alabaster

In 1869, the journalist Karl-Maria Kertbeny coined the terms "heterosexual" and "homosexual", giving them pretty much the meaning we all know today. But few people know he also included the category "monosexual", meaning someone who doesn't want to have sex with people of either gender, only masturbation.

The sexologist Magnus Hirschfield is another figure that always comes up in the history of early LGBTQ rights advocacy. He, too, wrote about people who don't feel sexual attraction (he used the term "sexual anaesthesia") in a pamphlet in 1872.

Same with Emma Throsse, the first known woman to write scientifically about lesbianism. She's most known for her 1895 publication defending the rights of homosexual people and in particular for her writings about lesbians, but she also wrote about "asensuals". Not only that, but she goes on to mention that "the author confesses to this category", meaning that she is asensual herself. (But even now, when looking for her Wikipedia page, it only mentions that she wrote about homosexuality).

In 1897, the sexologist Christiane Leidinger made the first modern definition of "asexuality".

In 1907, the activist Carl Schlegel published a document demanding "the same laws for all intermediate parts of sexual life: homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, asexual, be legal now as they are for heterosexuals".

When the biologist and sexologist Alfred Kinsey (known as "the father of the sexual revolution") made the Kinsey scale to describe people's position in the Homosexual-Heterosexual scale (with various degrees of bisexuality), he also had to create the "Category X" for people who did not have any response that could be described as sexual attraction, because his experiments with both men and women were finding people who only fit this Category X.

he’s “demonic”, he looks “satanic”, he’s secretly controlling everything behind the scenes. he’s allegedly harming actors he doesn’t like. he has this hidden power over the workplace, over the show, over people’s careers, over the rest of the writers, over the SHOWRUNNER. he will fire fellow cast members that piss him off or are “too progressive” to his liking. and whether people intend it or not, that is not neutral language when it is being aimed at a jewish man, because this is the thing: antisemitism is not just slurs and swastikas, and a lot of the time it works through older narrative patterns. the jew as secretly powerful, the jew as manipulative, the jew as corrupting, the jew as physically marked by evil. the jew as someone who tries to appear respectable in public while supposedly pulling the strings in private. those ideas have been around for a very long time, and they do not suddenly become harmless because the people saying them are in a fandom space and think they are just “criticizing a celebrity.”

and to be clear, this doesn’t mean ashkenazi jews are never white, or that jewish celebrities can’t have white privilege, class privilege, or industry power. the point is that jewishness does not always fit neatly into the sometimes flattened american white/non-white framework we’re all familiar with. ashkenazi jews can be perceived as white, move through the world with many of the advantages of whiteness, and still be racialized through antisemitism when the context shifts. that conditional quality matters. jewishness can be treated as irrelevant when people want to talk about privilege, then suddenly become legible through conspiratorial or dehumanizing tropes when people want to construct a jewish person as dangerous.

#he gets the ​‘generic privileged white man’ rhetoric until you get a chance to use antisemitic rhetoric #i do not know noah wyle as a person and i am not trying to defend someone i dont personally know #if you want to criticize him please do it without the nazi germany rhetoric please

Because seriously, this is the ask:

Good question! also this ask led me to learn that "malgender" is actually on wiktionary now, which is really cool! shoutout to whoever made that page. i love that tumblr user penisbagelbite's really useful contribution to trans theory is out there.

You can read the post where it was coined here, and I recommend doing so as it also lists some good (although binary, & this does happen to nonbinary people) examples. The coiner defined it as:

the practice of "validating" someone's gender identity only when it can be used against them and to hurt them, and malgendering almost always involves the enforcement of only the most negative sexist stereotypes available onto the victim with none of the "positives".

i think the wiktionary definition also does a good job:

To insincerely or disparagingly gender an individual correctly, particularly to do so by referencing gender stereotypes (e.g. telling a trans man he is archetypically unhygienic).

To say it more succinctly: it is when you weaponize gendering a trans person correctly in order to hurt them by using gendered stereotypes.

also good examples! altho i wanna clarify what i meant by the examples are quite binary.

malgendering a nonbinary person means gendering them as nonbinary, in a harmful way. examples include:

A nonbinary person uses it/its pronouns, and as a result people begin treating them like it isn't a human being, being extra rude or rough with it, joking about it not being a person. They justify this by saying its pronoun preference means it doesn't really want to be a human.

A nonbinary person wants to participate in a fun activity. The activity is done in gendered groups, split between men and women. They are the only nonbinary person there. Rather than degender the groups or let them choose which group to join, they are given the option to do the activity alone or not do it at all.

A nonbinary person is an androgyne / both a man and a woman. A person insists on calling her a "he-she," the h-slur, and making comments about him being bigenital. They make jokes about her being uniquely erratic or "acting crazy" because of the combined stereotypes of "women are hormonal and irrational" and "men are hormonal and violent." All of this is presented as simply affirming their nonbinarity.

Is that malgendering, or does the person need to say eg "of course that driver is a woman, she cant drive for shit" for it to be? Or does it need to be to someones face to qualify?

It's not just about gendered stereotypes, it's about them being wielded against someone who the wielder knows/believes the victim's gender is dubious in some way. It is a way of punishing them for identifying with a certain gender by gendering them correctly but punitively. The correct gendering becomes a punishment that harms the victim, which can have the affect of making them feel unsafe in their preferred gender presentation, making the act of living as their gender identity traumatic in itself.

As a historical example, this fictional story from the 1850s depicts a young masculine child seen as a girl, who is (as a punishment) made to wear boy's clothes for a week & subjected to cruelty from their brothers. Their brothers say that "if you act like a boy, we'll treat you like one," but in practice this means physical and verbal abuse. This punishment goes on until the child breaks down under the scrutiny and dedicates themself to repressing their masculinity, because they have now come to associate their transmasculinity with being humiliated and hurt and vulnerable.

So if I had to sum that up in some characteristics of malgendering that make it distinct from harmful gender stereotypes in general:

the victim is someone who's gender/sex is perceived as dubious, suspect, or illegitimate

the perpetrator percieves that this makes the victim uniquely vulnerable to gendered stereotypes, because they do not have access to "proper" manhood or womanhood.

as a result, the perpetrator's correct gendering of them allows them to assert power over the victim by saying their gender will be validated only when their gender is portrayed as negative.

while proper gendering helps empower the gender-marginalized person by affirming that they can exist socially as their gender and be part of society, malgendering disempowers the gender-marginalized person by only allowing them to exist as a cautionary tale for their gender, or as the butt of a joke about their gender. their gendered existence in society is not in their control, and it is wielded for the benefit of others

as a social phenomenon, the ultimate goal / end point of malgendering is either detransition or suicide. while misgendering tells the person that they will never be allowed to exist in society as their gender, malgendering tells the person that existing in society as their gender will only cause them pain, isolation, and loss of autonomy; either way, the conclusion many victims come to is that they should either live as society demands they do based on their perceived sex/gender, or not live at all.