#aporine

I would still call it an aporagender!

[ID: Three pixel hearts of various flags in order being Aporine, Transaporine 1, Transaporine 2. End ID]

I've been having this very complicated relationship with the more neutral aspects of my gender, and lately I'm trying to find the best way to encompass that side of me with one concise and broader term. Aporagender doesn't seem to fit the way I needed it to, so I don't feel the need to use it anymore.

I still can't figure myself out! I always tell people that that's okay, that it's normal not to have everything figured out, but lately it's just causing me a lot of distress.

Something strange happened to aporagender - the gender that is not male, female, or between but with a strong and specific feeling of gender - and it has to do with what we consider to be aporagenders. By default, most neutral genders (ningenders) fall within the aporagender umbrella, minus the ambiguous or genderless genders, but I don’t believe neutrality is compatible with the aporagender experience given what I know about it and its definition.

Aporagender was coined as a response to the wrongful assumption of aliagender’s racist intent - both genders being not male, not female, and not between them or genderless. The difference seems negligible but I can’t help but notice that aliagender was meant to also lie outside of neutrality, something that I believe was intended for aporagender as well. Besides, why else would aporagender be coined to replace aliagender if it in turn wasn’t also meant to be outside of neutrality? To me, these two terms are almost interchangeable, with aliagender focusing more on otherness but otherwise the same as aporagender.

What I want to focus on for this piece is why neutrality is assumed to be an aspect of aporagender, when aporagender is meant to have a “strong and specific” abinary feeling. Why do neutrality and aporagender tend to clash in my head, while the majority of the nonbinary community seems to have agreed that neutrality is under the aporagender umbrella by default? The longer I sit with aporagender - something I once used to describe my experience with neutrality - the more critical I feel about how this is all being approached.

The definition of aporagender is as follows: It is a gender that is not male, female, or anything in between but with a strong and specific feeling of gender. Neutrality can fall within this realm of genderedness, but it's never explicitly stated in the definition - this was simply a gradual and collective decision within the nonbinary community to have neutrality included. The problem is twofold: Not all genders that are outside masculine and feminine are neutral, and genders that are not male or female are not automatically neutral. The reason I think aporagender is seen as neutrality in many cases will be explained further down.

Aporagender’s definition highlights a strong and specific gendered feeling - as in, this gender is not absent or undefined. However, neutrality doesn’t feel like it fits in here either. Neutrality is treated by the larger nonbinary community as softness, as passivity, as background noise. It’s a present aspect of one’s gender that doesn’t feel strongly gendered, because it doesn’t lean any one way toward other gendered aspects.

My personal justification for using aporagender to describe my own experience with neutrality was to say that “strong” meant that my neutrality influenced other parts of my bigender identity in an inseparable way, but my neutrality has never actually felt all that strong. It feels tied to my manhood, of course, but it doesn’t feel in-your-face present like other genders can. Neutrality for me isn’t always like this, but most of the time it is. It simply exists in the background of my bigender identity like a faint hum.

Neutrality, historically, is about positionality - in this case, no position between or within the masculine-feminine dichotomy. It has a specific usage in how we navigate gendered qualities like masculine, feminine, or androgynous. There are, of course, the non-axial qualities that don’t require any comparison to masculinity or femininity - non-axial describing genders that don’t have a reference point. Those qualities are not neutral because they don’t rely on the existence of masculine and feminine to denote their positionality. As you can see, aporagender isn’t even something that fits here because it has no statement of positionality between masculine and feminine, but instead it has no positionality within the male-female gender binary.

What I notice most about the definition of aporagender is that it does not explicitly include or exclude neutrality. Many genders that were coined around 2014 expressly denote neutrality as either part of the experience or not. Aliagender is not male, female, or neutral. Maverique is not male, female, neutral, or anything between. Ilyagender is not male, female, neutral, or anything in between or derived from such. Every one of these genders ensures that neutrality is mentioned, but aporagender seems to have been left up to interpretation - that interpretation over time being that it must include neutrality.

Tumblr user oltiel, the coiner of outherine, used aporagender as a possible example of genders with an outherine quality along with maverique and ilyagender. This would be before we had specific gender qualities to encompass non-masculine and non-feminine identities. Outherine is distinctly not neutral, while also not being masculine or feminine. This makes me think that some people originally did not see aporagender as including neutrality, especially since Vesper H. (the coiner of maverique) noticed similarities between aporagender and maverique -  maverique being a gender that is distinctly not neutral.

I suspect the assumption by others that masculine and feminine is synonymous with male and female is why many ningenders are assumed to be aporagenders by default. Because of this, people tend to assume anything outside of male/female/both is neutral, rather than keeping neutrality specific to being outside masculine/feminine/both. To many, these are similar concepts. They seem to think that male is a masculine gender and female is a feminine gender.

I’ve seen too many labels’ definitions get reworded to include masculine and feminine when originally, they’re meant to be male and female. This happened with lunarian and solarian - being reworded to mean being feminine-aligned and masculine-aligned respectively, as well as proxvir and juxera - being seen as proximally masculine and proximally feminine. This is how people are confusing masc and fem with male and female when talking about the definitions of terms. People must see aporagender as something that can include neutrality purely because it is not male, female, or both, forgetting that there are so many genders out there that are removed from the binary, but not neutral.

So where does this leave me, someone who was so sure he was aporagender because of its inclusion of both neutral and maverine aspects? Well, I don’t really feel like aporagender quite encapsulates the experience I have with neutrality anymore. That’s not to say that other people can’t see their own neutral gender as something aporagender, but aporagender leaves too much room for confusion and speculation. What I need in a gender term is where it lies within the larger sphere of abinarity, with a clear assertion of what is and isn’t included under the label.