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for Cringetopia users
Also I hope people in here are decent about plurals. r/fakedisordercringe is another one of the "be normal 
" instances
for Cringetopia users
Also I hope people in here are decent about plurals. r/fakedisordercringe is another one of the "be normal " instances
the "airplanekin" it mentioned is just the attack helicopter "joke"
Oh, maybe I'm thinking of someone else then, I don't remember that. Was this the "swarmkin" one, or someone else? I think there was someone that kept changing their story every other post, which I'm guessing is the troll.
i think i saw it claimed to be swarmkin at some point but i was pretty checked out after it said it couldn't watch some episode of star trek voyager because it had a... i think the term was "brainmate" based on the character 7 of 9 that was contradicted by the on-screen depiction of jeri ryan's character having a (my terminology) 90s-ass normative gender identity because she was on a 90s tv show.
Ah yep, I remember that discussion.
So my general attitude is more of a "live and let live" with people who claim to be more on the...I think it is "faegender" side of things? And just not worry too much or try to demand they explain themselves or conform to my standards or anything. I'm hoping that's a decent way to treat people and I'm not being too welcoming to wreckers and trolls who want to make fun of the "woke SJWs" or whatever.
yeah idk i don't really understand what people get out of having a specific inscrutable gender label instead of just saying "nonbinary" and not elaborating, or saying something cheeky but intelligible to other people like "my gender can't be expressed in human language". i think putting on the label constitutes an attempt at communicating meaning because that's the entire point of language so i don't think it's demanding to be like "ok and what does that mean?".
i'm sure such people have reasons for how they're choosing to describe themselves and i'd like to understand that, at least, even if it's not possible to understand someone else's gender (and i don't really understand the supposedly well established genders either)
The entire point of xenogender labels is that to the people using these, it is a way to make their gender identity legible to them and being able to conceptualize it. It's the very opposite of inscrutable. Even when we view gender as a spectrum between the poles man and woman, there's people who do not find themselves anywhere on that, they are outside of the charted territory of what Western society views as scrutable gender expressions. So they need an approximation of how they feel about and understand the gendered part of their personality, a shorthand for their concept of the self, their body image and their gender performance. Nonbinary is in large parts a catch-all term, and it is one that says what people are not. Saying "i'm not this" does not answer the question "what am i?". I like large, open-ended labels a lot, but i get the need that many people have for microlabels to articulate their experience.
And i'll be honest here, i've met more than one nonbinary person irl where it would have made perfect sense for that elflike being to say "my pronouns are fae / faer". I wouldn't have doubted that one second. I've lurked in communities of people who can best conceptualize themselves as androids or energy beings and none of that seemed anything stranger than the self-image i have on a good dose of LSD - when my mind is able to produce such a state with a few microgramms of ergotamines, i do not find it hard to grasp that some people feel that way all the time even when stone cold sober. Especially when they're nonbinary and present in ways that make people call them a "thing" or an "it" to begin with. A lot of NB folks have had experiences of what they call "being creatured", having their humanity and even their personhood doubted and denied to them. Is it such a stretch that some of them arive at a point where they wonder if they even need to view themselves as a person when just acting naturally means others cannot see them that way anymore?
As a trans person, i understand both that our gender identity can be hard to grasp for outsiders and that we have a right to self-identification, and i also know the transmedicalist history (and in many parts still ongoing present-day status quo) of excluding non-binary people from community support and from access to gender-affirming care. So i'm not going around doubting other people's gender identity or saying their pronouns do not make any sense, and it's honestly kinda sad to see how quickly xenogender people are doubted even in a space like this. DroneRights probably was more than a bit of a troll in that it came off as willfully antagonistic, but i don't think it was trolling us about that it could best understand itself as a de-personalized borg drone.
i meant inscrutable to the rest of us. my experience around people finding solace or self-understanding or whatever in labels comes from "oh that was x all along" and is bundled up in other people before them having some experience of non-normativity and communicating about it. I guess somebody has to be first, but a new label doesn't have any of that context and i'm not sure how or if it carries any information. That doesn't invalidate someone's gender but it means they're not communicating any of the things that you or I do when we say woman or agender or somebody else says nonbinary.
I feel like you don't need a robust understanding of the specifics of "neither" or "something else" to add agender and nonbinary as umbrella to the canonical western reckoning of gender, but trying to establish a new specific one is a different project from what we've done before. It's not doubt it's you've said something that i take at your word has meaning to you but doesn't tell me anything, like explaining colors to someone who has never seen them, except there's no well established physics to draw on. There are surely genders that I don't know what they are but i literally can't think anything about them because i have no referent underlying the words.
as for the psych heavy stuff I was originally asking after a credible explanation and it seems to not be available, and i don't know about all that. Our brains can do all kinds of weird and wonderful things but the way people recall experiences and report them isn't methodologically rigorous so i don't know how i'm supposed to tell the difference between stuff like sleep paralysis hallucinations and things I apparently can't read about anywhere.
Yeah, I suppose if someone does have an unusual gender identity they would expect other people to not understand and ask questions. I don't really understand non-binary gender too well, but as a cis-gendered person, it's basically just because I've never thought about it. It's not something I've ever had to question or examine within myself. I think that is why so many cis people refuse to try to understand people different from them. They've never thought about that stuff, therefore no one else has. Or something, I don't know. I just want to be nice to people.
NB can be a lot of things. I identify that way because I don't feel male or female, at least not fully. Like if there is a gender spectrum from male to female, I sit around the middle but more towards the male side. But it varies a bit.
The xenogender stuff, I admit I don't really get it either. But if someone is sincere about it, I try and trust that it makes sense to them, and it's not my place to judge its validity. As you say, I think the main thing is to be kind to others and let them try and make sense of who they are in their own way, even if it seems incomprehensible or even ridiculous from the outside
I think the common term for "both outside binary gender identities, outside of a gradient between these and outside of just not having a gender" is xenogender. But yeah, just respecting people's pronouns and not prodding them to justify their existence is the appropriate thing to do. See my post below for some more detailed thoughts on the matter, even though it's just a trans woman trying to make sense of this and not a firsthand account.
Thanks for that! It's always good to try and get more perspectives on things, even if it isn't a firsthand account of what it is like, it's still good to empathize with another person, even if we don't fully understand what their inner life is like.
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