Queering Caitlín

I recently learned the term genderflux and wow! It's so rare to find a term that feels like coming home, but for me, that is precisely what it is: home.

I've been trying on different labels for a good while now. I have been pretty settled on gender liminal [1] as a depiction of my relationship to gender, i.e. existing between states of genderedness with regard to the loci of biology, psychology, and sociology. Yet when it came to a common term to use as a self descriptor nothing felt quite right.

Nonbinary is more of a general term akin to my usage of gender liminal, making it too vague and redundant for use as a personal descriptor.

Demigirl and demienby felt like they were partitioning my experiences of genderedness and creating an hierarchy of embodiment that either places girl/woman or enby/nonbinary above the other(s).

Genderfluid implies movement, which feels right, but it is movement between two or more stable positions and the positions of woman, femme, and agender do not feel stable for me.

Genderqueer felt closer to my experience because it connects to non-normative self-expression. This works as a political identity for me because it disrupts normative thinking around false binaries and gender expression, but I find it lacks the more intimate feeling of personal gender (your mileage may vary).

Genderfuck, as with genderqueer, feels more like a political identity than a personal identity (for me). It also carries a sense of intentionality in its mixing of normative female and male characteristics. But, my movement between female, femme, and agender feels more innate than intentional.

Then I learned the term genderflux. Where genderfluid primarily centers movement between genders, and genderqueer and genderfuck speak to choices made around gender and our ability to disrupt the normative, genderflux focuses on the felt intensity of gender over time. And this, this at last, felt like home to me!

I do not experience my gender as flowing between three distinct positions:

«——<—female—>—<—femme—>—<—agender—>——»

Rather I experience my gender as three components within a unified, simultaneous whole with elements felt with greater intensity or lesser intensity across time:

(Female FEMME agender) or

(female Femme AGENDER) or

(FEMALE femme Agender)

All three are consistently present. Even when I may be feeling one with greater intensity and another with lesser intensity, they each exist in simultaneous coordination with the others.

I love how we continue to develop words for our experiences of self and our commitment to greater nuance and clarity with our language.

All of this is happening while the US government is actively targeting our community with policies that threaten our safety and existence. We can't be tearing each other apart.