#trans neutral

i made a flag for black transneus. i’ve been dealin’ with hella gender shit lately, and i want to start makin’ more creative/aesthetic stuff related to gender. specifically, transneutrality.

this flag is called the “neu black” flag, fittingly labelled after my tag of the same name. i think of it as bein’ very sophisticated, it definitely look it lol.

what the colors represent:

brown: our skin

gold: our neutrality and our culture

green: our relation to the earth

these colors all wave into each other in harmony, green bein’ at the center to represent that community is in our core. gold and brown are a very deliberate choices:

gold is huge in the african diaspora because of its luxury and beauty. it’s also very neutral as it’s unisex. there’s an inherent beauty in our culture, and so i’m sure there’s an inherent beauty in our neutrality. here, blackness and neutrality cannot be separated.

brown is to represent our skin. whatever (neutral) presentations we choose for ourselves, it shall be based on a deep appreciation for the color of our skin. i chose a darker shade of brown to honor our darkskin siblin’s first and foremost, and it was the definin’ factor in how i adjusted the hue and shades of colors. i think it’s what made the flag so beautiful in the first place.

i believe we deserve something nice, something based off of earthy, soothin’ colors that appear in many black aesthetics across the diaspora.

i want to be able to live comfortably. to be able to live my life listenin’ to music. to be able to really sit back and relax like i have nothing to constantly worry about. to draw and write and sing and have it actually reflect who i am. to lay in bed or shower while whole and not fragmented. to have other black LGBTQ+ friends that understand me, and similarly to me. black transneu people, all black trans people deserve softness. but what that’s supposed to look like?

I think the worst thing about bein’ trans(neu) is how much impostor syndrome i have to the point where i can barely do the things i love. i have a huge fear of bein’ seen because i was never good enough to be gendered correctly. i felt like, because i was constantly misunderstood, misgendered, and weighed down by dysphoria, all my achievements really don’t feel big to me. i can get scholarships, stay in my NHS at school barely meetin’ requirements, be in honors, advanced, and AP everything, yet still feel like i’m nothing noteworthy. i have a college essay to write and i don’t really know what to write about because i feel like i’ve achieved nothing good enough. good enough to garner respect in my gender identity. when people say that grades don’t define you, i feel like they meant in this way too.

first, there’s the inability to conceive of genders outside of binary specificity. i tend to struggle with this too as a black transneu, as i feel like sometimes whenever i present as neutral or draw myself that way i feel too masculine. black people inherently be seen as masculine by society, so that extra layer of internalized racism make neutrality hard to easily pinpoint in myself. i should not have to forcibly binarize myself to make genderin’ myself easier.

second, it make it easier to make neutral people who see themselves as gendered out to be doin’ too much or even “recreatin’ binaries”. i cannot stress how many times ive seen neutrality (falsely attributed to as androgyny) be treated as exclusively a white, skinny, young people thing and use the social genderin’ of racialized people as a reason why neutrality is impossible or some progressive, utopian, perfectionist fantasy and that “positive” or “unbalanced” androgyny (which is just androgyny) is more realistic. they’ll try to claim regularly gendered things like clothing, pronouns, nicknames like “girl” or “dude” are actually neutral because xyz, despite us (and trans women, too, when not wantin’ to be called “dude” or “bro”) voicin’ our discomfort to be associated with those. they push their equally harmful ideas about genderlessness and agender people onto transneus: “neutral = genderless, so you must not care about gender at all! that means i can push whatever i want onto you and you can’t say anything cause you’s supposed to not care.”

lookin’ for a new name ? i gotchu.

Amari

Kamari

Jordan

Zion

Kai

Zaire

Jaylen/Jalen

Ty

Jace

Jalani