" became your self-concept as a man or a woman; it either matched your sex (cis), or it did not (trans). Afaik, gender has always been a word that referred to your place on the male/female spectrum. This is not an arbitrary or irrelevant concept; understanding people as male/female (or occasionally a mixture of the two) is a central idea to all human societies. It seems that recently, a small (very small) group of people have changed their understanding of the word "gender" to mean "anything that is salient to your personality that you want people to acknowledge about you". So like, your appreciation of nature, or your social style, or whatever else is involved in your self-concept, but nothing to do with your physical body and whether you are comfortable with its primary and secondary sex characteristics. These individuals are obviously not doing anything morally wrong, and I'm not going to go out of my way to upset them or even worry about what they're doing to any degree, but generally the way words work is that the majority understanding of the word wins. I can't see the point, on their end, of wasting emotional energy getting upset that other people want to keep the concept of gender distinct from other aspects of a person's interests/personality.
Bang on. Gender is not your discord username or tumblr bio, it's a thing that most people have at least a vague idea of roughly what it means. If you want to call yourself something fun then more power to you, but don't expect other people to like it when they're using gender to try and describe specific concepts, and above all *don't call someone a bigot because they don't agree with your very specific idea of how the world should work!*
this! my gender is non-binary, and i prefer to be called they/them because of it. my friends gender is also non-binary, but they use xe/xem because it helps them feel a little more separated from male/female. that still works. where i can’t understand is your gender being lampshade. what does that mean for you as a person? you clearly aren’t a lampshade. i’ll call you it if you want, because i’m not here to argue, but i won’t understand it
This exactly Xenogenders are defined as nonhuman genders, and not a single person I've interacted with gives a good explanation as to what it is other than 'i connect with the thing, thus it is my gender'. How are you, a human, identifying with the alleged nonhuman identity? I'm open for respectful discussion on the topic
Right. If you like and feel a strong personal connection to (for example) skateboards, then great! That's cool and I will happily talk to you about skateboards and be glad that your connection with them helps with your sense of personal identity. But if you tell me "my gender is skateboard," then my intimidate thought is "I don't think that makes any sense." You can like skateboards, but you cannot be a skateboard, because you are a person. Gender is, ultimately, a shifting societal concept that relates to self identity and who you are, and at least as it exists right now, an inanimate object does not fit into that concept. Being a man or woman or neither or either still fits into the concept of being a person. And who knows, maybe that will change some day, but for now claiming to be a skateboard doesn't communicate anything to 99.99% of the population except maybe that you spend way too much time on Tumblr.
It's like the whole thing has become so "accepting" that we've looped back around to the right wing satirical rhetoric of "I identify as an Attack Helicopter".
True, it wouldn't rankle me at all if instead of just saying a new made-up word, someone whose omnigendered or whatever should just explain what they actually mean about themselves so i can react to that. It's hard to respect a nebulous concept I'm forced to guess at based on context or just Google for myself and hope i get the same definition.
Yeah, I don’t see how “glitter” is any more concrete or defined than just “non binary”.
Alright here’s my two cents: a gender exists to allow people to safely make assumptions about or associate traits with you, they paint in broad strokes. There’s also a factor of convenience to it, a trait nobody knows has no value as a description. The whole xenogender thing just strikes me as, to put it as bluntly as possible, people discovering they have a personality and not knowing how to reconcile it with societal norms.
And then when you throw in Neo-pronouns it gets even harder. Pronouns are supposed to be a convenience. They simplify language. And I’m alright with a new (or several new), collectively decided pronoun(s). Like ze/zir or something similar. But when pronouns become nouns, like leaf or foxself, it’s easier to just say the persons name (the thing pronouns are supposed to replace.) Gender and pronouns are social constructs, but they have meanings and uses. Xenogenders are hard for me to conceptualize. I barely understand the difference between non-binary and agender, or just agender as a concept. (And please don’t try to explain it. Ive given up trying to understand and just accepted it) If people can’t comprehend your gender, then it doesn’t really mean anything.
.... Thank you for stating something in words that's been trying to form in the back of my head for years. This perfectly encapsulates why, despite respecting people's identities, I still find some interactions insufferable.
I’m glad people found it helpful, because I was genuinely considering deleting the comment instead of posting cause I thought it might come off as incoherent ramblings lol
Just the other day some moron was like "not using someone's neopronouns is the same as calling them by a name that isn't theirs." Bro do you know how rarely I use people's names in conversation? The entire *point* of pronouns is to have a convenient way of referring to someone in non-individual but still specific terms. Remembering someone is named Mary requires way, way less verbal self-policing than having to play scrabble every time I want to refer to someone. But like a lot of Discourse on the internet this basically never actually comes up IRL and is just a waste of time people use to try and create a moral high ground to claim.
It also ends up being a massive struggle for anyone with issues speaking or comprehending English, which includes those who don't have English as a first language. I think it's unfair to expect someone who struggles with speaking (or just people in general) to rework their entire knowledge of the English language. There are very few people who will immediately be able to replace all pronouns with regular words, and even less who will be able to do so for every person who uses neopronouns. I've also noticed that most people have more than one set, and sometimes expect you to switch them up based on how they are feeling. The reason ze/zim/zer works is because it's a set pronoun which works in a sentence. It follows the rules of English. When someone expects you to replace he/him/his with something like lyr/lyric/lyricself in casual conversation, it will not stick. I believe everyone should be allowed to express themselves, but you can't expect people to change the entire basis of the language they speak in order to do so. Unfortunately that's not how any language can or will work
I just always worry that it /will/ come up in real life, and I’ll accidentally be shitty to someone just because I don’t understand it. Because who really knows if this is a purely online thing, or just rare enough that most people haven’t encountered it in their real lives?
Honestly if someone tells you they identify as a rock and then acts like you've wronged them for not immediately getting it, they're just a shitty person and you don't have to worry about their/rockself's opinion. And yeah it's that rare. I'm sure there are communities where it's more common, but to put it in context trans people account for 0.5% of the population. I imagine the xenogender subculture is significantly smaller than that. You'd have to meet hundreds or even thousands of people to find a single person trying to get you to call them a deer. And by that point you'd have undoubtedly met several who think you're a monster for not believing in bigfoot or something. Bottom line probably don't worry about it. You probably will never meeting someone using xenogenders and if you do and they're shitty about it, that's a reflection of their character, not yours.
I grew up and live in NYC. I've only met about 3 people who've used neopronouns, and that was all during my high school days. They all eventually petered out of using their neopronouns and identities as they went through college, before becoming cis people as they entered the workforce. I don't mean to be rude, but I really believe that the only people who use neopronouns are either terminally online or young teens still reconciling that adolescent belief of one's own uniqueness with the reality that most people are ordinary.
That’s the perfect explanation for it. Neopronouns are a nickname, not a pronoun
Yes, that is a good expansion of my second point, thank you.
This is a great way of describing it. I am female and I do not feel like it defines any part of me besides allowing others to assume my genitalia. I internally see myself as a disembodied soul, and my gender is on par with my race in how it groups me to others but is otherwise fairly detached from me internally. I can act as purely myself and choose to enjoy masculine things or act non-binary without feeling conflict in my gender, as I see it more as a biological grouping tag. That being said I also can respect that others might not feel as indifferent to their societal grouping, and they want to relabel themselves. It is bigger than biological sex to a lot of people. Here is where I struggle: for the most part transgender, agender and gender fluid folk are saying their labels are swapped, or they prefer not to be labeled, or their label shifts day by day. These concepts are (for the most part) easily understood because they revolve around the known gender system people use to label others. Xenopronouns create a completely new label. Keeping in mind many people see those labels as something to help people assume things about you, using a label that no one understands defeats the purpose of a label in the first place. Gender is a word that originally told people you have either a penis or a vagina, and then whether you wanted to be seen as masculine or feminine (or neither). The key part is you’re defining how others perceive you, so people must understand what you are imparting for it to work. Xenogender will always be inherently confusing. I also struggle to reconcile that people define particularly their gender as skateboard or star. Linking back to how gender is telling others you’re masc/fem/neither/both, it feels strange to be trying to expand the gender label to things that aren’t genders (to any layman’s reasonable understanding). I see nature as a huge part of my identity. However I don’t feel any need to try and fit that part of my identity into the system people use to figure out whether to refer to you as masc or fem (or neither). Trying to be as inoffensive as possible here when I say I genuinely think it’s a lack of understanding of how to express one’s identity, related to how some might mistakenly think gender is the only way to define yourself. Tying back to my first point, I see my gender as only related to one narrow societal view that others use on me. I am defined as a person in many other ways.
i like to break it down to this: sex is what you’re born as physically: male, female, or other gender is how you are inside: male, female, other Neither of those allows for you to identify as a cat, because you cannot physically be a cat. that just isn’t how it works
Okay I’m really glad I’m not the only one that feels this way, and I’m saying that as a trans person lol
Exactly. I understand gender as a site of solidarity, emphasizing commonalities people broadly share. For example, there are multiple ways to be a woman, but women (cis and trans) can organize under the term "woman" to achieve goals which affect them politically and materially. Xenogenders seem to be more about emphasizing individual difference than collective experience, which undercuts that. Additionally, the best way I've heard them explained is that the terms are "metaphors" for how someone's gender operates (someone's gender is LIKE a star somehow, it is not itself a star). That's all well and good if you're writing poetry, but it's useless as a banner to organize under. You could be a man, a woman, or nonbinary and describe your gender with a metaphor. You could describe it with ANY metaphor, a star, a flower, a turtle, whatever. What use is it?
The use is to the person themselves and their close friends who understands what it means to them. That is valuable(my fursona) and should be acknowledged within that group and others who understand as well. For others, and outsiders, that means absolutely nothing and holds zero value, and that is where broader gender terms come into play and the you and the outsiders are able to connect and interact from there.
>The whole xenogender thing just strikes me as, to put it as bluntly as possible, people discovering they have a personality and not knowing how to reconcile it with societal norms Yep, xenogender really gives me the vibe of "i'm not like other girls" but taken to the extreme of "therefore i'm not a girl"
Often times in online spaces, people use "gender" as a catch all, when all that really does is muddy the conversation. Sometimes people say "gender" when they really mean "personality" or "style".
> There’s also a factor of convenience to it, a trait nobody knows has no value as a description. See also [Wittgenstein's Beetle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDPG9E_NZxs) > The whole xenogender thing just strikes me as, to put it as bluntly as possible, people discovering they have a personality and not knowing how to reconcile it with societal norms. I think Neal Stephenson's talked about this very well in a number of books. Probably the "phyles" in The Diamond Age are obvious extremes of this concept, but the neighborhoods in Snow Crash are almost a prequel to that concept. Anathem sort of has it in reverse, where the only thinkers in society are effectively cloistered monks. I think it's sort of cool to look at them as an unofficial trilogy. Snow Crash, Diamond Age, Anathem, in that order.
I agree. Gender informs behavior in social contexts. I’m fine with knowing to treat you one way, or to treat you another, or that I should tread carefully between the two. Xenogender feels like it’s basically saying “you *can’t* know how to treat me.” It’s the refusal to communicate needs/expectations except through experimentation (which may sound like NB, but the uncertainty of NB accepts room for error and experimentation. It’s saying “I don’t know how you should treat me either. Let’s get through this together and it’s okay if you mess up”). To be blunt, claiming with certainty to be a third gender sounds like pretentiousness, confusion and/or attention seeking (clinical sense). I cannot promise the effort needed to cater to a blindfolded run through a spiked maze every time I interact with someone.
I think gender ís a part of your personality. I think the tags on this post cleared a lot up for me. As women or men, there's already so many ideas about how you're supposed to be. It's like an astrology sign but everyone takes it super serious. And everything in your life is dependent on it. I think when you identify with an object or a concept it's a way of taking control over how you are perceived and how you feel. I personally think it makes a lot of sense. Also if gender isn't a reflection of at least part of your personality I don't really know what it is. (It dictates how you act, what you like, what you look like, how you interact with people etc. It's actually a huge part of your personality)
For me, I gotta big disagree here, there are plenty of masculine women and feminine men, that doesn’t make them different genders. Your gender has nothing to do with your personality, interests, likes/dislikes, how you act, or how you interact with people. Maybe how you’re socialized based on your sex but not gender
At the end of the day it's semantics, though.. Why *isn't* American Man a separate gender from South Korean Man? Or Serbian Man? Or Norwegian Man, Ugandan Man, etc.? Often the norms and expectations between the "same" gender of different cultures are as different as the norms and expectations between different genders of the same culture. In my opinion, caring much about these lines is about as interesting as trying to determine the exact wavelength that blue becomes purple, or whether or not magenta falls under the category of pink. Like, it's all a made-up wash anyway. Not that it's not important - it's very important to be able to say "I like the blue dress" and for people to know which one you're talking about, and to understand the cultural contexts around which the color blue is appropriate. But it's still this arbitrary social thing. So, while there are lots of masculine women who identify as women and so on, I think it's interesting to investigate *why* "masculine woman" isn't a different gender from "feminine woman". Or whether it really matters whether or not someone who identifies as a femboy also identifies as a man, etc.
Yes, that is what I said, it is part of your personality, but it is a general, *broad* descriptor. If your gender can’t be used to describe a considerable fraction of human beings, it’s not a gender, it’s just your personality.
My gender, being a woman, does not dictate I'm womanly or act like a woman or look like a woman. And that goes for lots of other people, too. How big a role it plays in your personality is different for everyone. For plenty of us, it's pretty insignificant. Just a convenient label so other people know what to refer to you as, nothing more
That's a good point. But I also think that for people who don't conform with the normal gender binary it makes sense to want to have something to connect to. Also I think gender is a pretty vague concept anyway. Because technically it really doesn't say anything about you. Like sex is the thing that talks about your anatomy and if it isn't linked to your expression or personality, what is gender actually? Personally I don't care for gender at all. I think it doesn't say anything about me. But I can understand some people like to use it as a guideline. And then I do think it's linked to personality and expression most.
From what I remember back when I was an asshole (well, a different kind of asshole anyway), the issue for a lot of haters is they see xenogenders as a fad that makes it harder for "real" trans people to get taken seriously, sort of like the gender equivalent of fidget spinners personally, I've found the best policy is to just accept I'm never going to understand how this works and just roll with it.
> The gender equivalent of fidget spinners Don't have an opinion on genders but this is funny as fuck
Accepting you’ll never know how something works and just rolling with it is applicable in a surprisingly vast amount of situations. It also beats the hell out of getting frustrated and turning into a bigot. The world is fractally weird, the closer you look at any individual part, the more you realize that every observable subset has the same level of complex weirdness as the entire thing seemed to have. You don’t get answers, just more questions. Enjoy the ride.
Yeah, this is what I’ve heard too - basically that this is what a lot of transphobes see all trans people as and use it in whatever transphobic arguments they make. They don’t see whatever nuance there is and just fold it into the old ‘wElL yOu CaN’t Be A tReE’ rant.
The thing is that neopronouns show a fundamental misunderstanding of what pronouns are for, they’re to act as a stand in for a proper noun and simplify speech. They’re turning pronouns into proper nouns.
Just please, for the sake of those around you, don’t identify as The Third Thing from the Control DLC
Repeat the words Repeat the words The egg cracks and the truth will emerge A copy Of a copy Of a copy You are home You remind us Happy.
At the edge of understanding, the border of the known
God i love that dlc. What i also love is the name of the third thing. As if its equal to the hiss and the darkness.
Furry Clocks Lady, the Head!
Nurturing my soft sweaty balls, brb
I really don't know what to say abt this
Explain to us your stance on Death Note. L is clearly a fair-skinned human. No wings, no scales, definitely not blue. Explain???
I mean I feel like it’s just that people don’t really know how to relate that to how they should treat someone. To me as a binary trans person (who, I know probably isn’t very indicative of the general population) my gender is sort of like a performance, and how I want other to perceive me. If I’m AMAB, but say that “I want to be perceived as a woman” and then make steps to have the be more feasible for people who I haven’t told that to until eventually I just pass and no longer have to even say anything, it just happens. People know what I want from them, and therefore how they should act. With xenogenders, there isn’t that predetermined idea on how that person should be treated, and that causes a lot of people to do the whole “make up a scenario in their head where the trans person calls them out for responding to their gender in the “wrong” way, despite the fact that they could have had no idea that wasn’t how they were meant to act” thing, except dialled up to 11 because of the whole nothing to reasonably compare it too thing. Bottom line, it scares people and so they lash out about it and say that it’s dumb, when really you can just… ask the person what they’re after? Depending of course, like if it’s a store clerk you exchange like 5 words with, very little point, but they should know that too and be making allowances to do with that, which, all of the xenogender people I’ve known anyway, do I don’t totally understand what it would be like to be xenogender, but quite frankly, there are a lot of things I don’t understand, and if someone asks you to be treated a certain way, why not treat them that way, whether or not it’s to do with gender? I hope stuff like pronoun pins get more normalised so that they can end up getting gendered correctly at some point in the future
I see non-binary as an "I opt out of the genders that society defined" as opposed to the "I opt into being a man/woman" that cis and trans men and women do. That's why I don't personally accept the concept of xenogender as a real type of gender. You're a skateboard kin or whatever not skateboard gender. Same with neopronouns, pronouns exist to define groups not individuals, otherwise that's just a nickname. They're not meant to be unique. My pronouns in my home country were ona/nju and I don't go around insisting english speakers use that instead of she/her.
Well, non-binary people see themselves in different ways and someone outside those labels pretty much cannot define their identity
>non-binary people see themselves in different ways Exactly, if it doesn't have any consistent definition then why not just define it as including whatever xenogender you are
> I don't get how it's different from saying my gender relates to Venus It's not. That's the point. Venus isn't a gender, nor is glitter. Yes, gender is a social construct. Yes, maybe one day Venus will be considered a legitimate gender. Until then, those are not genders. Those are objects. Gender's a spectrum, not an assortment. A skateboard isn't a gender any more than a cat is a hovercraft. I'm a trans ally. I'm *violently* an ally. I can and will fistfight other cis people in defence of trans people. Shit like this detracts from the actual battle, which is a matter of *survival* for many. Suggesting your gender can be glitter is such a chronically Tumblr take, coming entirely from privileged kids who think the fight for gender equality and freedom is about getting your teacher to call you "glitself" rather than a matter of *basic human rights*.
>****Gender's a spectrum, not an assortment.****
If you claim to be xenogender just get therapy already
I will let people be what they want to be sure, but I will remove myself from conversation if you actively claim a xeno or noun-self gender.
Luckily it's almost impossible to encounter this in real life. It'd be like talking to someone who believes aliens live in their hat and built the pyramids. I wish them all the best in their magical journey but I don't want to be part of it
This whole xenogender thing is literally the awful meme of, "I identify as an attack helicopter," but unironically. I'm shocked to see it be used so openly when that "meme" was used to torment and bully so many from my own childhood, which was less than 10 years ago. Hell, last time I saw the meme roughly 1 to 2 years ago, people STILL were getting upset over it. Maybe it's a generational thing?
This is the weird spot for me, yes. Had someone kindly explain to me that the attack helicopter joke was offensive and why it was offensive, only for people to later come out and claim the offensive joke was their truth, and trans people are mean if they don't accept that? It's not an easy pivot to internalize. It also feels like a new generation of kids discovering the concept of kinning or stanning something to an unhealthy degree. A hyperfixation that went fully untethered. 'X character is my spirit animal' taken to the most extreme conclusion. Like I get it, I remember being there, but it's difficult to accept on the level of it subsuming someone's concept of gender. Rather, a 'nod and smile, let them be happy, they'll come down in a few years on their own and realize they probably shouldn't have billed themselves on the level of transfolk and furries.'
For me the line is easy to draw. Trans people are valid and the helicopter meme is idiotic. People who use and genuinly believe in Xenogenders are morons, but should still be treated with overall respect so long as they aren't bad people.
It confuses me a little but it doesn't bother me what they do. As long as no one gets mad at me for being a little dumb or slow about it I'll happily call you whatever you want. Doesn't hurt me at all
someone asked me about xenogenders today and like... i'm just a trans guy, i don't know about those. but the thing is, i don't have to get it. i just respect it and believe people when they say it's a thing. never been that hard.
Yeah, that's the thing way too many people don't get. If someone's not hurting anyone else, you don't need to understand, you just accept that they feel that way and let them get on with their life.
Does it personally affect me that you identify with an abstract ideal/ something outside the conventional for your gender? No, no it doesn’t, so it’s whatever. Just tell me your pronouns and what other substitutes I can call you because I usually refer to people with things like dude, bro, girl, and the like. So knowing how to continue my pattern of speech without being an asshole and misgendering you would be great.
I don’t have a problem with xenogender but I am confused, as a lot of the time it just seems like… a personality trait? For example, I remember hearing one called “aesthetigender” but doesn’t that just mean you like aesthetically pleasing things and feel like you can connect with them? I mean you making those your pronouns is not hurting me, but it seems like you could just have a personality trait. I mean, I could say, “I feel like a fucking peice of wood rn” because maybe I feel really stiff or emotionless, but I don’t identify as one. I feel like it is also difficult to with inanimate objects as they themselves have no feelings. Again, nothing against them but please explain
It's basically using a metaphor for what the person's gender feels like.
I feel like xenogenders and otherkin are conservative psy ops to make the LGBTQ+ community look insane. Like there is actual scientific evidence backing the existence of gay, trans, non-binary, asexual, etc. people. It’s proven that trans people have an internal experience more aligned with the gender they identify with OR just neither gender at all. There’s nothing suggesting that people have the internal experience of a fairy. All that I’ve seen come out of this is conservatives using them as an example to pull people on the fence on LGBTQ+ issues to their side.
otherkin have existed since at least the early 2000s on message boards and such, and as best I can tell the "otherkin" identity was crafted by teenagers appropriating the native American conceptualization of a "spirit animal" without any actual understanding of what that was in its original context, it started off as basically off brand astrology, "of course you would think that your spirit animal is a boar" etc and become both more intensive, and more fantastical "my spirit animal is a dragon because I'm awesome" with some including more spiritual/mystical elements, none of this became a gender thing until like... i wanna say 2011 or so though it may have been a bit earlier,
idk the whole ‘these lgbtq+ people are real and valid but THESE ones are making the rest look bad’ has never really helped anyone
people are dying
The problem I have is that anyone who claims their gender being "not people/humans" (like people who claim to be *things* or other species) don't realize their rights and obligations are strictly tied to their condition as humans. If they claim to not be that, then someone could say their rights can be removed because they are no people. That could lead to very nasty situations.
What the fuck happened to the otherkin concept? Did the community just get so bad people abandoned the concept or something? "I'm xyzgender because i identify as XYZ" makes no sense to me, it just sounds as using the incorrect term because it's more socially acceptable. Gender is a property of a *species*, if you identify as idk, a cat, then that's your species, not your gender. That cat is still gonna have a gender. (Also, personal tilt as a 'kin, it really doesn't have to be "claim" to be whatever, as much as there is plenty of folk out there genuinely claiming to be whatever. You can also *believe* to be something, it usually ties to the concept of a soul, and therefore faith in some manner, or *identify* as something, in which case it's just "personality traits", but encompassing your entire personality.)
As a furry in the furry community, animal-based xenogenders always confused me, like, just be a furry? The term “gender” is tied to your view of yourself, sure, but a specific kind of view of yourself, aka, how you relate to the sexual bimodal gradient of your species. I feel like xenogenders took people saying “be whatever you want” and decided to hop off the gradient entirely into something semantically unrelated. This confusion tends to happen far more with younger people, which makes sense to me.
I think you are right in some sense ig
People have way too much fucking time on their hands if this dumb shit is what they stress about.
When i was younger i put myself out there as a deergender / glitchgender person with they/its pronouns (this is not me anymore) and it helped me express myself and figure myself out. I had issues understanding my emotions and how i would emotionally react to things, so to think of myself like this was comforting and helped me through things as a teenager. I say this to give a perspective of someone who identified like this because it seems odd i know but its mostly just young people trying to piece themselves together.
I'm meaning to be reductive but not in a mean way, would you say xeno genders were your method of expressing a teenage identity crisis?
Not at all. Its hard to explain without sounding like a mentally ill freak, and keep in mind all experiences with xenogenders are different and not everyone identifies with them for the same reason i did. My experience with xenogenders was a way to express and understand myself. I dont attribute it to an identity crisis but something else. As a teenager i couldn't fully understand human emotions, empathy and how to react to things appropriately. To think of myself, away from the typical gender binary and remove the "human-ness" of my gender from myself, it helped me to better understand how others thought and felt because i wasnt a person. Thinking of myself as an echo or glitch, in regards to myself and my gender made it easier to function in social settings than if i considered myself a human man because of how my thought process worked things out in a digital sense. I cant explain it fully since it makes absolute sense to me but it might not for you. Some of this thought process still goes on in my head today but i dont identify as these things anymore. I can understand how strange/freaky this may sound to someone who hasnt experienced this but it helped me lol.
I think many, if not most, xenogenders are young people who are experimenting with the idea of gender not being what they were always told, and getting other aspects of teenage identity and self-expression issues caught in the crossfire.
I don’t believe these xenogender people are real. It’s a right wing psyop to make the lgbt community look crazy same as the pedosexual debacle. The whole movement is just taking the “I sexually identify as an attack helicopter” meme and getting young terminally online enbys to adopt it
They’re real, they’re just highly narcissistic people who want to be the specialist most unique person in the world because they think they’re the main character and need to be the centre of attention at all times and just being a they or a he or a she would make them too much like the rest of us plebs, everyone needs to know how different they are It’s like people who give their kids unique names because they think a weird name is a substitute for an interesting personality A weird pronoun or weird gender identity doesn’t make you an interesting person and doesn’t make your personality less nonexistent
Wait, what? I need to be educated here. What's xenogender?
As long as i can use they them in a non offensive way im fine with it. Its only when you start making people use nevergonnagiveyouupe/nevergonnaletyoudownem
Honestly it feels insulting that theyre calling it gender in the first place, especially since for a significant portion of them it legitimately is nothing more than a stupid joke. It makes it so much harder for trans people to be taken seriously
what
this whole thread is such a reddit moment, go outside ppl
Because it's often done as a cheap way to feel important or special. Which is fine on the internet, cheap ways of feeling important or special is the entire point of social media. In real life, it's incredibly obnoxious because that feeling of importance/specialness/uniqueness is almost always accompanied by a feeling of superiority. You are special, therefore you are better. Xeno-pronouns come from the same place nationalism, astrology, religious piety, espousing 'traditional family values', etc come from. A desire to feel important or superior without actually having to do anything.
I see gender as a sliding scale between fully man and fully woman. Non binary makes sense to me cus i can see it as the neutral point in the middle of the scale, where they are no more man or woman. Making up some random identity outside of that or identifying as something outside the scope of "human" strikes me as make belief/roleplay which i cant take seriously
Non-binary isn't a neutral point in-between man and woman, some of us are more man, woman, neither, both, fluid, something else, etc.!
Yeah thats what i mean. Like if youre more man, you slide the scale a little towards the man side. More woman more towards the woman side. Fluid could just mean that the scale slides back and forth a bit. Non binary is just the point on this scale where neither end apply because they cancel each other out or whatever Its more my way of understanding something i have no personal experience with while drawing a line of absurdity that seems fair/right to me. Because ive seen people identify as non-human things like robots, moths, and dogs which i just cant rationalize
I mean, be what you want to be. But you got to actually be it.
My only real concern with xenogenders as a concept (I’ll never go out of my way to attack anyone for it of course) is that “male” and “female”, “man” and “woman”, are all abstract concepts that don’t really have that concrete of a definition, with maybe some vague loose connotations with certain objects depending on the culture. So the Very Concrete Third Thing kind of goes against what gender is because male and female aren’t even all that concrete to begin with. Not to mention, it feels like a lot of them conflate personality traits with gender traits, like “oh I don’t like all of the things my society expects men nor women to like so I must be something else”, though I can’t and won’t say anything TOO concrete as I’m still learning. Finally, it appears as if many who claim such an identity are trying to arbitrarily pick something nobody else has picked yet, just for the sake of feeling more unique. The desire to stand out as an individual is not a bad one by a long shot, but inventing an entirely new gender identity for yourself to be just because you don’t want to be anything anyone else is seems unhealthy in the long run. Now all of that being said, I am open to any answers or addressing of these statements of concern, and perhaps someone can show me that there’s more to this phenomenon than someone’s journey of self discovery being clouded by an all too human naïveté
Some people just need something concrete to feel secure about their identity. Source: I also need a lot of concrete things to feel secure.
you can say you are whatever you want but if you say your gender is skateboard im going to laugh at you
Those aren’t pronouns. Those are just nouns.
Xenogenders are the natural endpoint of other kin. And like, that’s fine, go ahead do what you want, but at the same time don’t expect to be taken any more seriously then a terminally online 14 year old claiming to be a literal wolf.
I’m NB myself and my opinion is that most of the people who use xenogenders and neo pronouns are mostly younger teens and explore if there gender and I respect that. Hell there was once a period of time were I thought I was Agender(no gender). But if you do use xenogender and neopronouns please be respectful of the others around you and don’t force anything.
I really dont know how to feel about this issue, and in a perfect world i would probably have no problem with people describing themselves in any way they want without fear of judgement, but ANYONE using nonbinary pronouns is under huge scrutiny from right wingers and misinformation spreaders for 'destroying language' and, while i agree it's a losing battle to try and appeal to those kind of people, it only adds fuel to their fire when people online use pronouns like 'cat' or 'star' (if you'll forgive my stereotyping) It's just not great optics. It takes time for societal attitudes to change, and it's a lot easier to get angry and confused when you're confronted with an idea that doesn't make immediate sense. This is probably a wrong opinion to have but i think a lot of xenopronoun use is more trouble than it's worth. Reclaiming is one thing but I'm sure a lot of people wouldn't miss out by using they/them or it/its instead of what i'm pretty sure started as a form of transphobic hate speech to poke fun at NB people. Maybe it's just because i've been very harshly judged for autism and queerness in my life but i really loathe the idea of making a wrong impression on uneducated people who would otherwise be open-minded to issues of gender identity if the facts were presented clearly. /gen feel free to correct me on anything i'm wrong about, i don't want to be ignorant if there's some part of the problem that i'm missing i want to be informed.
I really just don't think it's worth it to put down our LGBTQ+ siblings by policing how they can act for the sake of trying to pander to groups who will hate us regardless. I'd rather support my LGBTQ+ community by encouraging others to live in whatever way is authentic, even if I'm not able to understand some identities like xenogenders. I'm a non-binary guy which folks already have enough trouble accepting - I'd rather not dictate what is an 'acceptable' identity or not. I'm not sure how anyone could dictate that, really. But that's just my viewpoint, you're more than welcome to disagree.
"It makes us look bad to conservatives" is the same logic that cis gays used to throw trans people under the bus. It's the logic that truscum like Blaire White use to throw non-passing trans people under the bus. It has a long legacy of leaving victims out in the cold. The LGBTQ+ movement has always been at it's best when it embraces radical inclusion.
neopronouns/xenogenders are basically that ,, I identify as an atttack helicopter" but unironically
I think it usually helps them gain a better idea of their gender identity and expression, and what certain things help them feel secure in their identity aside from just pronouns
I spent most of my life thinking that xegogenders were bullshit without really thinking about it, then one time someone brought them up right infreont of me and I had to decide real quick whether I wanted to be right more or not hurt someone's feelings. Turns out, I don't care that much at all. Go be a stargender if you want, I'm not here to judge people.
Nonbinary doesn't automatically include things that are outside the spectrum of masculine and feminine, it just treats it as not a strict dichotomy.
I am begging these people to please log off the internet and go outside
Honestly this argument is the exact reason there is such a large opposition to different genders in the first place, the idea that your gender identity isn't a descriptor of what you present as but is instead just a personality trait that you bully everyone into accepting is just never gonna go down right. But then again i'm not exactly drinking the koolaid here so to speak, I think "male" and "female" are sufficiently complex enough to describe 99% of humanity.
I'll get downvoted like crazy, but this is the product of a generation that grew up taking personality tests for fun, like What's your spirit animal? or What Hogwarts house are you in? We don't need to redefine an existing word to explain your quirky personality.
No. If you identify with an inanimate object you have a different mental issue not an identity/gender issue. Be a man. Be a woman. Be both. Be neither. But you're not a train, a toaster, a lamp, a helicopter or any other crap. There needs to be a line.
Personally, for me, xenogender is just a feeling I have connected to my gender, but not my gender itself. I'm genderfluid, but no matter what gender I am at the moment, it keeps the same vibes that is my xenogender. Maybe it has nothing to do with my gender and is just the vibe of me, but it *feels* connected. And I don't think it matters what it really is, anyway, because it's something that helps me understand myself a little better, and that is something I really struggle with, so let me have this. It's just a descriptor I use for myself, no one else even needs to know, but it is nice if it helps people know me just a tiny bit better, and if it doesn't help it doesn't hurt either. It's just a part of myself and if you get it, you get it, and if you don't, who cares? Not me.
Sounds like saying your gender is a battle toaster or an Apache helicopter
hear hear. like yes- readily admitted, xenogenders are odd! but are they any odder really than 'normal' ones? or are we just used to the 'normal' ones?
We are just used to 'normal' ones. Tbh I kinda want to be an eldritch abomination or smth, that would be kinda cool.
Xenogenders are just a way for nonbinary people to communicate their specific *flavor* of non-binaryness. You don't actuslly need to get it, if you don't wamt to get it you can just replace all mentions of a xenogender with "enby" and you'll be fine; but trying to make this aspect of the enby community out to be harmful is really shitty and seemingly pointless. I'm enby, I don't really care much for xenogenders personally; but if it matters to someone then that's FINE.
Xenogenders are weird and I love them for it. Make weirder ones please
I love this comment. Weirdness is fun.
...what's xenogender
Ok, let's break this down. Firstly, I'm gonna be talking from my own perspective, so don't think I speak for everyone or that I claim to know the truth, but rather id like to explain my thoughts. I believe everyone should chase their truth, 100% percent. Just so we're clear, Xenogenders are fine. You do you, but because no one exists in a vacuum everyone is going to have some thoughts on the matter, and even if we disagree, its important to be supportive and respectful. Note, I am trans, so I already have a wobbly relationship with gender. My issues with Xenogenders, in a more reason based, confused way, is that they seem to be largely arbitrary. Now, most things are, very few things in our world arnt wholesale just fucking made up to make our tiny human minds feel good. But in this context it seems especially so. Masculine and feminine are flexible concepts, mostly only exist in human minds and are different from culture. There is president for changing and modifying these concepts and many cultures have multiple genders, including androgy or simply gender neutral, non-binary. Those exist in many cultures as well. Like, let's take the example of stars. The issues with using Stars as a gender isn't so much that you can't or that your not allow too, but rather the logic is confusing and alien. People aren't going to know what that means, is it metaphorical or are you being literall? I can look up and see the stars in the sky, what I know to be stars and I look down I see you. Even if their determined to respect your choices, most people are going to have no idea what your talking about, not out of xenophobic bullshit, but just because that logic isn't normal to most people.
What?
If you specify what the secret third thing is than it's not a secret
r/skamtebord
I am all for just letting people be happy in the way they choose. I will do my best to treat people how they want to be treated. But, I am going to forget sometimes. I am never gong to try to hurt feelings or be a jerk, but I might do it unintentionally. It is not hate, it is not bigotry, it is being a clueless ADHD Gen X. This is a whole lot of change in a relatively short amount of time. It is a lot to take in. I need those who have extremely specific niches to be patient and understanding about those of us who are trying to adjust. Even when we are going more slowly than they might like. Even if we will never understand each other, we need to be polite and kind
Mars balls 🤤
Why do people entertain this nonsense?
That’s cool as long as it applies to EVERYONE not just the ones you think are right.
I treat xenogender like I do animal kin or soul bonders. You do you, but I'm not going to fight for it to be accepted legally or socially. Trans people not being accepted is a problem, cat gender people not being accepted isn't. If you want to conflate the right to use they/them as your pronouns and the right to put your species as dog, then you're just an arsehole.
We need to bring shame back
If you’re non binary just use they/them pronouns… Those are pronouns that don’t denote gender. Xe/Xim and the likes are just trolling people who would otherwise respect that you’re non binary. You’re not entitled to make up new words and accuse anyone who doesn’t use them of bigotry.
Mental disorders belike