Have some arithmogender
There’s a Nonbinary Wiki.
There are many kinds of nonbinary gender identities. These include, but are not limited to:
- Agender people find that they have no inner sense of their gender identity. That is, they have no gender.
- Androgynes are a mix of female and male.
- Aporagender is separate from female, male, or anything in between, and isn’t an absence of gender. The basic definition of maverique is similar.
- Butch and boi are queermasculine genders, which some use as nonbinary identities. The same is true for a queer feminine gender, femme.
- Demigender identities, such as the partly female demigirl, and the partly male demiboy.
- Genderfluid people have different gender identities at different times.
- Genderqueer is a non-normative gender identity or expression. This can be an umbrella term, or a specific identity.
- Intergender people have a gender identity in between female and male, and were born with intersexbodies.
- Multigender people have more than one gender identity, either at the same time, or sometimes changing between them. Bigender people have two genders.
- Neutrois is often a transsexual identity, and usually means a gender neither female nor male, but neutral.
- Xenogender includes many nonbinary gender identities defined in reference to very different ideas than female or male.
- Transgender is an umbrella term for all genders that go beyond society’s ideas of gender, which includes some kinds of binary gender people. However, some call their gender identity simply “transgender,” as a nonbinary identity itself.
- Nonbinary is an umbrella term for all who don’t identify as just female or male. Though there are many kinds of nonbinary gender identities, some people identify as “nonbinary” only.
Is it true that transgender is an umbrella term for all genders that go beyond society’s ideas of gender? I ask because I thought it was a term for people who are binary but identify as the gender they were not assigned at birth. The two aren’t the same.
At any rate, xenogender sounds interesting, so let’s check it out.
Xenogender (coined by Baaphomett in 2014,[1] from xeno alien + “gender”) is a nonbinarygender identity “that cannot be contained by human understandings of gender; more concerned with crafting other methods of gender categorization and hierarchy such as those relating to animals, plants, or other creatures/things.”[2] Xenogender isn’t defined in relation to “female” or “male” (the binary genders), but by other kinds of ideas that most people don’t think of as having to do with gender. When people talk about nonbinary gender, they often find that there aren’t any words for their experiences. This is called a lexical gap. In order to fill a lexical gap, this wiki takes up “xenogender” as an umbrella term for an entire category of nonbinary genders that are defined by characteristics with no relation whatsoever to “female” or “male.”
If there’s no relation whatsoever to “female” or “male” then it’s not gender they’re talking about. Gender isn’t just another word for personality or interests or style.
Because a gender binary society doesn’t give much in the way of roles or descriptions for nonbinary genders, some transgender and gender nonconforming people address the challenge of describing their unusual gender identities by creative methods, referring to concepts that aren’t usually seen as related to gender.
But why do they have to be gender identities at all? When they’re not?
These creative methods of describing nonbinary genders come naturally to many nonbinary people. As such, these are an emerging part of nonbinary culture, worthy of exploration and examination. Some common themes of these concepts:
Nouns and archetypes. Some nonbinary people find it easier to perceive or describe their inner sense of their gender identity by evoking familiar archetypes. Instead of giving references to how their gender relates to maleness and femaleness, they say their gender is– or is like– a kind of animal, an imaginary being, a part of nature, an abstract concept, or a symbol. Some people have made names for some of these kinds of noungenders, such as arithmogender, faunagender, and gendersea (see below).
Buuuuuuuut that’s not gender, it’s something else. By all means describe yourself in metaphors involving animals, imaginary beings, parts of nature, abstractions, symbols, and anything else you like, but why call it gender? Why not just call it “I’m like _____”?
There’s a list, along with a credit for the person who coined the item on the list.
abimegender. From “Old French – related to ‘abyss’; from Latin a- ‘without’ byssos ‘bottom’. Having a gender which is profound, deep, and infinite.”[4] Keywords: size, shape, space, synaesthesia
aesthetgender. Coined by curiosityismysin. “A gender experience that is derived from, or the embodiment of, an aesthetic.”[5] Keywords: abstract concepts, symbols
archaicgender. Coined by irredeemablegoety. “A gender that stretches far beyond one’s own age or lifetime. The vast-age of this gender has allowed it to grow far beyond whatever size/presence one would expect, or perhaps to shrink down and almost be forgotten.”[6] Synonyms: archaigender, historiagender. Keywords: time
archaigender. Coined by completelynormalscientist. “A gender that is ancient/old and big, and can either only be described with those words, or is correlated to them. Can be changed into archaiboy/girl/nonbinary/other.”[7] Synonyms: archaicgender, historiagender. Keywords: time
arithmogender. Coined by furryhell. “A number gender. It can range from any number/s, positive, negative, decimals, fractions, etc. gender can be replaced with xirl, fluid, girl, boi, nb, nonbinary, boy, enby, etc.”[8] Keywords: abstract concepts, symbols
But “arithmo” isn’t a gender. Math isn’t a gender. None of this is gender.
cosmicgender. Coined by dragon-friker. “A gender so vast and complex that you are only able to process a small bit of it at a time. like viewing the night sky through a telescope you cannot hope to see all of it at once however you may gain more knowledge about parts of it the longer you focus on one part. may contain any number of sub genders within it that may present themselves to you. it is infinite in its possibility. Name from the vast reaches of space filled with things we canot begin to imagine.”[13]Keywords: size, change, space
Now the person who has that gender is really special. Cosmic, man.
digigender. Coined by furryhell. “A digital gender. it can range from any digital thing or file; virus, malware, .txt, .mp3, anti-virus, trojan, email, etc. gender can be replaced with girl, xirl, nonbinary, nb, enby, fluid, boy, boi, etc.”[15] Keywords: abstract concepts, technology, symbols
……
……
What?
freezegender. Coined by asperdemigirl in 2014. “Similar to frostgender [which is cold and snowy], but it also encompasses other genders as well. such as a freezegirl experiencing both a cold and snowy gender but also being a female, for example.”[20] Syn. wintgender, wintegender. Keywords: nature,demigender, temperature, season, synaesthesia
frostgender. Coined by asperdemigirl in 2014. “A gender which is cold and very snowy.”[21] Keywords: temperature, nature, season, synaesthesia
This must be a joke. Except I know the people who chew their knuckles over this stuff are deadly serious – hey that could be a gender too: waytooseriousgender. It’s not a joke, it’s a kind of narcissism that is so vast and complex that you are only able to process a small bit of it at a time. like viewing the night sky through a telescope you cannot hope to see all of it at once.
jupitergender. Coined by anonymous. “When your gender is so large and present, you’re not quite sure what it is because it’s too big to see clearly but it is definitely there and you know you’re definitely not cis.”[29] Keywords: size, monogender, questioning, space
Oh well obviously. Of course you’re not cis.
You know, I keep saying I’m not cis, and people keep saying that makes me transphobic – but so why can nonbinary people say their gender is so large and present, they’re not quite sure what it is because it’s too big to see clearly but it is definitely there and they know they’re definitely not cis?
I’m genuinely baffled by that.
Hey, not everyone identifies on the conservative/liberal binary. Stop oppressing the narcissopolitical.
There you go again, thinking thoughts. There is no way that can end well.
We’re over here now. We can just ignore them.
*hugs self in glee*
Xenogender or aesthetgender?
Reading this, oddly, I was reminded of some of Groening’s larger, matrix-like Life In Hell strips. Your Guide to the Modern Creative Artistic Types, The Many Moods of Binky, and so on…
… someone should totally do that strip. The Many Genders of Binky.
Maybe they’d be right at home as fungi? Some fungi have mating strains, some only a few, some dozens. And reproduction among the mating strains can be complex. A pairs with B, but not C through Q. B pairs with A as well asF, L, and P. D can pair with any other strain, but with varying degrees of fertility. Etc., etc., etc. I don’t know how the fungi keep it all sorted out.
Maybe because they just mate and don’t have to think about gender.
Oh, ye nonexistent gods, how were such definitions inspired? And yet, egendered, meaning “Euler’s number represents the never-ending series of fractions summing to my gender” is now highly tempting, if only to give the woo-ish people who must have started us down this path math anxiety.
And somewhere in a Cambridge churchyard, the ghost of Wittgenstein rubs its* eyes, browses the internet, thinks “Oh, fuck this for a game of soldiers”, and wafts back into its grave.
*Its eyes? His eyes? Do ghosts have a sex? Are they spectrogender?
“We’re over here now. We can just ignore them.”
I’m happy for your glee, but I feel you’re not doing a great job of ignoring them.
Frankly this is starting to sound like a D&D enthusiast working on detailed rules for their half-elf half-dwarf interclassed fighter/mage/cleric.
This reminds me greatly of the furry constellation of IDENTITIES THAT MAY NEVER BE QUESTIONED. Because they identify as it, therefore that’s the end of all discussion.
Also, this keyword business reminds me of the ‘domain’ section of Dungeons and Dragons deity descriptions.
What amazes me is how much effort people seem to be putting into finding their identity(ies?) Personally, I don’t have much faith in the self, and even less in identity. I am reminded of Terry Pratchett (Witches Abroad):
Women are not discriminated against because of how they identify, or because they wear frilly skirts, but because they are the child-bearers, and for millennia controlling women’s sexuality and women’s lives was the only way to enable patrilineality. Just sayin.
You’re allowed to not be cis, as long as you have some other special misunderstood gender identity label for yourself. What you are not allowed to do is deny you have a gender identity.
When I wrote this http://moreradicalwithage.com/2014/08/04/am-i-cisgender/ I had a handful of well meaning people saying to me “it sounds like you’re agender”. Ok yeah, sure I am. But so is everybody. Everyone is agender.
sounds like we need a new edition of the Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense…
I love this idea that since something was “coined by” someone, then it must of necessity be real and taken seriously.
Let me try:
Caffeinogender: I am the gender of my coffee cup.
Most of this stuff exists as a sort of peacock-preening in Tumblr circles. You define your own made up gender and your own ludicrous pronouns and you get to go around bullying everyone if they don’t use them correctly, and it makes a huge mockery of what actual trans people in the actual real world face.
To put it more bluntly, no one ever got killed because someone found out they were arithmogender.
Or even beaten up.
Man, I wish I hadn’t missed this one.
A lot of these people are young female bodied individuals who would rather they didn’t have to be women. A little patience and empathy might not be too much to ask. After all, every generation has itsn excesses. Why, there was even a time, way way back, when some people thought gender identity was 100% socialization. Then they tried to raise that little boy as a girl and he killed himslf. Ooops!
VR, you mean David Reimer, who was raised as a boy for seven months, then, after a botched circumcision destroyed his penis, raised as a girl–and given an orchidectomy and lied to and forced to play “sexual rehearsal games”–until his mid teens, when he began identifying as a boy.
In the following years he had testosterone treatments and phalloplasty, and he married a woman, but his depression never left him. He killed himself at age 38 (not long after his twin brother, who was schizophrenic, died of a drug overdose.)
David Reimer was treated abominably, but his story is not as simple as some would have it.
Yes, I do mean the kid who was lied to and forcibly raised as a girl, whose internal gender identity reasserted itself in spite of all attempts to socialize him into being a girl when he wasn’t one.
The rest is largely irrelevant- except maybe I shouldn’t have been so flip about his later killing himself, fair enough. Unless you really, really think the seven months of being treated as a boy infant made all the difference to his subsequent gender identity? I mean, come on now, I understand that boy and girl babies are treated differently, but that reallllly seems like grasping at straws, to put such an outsized weight on the experiences of an infant. Surely individual differences in parenting styles would be too great for the idea that gender identity is formed in infancy to hold much water- even if statistically girls are held and talked to more than boys are, that doesn’t mean that a great many parents are holding and talking to their boys more than other, less demonstrative parents hold and talk to their girls, for instance.
Of course I don’t think it “made all the difference to his…gender identity.” As I’ve mentioned before, I’m agnostic on gender identity. It’s obviously complicated and poorly understood, and it may well have a biological component.
I’ll defer to people who study infant cognition, which is a lot more sophisticated than people realize. But I didn’t mean to attach outsized weight to it. Reimer’s early experience may well have contributed to his sense of gender identity, but I doubt any single variable can “make all the difference.”
What I was responding to was this:
Well, then I think you missed the point, which was only that back in the day it was relatively mainstream to believe in socilization to a degree that now seems absurd and even dangerous. Those people were written about approvingly in their day.
VR, we can’t know how “dangerous” it is, because, as I was at pains to point out, the problems with the way David was treated, and the reasons for his eventual suicide, went far beyond Money’s belief that gender is 100% socialization. (Money saw David’s misfortune as a chance to test his pet theory–always a bad sign. When scientists start using people that way, the results are rarely scientifically useful, and generally bad news for the human subjects involved.)
I responded to your glib characterization of David Reimer’s story. I don’t think I’m the one who missed the point.