#binary gender system

[micahthemoon]

Summer 2024

Case Study: being my own representation

The last two weeks of July I was at my yearly visit to a summer camp/school. I love being here. Obviously, since it’s now my ninth year in a row. And this year marked the first where we’re more than one transgender person both weeks of the camp (two transmasculine people the first week and one transmasc and one transfemme in week two)!

I remember one morning where the transman teacher told us about his transition. I felt so seen that I cried. After the presentation I went to hug him, thanking him with tears running down my cheeks. While this place has been my safe space for years, this was the first time I had been able to mirror my transgender experience so clearly within these walls.

However, being the minority in a tight knit community (if only for a few weeks) also meant that I got the spotlight on me a lot more than I’m used to. While passing outside of the summer camp, I’d been open about my transgender identity from day one at camp, which in turn invited people to ask all their curious questions.

I got quite a handful of the old classics:  What was my name before? How far did I want to go with my transition? Which way am I trans?

However, I also ended up having to be an advocate in other ways, I didn’t particularly sign up for: I had to explain to people why we’re still trans even if there are parts of us that doesn’t fit into the norm (the other transman being short for instance), reminding people not to misgender the teachers (the two other transgender people were teachers) and also explain how me dressing feminine has nothing to do with my identity since gender expression and gender identity are separate.

The third way I was being an advocate by just existing was something I only realized when I said goodbye to this one lady and she cried while thanking me: meeting me six days prior she admitted having dreaded being on the same course as me due to internal prejudice yet after getting to know me, she now had experienced that we – transgender people – are just as much human as anybody else.

Honestly, I feel awkward being somebody’s example of how a transperson are “human”, yet if the fact that I am present and open with people like this a few days make it so there are less bigoted people in the world I guess I’m okay with it.

[cloudinal]

Marluxia doodle hehe

[vatt1vv]

I’m being a hater real quick. You trans women sy truthers have your fun I too enjoy imagining sy with tits…. HOWEVER it’s way too simple a solution to sy’s gender weirdness. He has way too much of a complicated relationship with gender for it to simply be ‘Teehee estrogen would save him’ break free from the gender binary embrace genderqueer sy

[nonbinarynow]

Gender creativity and gender creatives will never not be beautiful in my opinion. I feel that xenogenderism, systems such as the galactic alignment system and the creation of new ways for enben to describe ourselves both in and out of relation to the binary is the forefront of queer gender abolitionism and individual binary deconstruction. It's wonderful to see that we are taking metaphors for gender, just like binary people, but we are running wild with them. It's queering gender, it's removing the seriousness of it, it's wholly enbiness. It's fully binary nonconforming. That is what being gender queer is all about.

[nenehyuuchiha]

I've been reading a lot of Shen Jiu centric fanfics lately and I'm happy that we all agreed that there's something non cis going on with him.

Like just look at this diva

[finnslay]

Remember kids,

We're a system, not a cistem.

[squirrelwrangler]

What is Wheel of Time about

Book or TV show?

The book series is 14 very thick fantasy novels with a very large cast (of which when broken down has more named female characters than male) and multiple plot lines. It helped to inspire A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones - but it is far less bleak and has way less sexual violence (a easy accomplishment). If you’re also familiar with the Dune movies/tv shows and Lord of the Rings, you’ll also see parallels. And like a lot of fantasy it has SF elements. And if you like Dreamworlds and Alternative Realities and glimpses of the past and such, yeah. Written in the 90s by an old cis straight white guy, but one that was in many ways progressive for his time, so your mileage will vary. There’s a post that answers almost exactly this same question that I wrote years ago that goes into this a little more.

But what is it actually about? It’s called Wheel of Time because the central premise is the world operates as a long circle of time with narrative-driven reincarnation. The book/show world is both the inspiration of all of our real world legends and our far far future after magic is discovered thousands of years in the future and a few calamities have leveled it. What that means is there’s a lot of Easter Eggs and familiarities if you know your mythology, in particular Arthuriana. For instance, a character hangs from a tree and sacrifices an eye to gain knowledge, has a pair of ravens symbolically important, and their personality is also very trickster-like. At no point are they called Odin, but if you know Norse Mythology, you go “oh yeah this guy inspires stories about Odin or is his reincarnation”. There’s a lot of vague Jungian and Vedic inspiration if you can’t tell.

Okay, really.

3,000 years ago was a high-tech peaceful society where some people could do magic and thus worked as public servants, very utopian. But then Evil Personified was unsealed, monsters and war unleashed, some of the wizards turned evil, long war was fought. One of the most powerful wizards, a man nicknamed Dragon, seals away both the Dark One and the top evil henchmen wizards - but it was a patch job. Evil monsters still around, people still pledge loyalty to cause evil. And as a counterattack during the sealing, the Dark One is able to place a sickness on the male half of the Power which forces every male wizard then and in the future to go mad. In their madness they destroy the world. Thousands of haywire magical nukes would do that. Female side of wizard Power is still okay, so only female wizards left. They help rebuild the world; societies that re-emerge are thus far more matriarchal than the real world. Men would can use magic are hunted down before they can go mad and start hurting themselves and others. People are understandably Terrified of Male Wizards. Only female wizards allowed. These female Aes Sedai, their Wizard Vatican City, and their factions are a large portion of the plot of both book and tv show. Do you want to see a lot of middle-aged women in gorgeous costumes fighting with magic and scheming? This is the show for you.

So, 3,000 years later, the Pattern that controls-and is created by- the Wheel of Time (lot of weaving and loom metaphor in the metaphysics) decides that the Dragon needs to be reincarnated along with a couple other key people in order to have another Last Battle against the Dark One to hopefully start a new turn of the Wheel/new age (and on evil’s side here’s the chance to reset things in their favor or break the Wheel itself).

Moiraine, an Aes Sedai, learns through a prophecy that the Dragon has just been reborn, so she spends the next twenty years trying to find them before evil does. There’s a long list of accumulated prophecies about the Last Battle and the people and events around it people are also worried about. Lot of plotting as everyone thinks they have the best idea of how to do it. Again, in comparison to Game of Thrones where almost everyone was scheming to win the Iron Throne and ignoring the White Walker invasion, think of it as here all the rulers know about the White Walkers coming and they’re fighting wars with each other to be the one to lead armies against the White Walkers because only their plan will work.

A common joke is that this very very long book series would be much shorter if characters properly talked and coordinated with each other. Teamwork is a central theme (both when you have it and when you don’t).

In an isolated community (think The Shire but instead of hobbits it’s a bunch of tax dodging Appalachian hillbillies or Elizabethan yeoman) Moiraine finds five young people that the Pattern has singled out as Very Powerful Main Characters. Okay, she thinks, one of them is the Dragon Reborn.

Problem is, none of them want to do the Magic Quest Protagonist Plot Stuff; they know that sucks. Moiraine has to get them to do it anyway. Our Gandalf figure is a middle aged queer woman (with a strictly platonic soulmate bodyguard) who has trouble with sharing the whole truth to other people (she is magically forbidden from outright lying) stuck herding a bunch of cats named Rand, Mat, Perrin, and Egwene. And later Nynaeve. By the end of book one/season one we know (but the rest of the world doesn’t) who the Dragon Reborn is - and that they need their friends and others by their side to have a chance of winning the Last Battle. All of them are main characters. Yes, the Dragon Reborn is Main Character- but more than one book in those 14 has barely any page-time dedicated to them. Plot is a Tapestry; not a line. That’s the least spoilerly explanation that I can give.

The tv show is about to start season three in a week (which will be mostly plot from book four, arguably the best book). Each season is eight episodes. Covid and recasting issues meant that the finale of season one had to be reworked and the first book was always the weakest with an infamously weird/weak ending. The show obviously had to change a lot form the monster book series, but it has imho the spirit of the books and often improved them. The casting is diverse- properly so instead of just tokenism- which pissed off a lot of racist fans. That and changes from books and that the main showrunner is a gay man means that there’s a vocal online faction of haters. My two main fantasy series, formative in fact, are Wheel of Time and the Silmarillion/Tolkien. I ADORE the Wheel of Time tv show but I could barely watch any of Rings of Power. Make of that what you will.

Hopefully, anon, this was helpful.

[clannfearrunt]

set of images completely unrelated to anything that actually matters. anyways Thresher would have been one of those students that coast along on mostly A's despite not appearing to ever do fucking anything at all and they would have pissed Rill off forever and ever

[micahthemoon]

Summer 2024

The duality of passing pt. 1: Am I a Guy?

Since starting HRT I‘ve noticed that I pass more and more as a guy. And to be fair I have complicated feelings about this. On one hand I love it! Being gendered as a man means that in this rigid binary society I’m not being seen as a woman, which is all I ever wanted! I’m pretty much never being called ‘maam’, ‘lady’ or ‘girl’ anymore even in my most feminine attires.

However, there’s a ‘but’ and not the fun kind.

You see I’m not really a guy. I am transmasc nonbinary meaning while I do lean (some days very much so) masculine, I’ve never really felt 100% like a dude. Yet for most of society these nuances are confusing. So I’m called a guy even on days when my inner sense of gender leans towards the genderless (these days will any form of recognition of a gendered presence seem wrong).

Maybe this is some sort of internal transphobia speaking. Maybe I’m still not fully at home seeing myself as masculine. The back and forth between wanting to be called a guy and finding it strange can be exhausting. Yet really this is a minor inconvenience compared to pre-t where I’d be misgendered frequently.

So there’ll be days it gives me gender euphoria to be called Sir – like when I shopped for work shoes for my new internship or when Käärijä saw me and pointed me out in the crowd. Other days? Idk – it’s not as bad as being called a girl but it just feels not entirely right either.

[balticisstrange]

hey question for non-binary umbrella homestuck fans:

when classpecting for yourself, do you guys just not take into account gender-specific titles (edit for clarification: and allow yourself to be any of the 12 classes)? Because that's what I've been doing but I'm just curious to see how other enby homestuck fans account for that. Or do you just lock yourself to only the non-gendered classes?

[distractionactivated]

You know what is really getting me about the current moment in the UK? Among all the other things that are really getting me, that is. It's that the trans community is being forced to roll back the arguments we use and leave behind language and battles we were making headway on, and now I read article after article, by trans people, that never even mention the fact that non-binary people a) exist, b) are trans and c) are affected by the whole dealio that's going down.

[prismatoxic]

when i scroll through the fyp tumblr shows me a lot of things i am actually interested in, which is nice. algorithm functioning as intended. one of the things it shows me is posts about transmasculine oppression, since that's a topic i engage with often enough.

most of the time these are posts i agree with. (every so often it's some freak pinning all our issues on transfems, and they get instantly blocked.) i reblog some, or at least add them to my queue, but more than that i check the notes. this is for two reasons:

it makes me happy to see people agreeing with the topic. for so long i felt alone in how i felt about our place in society, quietly backed down when people dismissed us. it's real! other people see it too! it's very validating.

free blocklist if any transradfems engaged with the post

on any post with more than 300 notes, there's usually someone in the replies or reblogs causing a scene. i have blocked a LOT of people over this stuff. and it's genuinely, mindbogglingly bizarre how many of them casually and unquestioningly approach the entire topic as if "trans men face unique oppression" is also saying "trans women don't".

basically just this, over and over again. and this is a serious argument for some reason

[indigenous-gender]

If you were wondering why many lesbians of color are fighting back against identity policing and rightfully calling it out as white supremacy, it is because this rhetoric is dangerous, harmful, and antithetical to our liberation. Invalidating lesbian manhood is rooted in antiBlackness and antiIndigeneity. Excluding lesbians of color for our race and culture is colonization in action. Excluding trans lesbians of color for our cultural gender and sexuality and for being trans in a way that subverts colonial gender systems is racist and transphobic. here is a fantastic article that talks about African gender and sexuality and highlights the existence of male lesbians or lesbian men. As an Indigenous person of triracial descent, I am proud of my Indigenous cultural gender and sexuality, and I will not allow white supremacists and queer assimilationists to erasure the history and cultures of my ancestors. Male lesbians and lesbian men are STILL HERE. We are proudly Black, Brown, and Indigenous! This is our tradition!

https://africasacountry.com/2014/03/africa-has-always-been-more-queer-than-generally-acknowledged

[cedarspiced]

i will be honest. if you water down the whole concept of the terms TMA vs TME as 'penis havers vs vagina havers' all it shows is that you fundamentally misunderstand each of these terms.

[cannifreak]

TMASCLESS

- : a gender where you feel connected to being transmasculine & non-binary , but genderless at the same time . . . requested by a deactivated account ? ?

- : flag and term coined by me . . . give credit if reposted . . .

[chaoticrei]

Hello everyone, this is just a friendly reminder that, since there is no binary system, I don't see why we should want a body which is the expression of it. For example: I don't want to be neither a girl nor a boy, so why should my body be female or male? And also remember that there is no trinary system either. It's not: male, female, nonbinary. There are people who feel like both male and female, people who feel partly female/male and partly nonbinary and so on. There are people who don't care about fitting in your stupid boxes, because it's not about cis or not cis. Gender is a spectrum, don't act like giving three options is inclusive, because it's not. It's a step in the right direction and I appreciate it, but remember that gender doesn't work like that.