#genderfeels

I want to look at some gender terms I could use. I’m getting super specific here because if I don’t, these thoughts will keep bouncing around in my head.

Some of these terms have “girl” in them. This is uncomfortable to me because I have been an adult for some time and I don’t want to be referred to as a girl (though I don’t mind being referred to as a woman). But replacing “girl” with “woman” in these would make them harder to look up.

Each bolded word technically applies in some way, and most of them have their own flags.

I have felt at least four different ways at different times:

fully female

“weakly” female

nonbinary female-aligned

other nonbinary

There are various words that could be used for each; here I’ll put the ones that have a decent chance of working.

female

By itself, this is just cisgender, because I’m AFAB and not intersex. But because I don’t always feel fully female, cis wouldn’t apply. When I do, I could be called female or a woman.

“weakly” female

There’s the term demigirl, which means being partly female and partly not, without indicating what the rest is, nor whether there’s fluidity or simultaneity.

There are other words for being partly female, including magigirl (mostly female) and nanogirl/pixelgirl (only a little female).

The amount of female I feel can vary over time, so genderflux applies. More specifically, I could use endogirl (flux but always somewhat feminine), girlflux or even demigirlflux.

nonbinary female-aligned

I’ve seen some disagreement on what the alignment concept means. Some would say it refers to having a connection to womanhood due to agab, socialization, or how others perceive you. This would hold in my case. More often, however, I see it used very loosely to mean that the person feels some unspecified connection to femaleness or femininity, which also works in my case, and is what I mean here.

Some words for genders that are nonbinary but female or feminine in some way include gxrl, xirl, lunarian, stellunarian/nebularian, femgender (if I’m allowed to use “fem”), and fingender. Demifeminine may also apply to this part.

other nonbinary

There are times when I just don’t know what gender I feel. Terms that could apply in these times include questioning and gendervague. (Edit: turns out gendervague is a neurogender, so I won’t use it.) Less-than-fully-specified nonbinary terms include genderqueer, nonbinary, and aporagender (”a gender separate from male, female, or anything in between male and female, while having a specific feeling of gender”).

the combination

What would this make me overall? Well, depending on how I divide it up, I could use bigender, trigender or quadgender, but I would probably skip to polygender or multigender.

Since I feel differently gendered at different times, I could use genderfluid. Since the amount of my gendered feelings changes also, I could use fluidflux or multiflux. Since female is pretty prominent, I could use duragender (”one gender is more identifiable, long lasting, and prominent than the other genders”). If I felt that all my genders were feminine, I could use femfluid. Since maleness/masculinity is excluded, I could use genderfae.

I could use demi- with any of these parts (e.g. demifemale, demigenderqueer).

I could also just sum it all up as nonbinary, genderqueer, or q-spec/queeric.

so...

It turns out I can run the gamut from “more or less female” to “genderqueer as in fuck you” to so-called “mogai hell” (e.g. quadgender with female, fingender, stellunarian and aporagender).

What would most easily get the main concept across to people is either nonbinary female-aligned or demifemale.

What I like the most, though, is nebularian. It includes femininity, nonbinary-ness, and vagueness. And look at the pretty muted colors!

addendum

Rejected terms:

those that reject the binary altogether (singularian, abinary)

those that are explicitly feminine-not-female or female-not-feminine or the like (juxera, nonpuella/nonera)

comfeminine (always fully feminine; could be fluid between, say, female and juxera but not demigirl, if I understand correctly)

Ironically, this is a day where my genderfeels are either neutral or absent, but either way "woman" doesn't feel like the right identifier for me today.

Today is also a day where my employer wants to get all the women in the branch together for a photo. And I just...can't. It feels dishonest. I don't want to go out there and declare "yes I am a woman and I belong in a thing that is For Women" right now, even though yesterday I'd have been fine with it. (and normally my sense of myself as NB is more gender euphoria than dysphoria, so today was Fucking Weird - like I felt super stressed and freaked out and tense and halfway between nausea and tears, and I was like "oh wait, is this what dysphoria feels like?" I occasionally get a mild version of that when someone calls me ma'am on a Not A Woman day, but it's just a quick twinge of annoyance. This was on a whole other level.)

But of course I'm not out at work (about that, anyway - I have a bi pride flag hanging beside my desk, but then that's a lot easier to explain) so everyone is trying to get me to come take the stupid picture with them. I declined, but everyone's all "whyyyy? Come on, you should!" and I just Do Not Want this to be how I out myself on the genderweirds stuff, especially since I haven't really pinned it down myself.

I did get out of the photo, just by smiling and repeatedly saying "no thanks" and just "because I don't want to" when people would ask why, but then I'm already known to be a little weird and people-shy so it didn't provoke too much comment once people were sure they weren't gonna change my mind on it.

It was just...really fucking awkward tbh and I think maybe I'm at a point where I should officially come out to at least my immediate family - I haven't even talked with Ozz about this, and mom is on Tumblr so may well have seen me posting abt it but we've never talked about it.

A lot of my issue is I don't want to deal with what I feel like are the inevitable "but then why do you still dress like a woman/wear makeup/have (sorta) long hair/etc?" questions, and being taken less seriously bc my appearance doesn't match people's expectations for my declared gender would be very hurtful and I'm genuinely afraid of that happening.

I still dress like a woman bc I'm realistic about how I look to other people - I'm very curvy and there's no universe in which I could pass as any kind of androgynous, so realistically speaking my options are "unattractive woman" or "attractive woman" and lets be honest here, there are perks to performing your perceived gender "appropriately". I have a hard enough time with my self-esteem as it is. External validation as "beautiful" is usually worth the occasional twinge that comes with the attached "woman" part of that.

Makeup is kinda the same thing, but also I think I'd still wear makeup even if I could pass as androgynous? I just really love eyeliner dammit.

So I don’t like the idea of you saying that nobody is binary. It kinda reminds me of the whole “everybody is a little bit bisexual” thing that is just… not right. Not okay. Misidentifies other people against their will. Your perspective, feelings, and experiences are not everyone’s perspectives, feelings, or experiences.

While gender and the binary are social constructs, yes, you cannot change or deny the fact that we live in a gender binary world that is built upon really only recognizing two genders and doing its best to fit everyone within those genders. That’s not right and it’s not fair and it doesn’t change the fact that either nonbinary people exist or that cultural genders that are neither binary nor nonbinary exist. 

But it also doesn’t mean that nobody is just a man or is just a woman. There certainly are binary people. We all exist on a spectrum, a gradient. I think of it a bit like a gradient color wheel. People can exist as the primary colors, as “blended colors”, as multiple colors (primary and/or blended), lack of color, or any other possibility. They can be comprised of different “colors” (aka genders) or ‘colors’ that change or flux or only partially fill them. But just because all these options exist don’t mean that solid, primary colors don’t exist or naturally occur.

What you’re talking about (or what I hope you are) is rejecting the gender binary, which is healthier than denying it exists (it exists, though it exists oppressively, though that doesn’t mean this always has to be society’s view - it wasn’t always in the past).

It’s fine to radically exist outside the binary. It’s fine to rebel against the binary. It’s fine to queer the idea of binary through your expression, labels, and descriptions.

It is not okay to label or define others for them. Especially for binary trans people, that’s really a form of misgendering, which is a form of violence against trans people.

Gender being a social construct doesn’t make it not real. It just means it is defined and described and determined by humans.

I think you might be interested in looking more into gender nonconforming, genderqueer, and genderpunk. As well, work on continuing to confront this internalized transphobia/exorsexism you seem to be struggling with and accepting that it’s okay to have genderfeels. Gender exists, even if the way society upholds it is harmful. You can rail against the system and still proudly express your own gender! Being critical of the gender binary doesn’t mean that we need to completely destroy the idea of gender itself.