Hey, cis people: Most of you have never met a xenogender person or been in a situation where your actions mattered to them, right?
Here’s a word of advice: When you meet your first xenogender person, the way you treat them is your attitude on ALL xenogender people until proven otherwise. If you attack the first xenogender person you’ve ever met for having a “silly” gender, then you’re a transphobe. It doesn’t matter if you think you’re somehow protecting trans people, because hatred and dismissal and erasure is the way you treated 100% of the xenogender people you’ve ever met.
Hey, uh, as someone who’s not familiar with the term can someone explain xenogender?
The description lgbtqia Fandom site sounds to me like it could be inferred as including the “apache helicopter” types, but I’m more than inclined to believe that’s not the case sense that’s essentially a slur.
Not trying to cause any shit, I just want some clarification.
A xenogender is any gender which isn’t male or female, and doesn’t fit along the male-female axis of gender. So, for non-xenogender identities you have: man, woman, demiboy, demigirl, agender, bigender (male and female), genderfluid (male and female), genderfae (female and agender), genderfaun (male and agender), androgynous, and, you know, everything in that whole space.
Xenogenders are genders which don’t exist in relation to binary gender or the absence of gender. Unfortunately, they’re harder to name, because you don’t get to pick a name that relates to existing terms for binary gender. The most common path is to name a gender through analogy. For example: suppose you were trying to explain male gender to an alien creature who’s never heard of maleness or masculinity. So you say “Men are meant to be strong, and to have camaraderie, and to be protectors, and to have interest in athleticism”. So you try to come up with a single word to relate all this quickly, and maybe you settle on the term “shieldgender”. So in the absence of the word “man”, you have that. Now imagine trying to explain a xenogender to a binary person. There’s cloudgender, and seagender, and robotgender, and pretty much any set of interrelated concepts you can imagine.
For my xenogender, it’s more literal and less analogous. People of my gender relate to one another through a swarm dynamic instead of a nuclear family, so we’re swarmgender. It’s just a description of how we work.
Ok that does it clear it up some. It is a fascinating way of looking at it like your example of not having the word for man. I’ve been trying to get a better grasp of the ideas of gender identity vs expression and to some extent I come back to the idea that gender as a thing is kind of bullshit. Like making little boxes with labels around stuff and behavior, you know? Just let people be, and don’t assign that they’re then allowed to ABC, and not allowed xyz. I don’t mean it in any kind offensive way so I hope it doesn’t come across that way.
I don’t think I’d be able to explain my identity to other people if it wasn’t a gender. I tried understanding it for myself before I knew it was a gender and I missed a lot of important stuff. Knowing it to be a gender helps me understand it from so many more angles to make sense of my own behaviour and feelings in different situations. For example, I used to think I was asexual, and I couldn’t square that with the deeply sexual feelings I had when I mind melded with a swarmmate. It just didn’t make any sense. Then one word suddenly made sense of it all: gay. I’m gay. One word, and suddenly the logic of it all comes into focus. If I can’t understand it without it being a gender, then I doubt anyone else can.
Yeah, fair. It does provide a neat little package of certain attributes you likely have. I guess I was thinking more of the angle of enforcing roles.
I love my xenogender comrades.
