#saxheel

The part of me that wants to explore gender outside of the binary cisnormative context I'm inundated with makes me hesitate to classify majja-wei as trans, intersex, or nonbinary (despite all of these being some degree of applicable within the structure we usually operate under), simply because I'm thrilled that transness is an open and innate part of argonian culture. It's a whole thing where argonian who chose to change the way they present their gender do so in a religious, ritual fashion. They go to the hist and change their name and get a rad new body and then everyone throws a big party for them when they get home.

It's great and a big part of me thinks that this rather fluid cultural and physiological role of gender would naturally encompass a vast spectrum of sex characteristics and gender identities.

While majja-wei has a mixture of what we would normally designate as male and female physiological characteristics (something that she chose for herself later in life), I'd like to think that within argonian society this, alongside her gender identity, is recognized as it's own thing outside of a male-female binary, simply because such a binary does not exist.

The very terminology used to describe nonbinary identities is indicative of the binary society they clash with, just as transness (and queerness as a whole) is used as a way to carve ourselves out a space within a hostile, cisnormative society. A society without such norms or hostility is going to have a vastly different conception of these things.

So if majja-wei lived out her life in the black marsh, there wouldn't be much to talk about, but she's in skyrim now, and skyrim is Very gendered (thanks, Todd). She defaults to female pronouns, because unlike in her native language, cyrodillic only has two widely used pronoun sets, and when asked (which happens a lot and is rarely pleasant), she defaults to calling herself a woman for convenience's sake (women are Very Good, in her less than humble opinion, and if she has to choose, it only makes sense to go with the more attractive option).