local sun worshiper

Rani

They/them, it/its, dre/drem/dris/dris/dremself, with no particular order of preference

I've often described my gender as "ranging from "meh" to "absolutely not" depending on the day," but if I'm honest, I think my gender is kind of something that looks different depending on which lens you look at it through — human or dragon. That description is accurate for the human lens — as far as human gender is concerned, I don't really have a gender, but how strongly I feel about that depends on the day. Some days it deeply bothers me to be referred to by the wrong pronouns or the wrong gender; some days I kind of don't care. My pronouns are as much playing with queering gender (and for that matter, species) expression as they are actually representative of my experience of gender. All three of my pronoun sets are fairly gender-neutral; they're essentially just what sounds and feels nice to me for some nebulous reason.

That being said, it's… I think a little different through the dragon lens. I've gone back and forth on whether to label it gender, exactly, but my species has two major groupings when it comes to behavior and particularly courting, which I've taken to calling "hoarders" and "seekers." Hoarders are the territory-keepers, stationary and stable, maintaining a territory with set boundaries and keeping a hoard of precious and beautiful items. Hoard and territory both demonstrate strength and ability to defend what belongs to you — including the ability to defend a mate and young. Part of what makes a hoard valuable is that others would want to take it; therefore, the size of the hoard demonstrates your ability to fend off threats and thieves. But even without any desire to court, the drive to own and protect the treasures your instincts tell you are beautiful and desirable is deeply instinctive, and it lends a deep satisfaction and sense of stability to have a large and beautiful hoard. Seekers, by contrast, are at least partially nomadic — if they have a territory at all, they leave it in order to seek a mate. Strength is important for all dragons, but stamina and speed are likely more important for a seeker than a hoarder, and feats of flight and hunting demonstrate their capability instead of territory and hoard.

If the level of detail I can provide on each of these categories didn't already tell you, I am a hoarder myself, a territory-keeper. It's not a very useful term for public use, considering how specific it is to my species, but more and more I've been quietly applying it to myself in my own head as a sort of gender label. It's different from how most people think of gender, entirely outside of the ideas of masculine and feminine and entirely separate from physical sex or really most things humans assign to gender roles — but I think that ultimately gender is probably the right word for it. Maybe that's even the reason that through a human lens my gender is so nothing — maybe that part of my brain is just dedicated to such a different framework that masculine-feminine-etc. just doesn't compute. Who knows, really?

Caldwell

She/her

I really don't think my experience of gender is all that interesting, to be perfectly honest, but my headmates insist that it is, so here we are.

My experience of gender has been semi-jokingly summarized as "woman out of spite" in the past. I am a cisgender woman, and I am certain of that (I spent some time questioning it in my early twenties, believe me), but in another universe perhaps twelve to eighteen inches to the left of mine, it's very likely I ended up some form of nonbinary. You see, I grew up in a very conservative, traditional English household that had very firm ideas of what I as a woman was to do with my life — namely, be courted by a proper English gentleman, marry, have children, and spend my days as a housewife caring for my family, orchestrating household staff, and organizing parties and whatnot for my gossipy neighbors.

Absolute rubbish.

I never wanted any of it. I never fit that mold — being aromantic, asexual, both sex- and romance-repulsed (likely in part because of the way my family pushed the ideas on me), and, perhaps worst of all, deeply interested in academic subjects not considered suitable for a lady of good breeding (at least not to the degree my interest took) made me quite the square peg failing to fit into the round hole my parents had carved out for me. Over and over, I was told in no uncertain terms that I was a failure of a lady, and that what I did and what I wanted were not things women do and want. I did, quite frankly, a terrible job of being a woman, as far as anyone around me was concerned.

In another world, it would have been very easy — once I got out of that environment, that is — for me to decide very well, then, I suppose I won't be a woman at all and wash my hands of the whole thing. Plenty of people have, and in another world, it might have worked for me as well. (I've even joked once or twice now about accepting "mage/magister" as a gender, and it almost may as well be, though I categorize it differently in the end.) That is not, however, what I did. Instead, I dug in my heels, snapped my teeth at every attempt to force me into that mold, and insisted, no, it is not my fault that your ideas of what a woman can be and do and mean are so small. My innate feelings of gender are not terribly strong compared to some, but they were strengthened by spite and the refusal to let others dictate what I could be and become. My refusal to allow myself to be pigeonholed into my society's idea of womanhood also became a refusal to allow the concept of a woman to be so pigeonholed, and somehow that tightened the ties between my concepts of self and gender instead of loosening them like it does for many.

(Those who know me now may be laughing a little at the idea of me bridling under the expectation to be a 'proper lady'; after all, in many ways I do still retain the etiquette and deportment that being raised to be a proper, traditional English lady gave me. I value much of it, frankly; having that etiquette at my disposal is often useful. But this is after cutting away and discarding the portions that did not serve me, and that was a process that took some time.)

So, yes: woman, partially out of spite.

Loretta

She/her/meh

I'm another cis* woman doing it weird. (*We suspect I'm also intersex back in-source, based primarily on the fact that my dragon form displays very male secondary sex characteristics (size, build, horns) despite me being apparently female in human form, but the fact remains that I was raised as a woman and did not recognize I was potentially intersex until my Linking (when I became a dragon), so, cis for all intents and purposes.) Our shorthand for my gender is "woman out of convenience" — that is, woman primarily because I was raised that way and I don't have particularly strong feelings about changing that. It's a much shorter story, really; I just… feel loosely connected to being a woman, but it's not all that important to me. I'd be more confused than anything to be gendered another way, but it probably wouldn't be terribly distressing to me, especially given time to get used to it. I just don't have very strong feelings about gender — which ostensibly legally makes me qualify for the word nonbinary, but it really is just easiest to keep going with cis woman.

Locke

He/him

And then there's me, who's not even a whole person but somehow has one of the strongest senses of gender in here. I'm a daemon, a mental construct and a part of Rani given faux autonomy; I'm a lemur, but in a much more representational way than a literal way, lacking lemur instincts or anything like that but with the lemur shape being distinctly right; and I'm… well, not quite a man (though I'll accept the word if it's handed to me), but a him, a male, a guy (masculine), distinctly masculine. I do not like other pronouns and I find it important to who I am to be a guy, which is fascinating considering early on we expected me to have less sense of gender than my daemian (considering I'm, you know, not actually a full person, and dre is). I'm also a lion on the side (in daemonism terms, my comfort form is a lion), and come to think of it, that being the very first form I took and consistently one of my most common forms might have influenced my gender being distinctly masculine but not exactly a man. Lion is as important to me and how we view me as lemur is, it's just not as important for other people to know about because it's not an analytical form — and the high sexual dimorphism lions have may well have influenced my sense of gender, I'm not sure.

Roshan

Fae/faer/faer/faers/faerself

And last up through the power of bein' the most complicated one in the system, despite bein' the reason we started this project, is me, who has a strong sense of gender but also has no good words for it. My gender is… some kind of vaguely femme thing, pink and gold and distinctly not a woman but can be easily mistaken for one from the outside if you don't know better, and maybe associated with my sun motif but maybe not. I've described it somewhat facetiously as "pink lemonade bitch" and "sun worshiper," and one of my good friends took the words right out of my mouth by describing me as "the gender equivalent of hanging out in a meadow in the sunshine" (which would've been exactly the imagery I would've applied to it if asked, and gettin' it from the outside was actually incredibly affirming and euphoric), if that tells anyone anything.

Half my problem with puttin' a name to it is that I keep struggling to separate what parts of my aesthetic desires and self-image are Mithraic and which parts are gender, and how much those things are really separate anyway (because "Mithraic" is definitely not a traditional gender, but… it is a lot of how I view myself socially, and social role is often a big part of gender). I know I had at least most of my gender situation pre-Embrace, but maybe it did get affected by the Embrace and by convertin' to Mithraism — I have no way of knowin' for sure. When a lot of gender is tied up in expression, it's hard to separate which parts of your expression desires are gender and which parts are other things, especially when I guess there's no real reason they couldn't affect each other.

The other half is that it's a very nebulous, aesthetic-ish thing and I don't know how to put words to that very well. I've looked through xenogender lists and wikis and whatnot and it's kind of given me some ideas, but not much. I've been absolutely spoiled by the alterhuman community's habit of writing experience essays, as it turns out — where are all the experience essays about gender? Sure, I can find one-sentence definitions and wiki pages, but very few seem to go into any kind of detail about the experiences of these gender words and what livin' with those genders feels like day to day. Every time I go lookin', hopin' to find someone to compare notes with, all I do is frustrate myself.

So, I guess it comes back to what it feels like, which is kind of a nebulous thing but which I at least do have some answers to, and what things hit dysphoria and euphoria for me. I already gave my best description of the general feeling of it. Fae/faer pronouns are actively euphoric, though I couldn't tell you why; the feelin' of 'em just hits right. Both sets of binary pronouns hit wrong, and I don't like they/them either, I think partly because they/them usually gets applied to me as an excuse to not use my actual pronouns. Other neopronouns might be okay, but I haven't experimented with any I can think of. Aside from pronouns, some feminine words are fine, as long as I know the person using 'em is doin' it in a genderqueer way, if that makes sense — I can be a ma'am or maybe a queen, as long as it's in a queer way, for example, but woman, girl, girlfriend, etc. are all wrong. Masculine words tend to be even more wrong; sir and dude (as a gendered word; people who use it genuinely neutrally are usually fine) feel distinctly weird no matter who they're comin' from even if they're not exactly dysphoric, and man, boy, etc. all definitely feel wrong. (Although weirdly, "king" specifically is fine?)

In terms of physical gender expression, a lot of what I like is femme or at least considered femme — shirt cuts, sometimes skirts, lots of jewelry, light and bright colors — though frankly, half of how femme I look is just the shape of my body and the fact that I don't care to change it with binders and packers and whatnot. I like bein' soft and curvy, and that's not necessarily all that feminine to me (more so than it is for, say, Rani, but still), but it does look feminine from an outside perspective, if that makes any sense, and I don't necessarily mind bein' perceived as femme as long as that doesn't necessarily mean woman.

(You see why I keep talkin' myself in circles?)

And to be frank, a lot of how I present myself is very sun-based — a lot of gold (gold jewelry, gold makeup, gold colors in clothing), a lot of sun and light-ray imagery, and even outside of that blatant stuff I feel at my best when I look at myself in the mirror and see and feel warmth and light and joy. Those are the vibes I want to put off, that's how I want people to see me and how I want to see myself. Is that gender? I'm not wholly sure, but if it's not gender exactly, then it's something close. And it is very symbolic sun vibes — a little ironic, considerin' the sun is usually associated with the masculine (even my own sun god is a man) and I tend toward the femme, but I do think it's a little silly to get too deep into assignin' human gender to a star, so I'm fine with that. So maybe some kind of sun-based xenogender is the best word for it after all — at the very least, it might be worth tryin' on. Even if it feels a little like I'm stereotypin' myself as a Mithraic. (Oh well. I was already a walkin' stereotype of a Mithraic in a lot of ways, so I guess I have nothin' to lose.)