aceofenbies

[aceofenbies]

as someone who's nonbinary, bi AND ace, it can be really startling to suddenly be visible in june after being completely invisible the rest of the year. that's why this queer pride month, i'm happy to announce my partnership with the romulan empire, promoting their cloaking device.

[aceofenbies]

me, an ace who has sex, taking the "whatever the fuck you want" to the next level

no but really, allos hear these phrases and then use our own intracommunity stuff against us. this reminds me of when in transgender spaces we say pronouns don't equal gender and then the cisgenders come in and use that phrase to justify misgendering people.

The sentences "Asexuals can still have sex" and "Aromantics can still date" need to go up on the high shelf for everyone except aces and aros talking about their own experiences. From now on, everyone else has to use the revolutionary new phrase "Asexuals and aromantics can do whatever the fuck they want forever."

[aceofenbies]

i relate to not feeling "queer enough", not specifically about pride parades because they aren't really a queers only event.

i actually made a post a while ago how i often feel like all my queer identities are "debatable": i'm an enby who hasn't medically transitioned, an ace who has sex, a bi who's only been with one gender and a demiromantic who... exists. all of this could be argued out of existence and people have tried to do that a lot.

nonetheless i'm here and i'm queer.

and so are you.

no matter how people see you, you are what nonbinary looks like and you add to the diversity of our community.

aromanticism is a real and queer identity and i know for a fact if you went to a pride parade and made yourself at least a tiny bit visible as an aro, it would mean a lot to other aros there. i went to my first pride parade last year and i saw a few ace flags and i would have been so thrilled if i'd seen an aro one too because it's one of the least visible queer identities.

besides. people at pride parades are too busy marching, singing, shouting, holding their signs to worry about who is "queer enough" or who is queer at all. last year there were of course many people with flags but also many people who were dressed "normally" where you couldn't tell if they were qeeer or what their identity was - and it didn't matter. i was there in the moment being part of something bigger and i feel like most people there probably felt the same. i went with my partner who does not identity as queer and no one cared. not to liken nonbinarity and aromanticism to not being queer - just that if they accept nonqueer people at pride, they will accept actual queer people even more.

so if you feel safe to go i'd encourage you to go! if you make yourself visible as nonbinary and aromantic (again, you don't owe this to anyone), it would make people feel seen. i certainly did when i saw so many nonbinary people of all shapes and sizes last year.

you don't have to be gay to be queer. you belong at pride.

has anyone ever felt not “queer enough” for pride. my friend invited me to a pride parade for tomorrow and i would definitely join them but idk if its right for me to do so.

despite identifying as non-binary and aromantic i sometimes feel like im not really queer enough to be part of the community.

on the outside i look like a cis girl and in truth i am not “gay enough”. but i still want to go cause this is something i know my friend cares about and she’s sweet enough to always consider me part of the community and wants to have this experience of marching with me besides her.

not to long ago, i talked about my professor in intercultural experiences and i gently mentioned about how my identity is very “small” to be represented and so i sometimes dont manage to put myself out there in society cause im still viewed as a girl and of course barely anyone understands what being aromantic is.

but she told me that i should accept more my identity so that i could be able to not only have relationships with others but with myself too.

so idk. im trying to find anyone who is able to relate so that i could have a piece of mind…

[aceofenbies]

sorry for the awkward question, but is your name still delta or did that change around the same time as when you switched from ve/ver to they/them? sorry, i only just realized youre the same person who ran the blog soong-type-delta a while back asdfhdlgj

yes, my name is still Delta (now legally too!). i was actually the-delta-quadrant for a long time too but i can't keep a username for long.

(also not that weird of a question at all)

[aceofenbies]

(they/them)

[aceofenbies]

i love going to my queer meetups and have more than half be transgender/nonbinary and be one of three aces (that i know of) in the room like wow 😭

like it's not always the exact same people going every time but i'm never the only enby and since finding out another person is ace i'm pretty much never the only ace either and especially that means so much like 😭

[aceofenbies]

"pride becomes before the fall"

you telling me june and july come before september? wow i would have never guessed that

[aceofenbies]

you know how there's all these poll accounts floating around? i'd love for there to be accounts for like... more in depth questions for certain identities because some of the shit i want to ask is not fit for a poll and i deeply love learning about my communities, and others.

[aceofenbies]

[aceofenbies]

not even half of 1st june is over and i'm already seeing people call it "gay month", i hate it here.

i don't care if it's a joke because a) queer exclusionism isn't a funny joke, b) the centring of allo, cisgender, perisex gay people has already happened at pride and is still happening, we do not need to bring it back and c) there are currently active movements working to exclude anything after the B from the community, do you really think playing into that by calling it "gay month" is a good idea.

my nonbinarity, my bi-ness, my aceness, my demiromanticism all deserve to be seen and celebrated this month (and all year), not flattened into a term that doesn't include me whatsoever. queer people don't constantly need to be measured against the most visible in our community. my queerness is not and will never be about "how gay i am".

[aceofenbies]

growing up disabled is wild.

i met someone today who i last met when i was young enough to not remember her. literally the first thing she said to me was "i always felt so bad for you because you had to have so many eye surgeries."

past a certain age i was aware that i was "the disabled one", but it's truly jarring to realise as an adult that you were always just the one with the fucked up eyes basically since you were born; your one defining feature was your low vision.

so defining that's all they'll remember of you, while people expect you to remember someone from when you were 2.

the older i get and the less often i see these random people from "my" life, especially since i moved countries, the weirder it gets. great aunts and old neighbours never asking me "how are you?", "what are you doing with your life?" or even "how are you eyes doing?", but only asking "are your eyes still that bad?"

no. i actually lost half my remaining vision 10 years ago from a fucked up surgery. but you don't actually care. you want to pity the poor crip and have something to gossip about. now leave me alone or i'll whip you with my cane.

to only be defined by and known for something "bad" is bizarre. to get pity to your face and judgement behind your back from such a young age is absolutely wild.

[aceofenbies]

a note on using different languages:

don't just find a random word in another language and use that. this would cause multiple problems:

the word becomes kind of unusable in its original language. for example, someone has coined the term "mädchen" for a feminine abinary gender. "Mädchen" is just the german word for "girl", so if a german were to want to use this label their only option is to just say they're a girl, or explain their gender anyway, which defeats the purpose of a single-word label. the masculine counterpart "Herrlein" has a similar issue, it's a diminutive of "gentleman" in german, so if you said you're a Herrlein, people would just assume it's a very silly way of saying you're a man.

finding resources will become very hard or pretty much impossible. try googling "mädchen gender" and see what happens.

it's impossible to account for every language's words, but i would very much recommend altering the word you're borrowing a bit, and staying away from the words for binary genders in that language (yes, even if your term relates to a binary gender - just stick to a concept or object you associate with it instead).

Some Advice for Gender Neolabel Coiners

Here are some pointers for those of you who are interested in coining new gender labels!

1. Keep it simple. You don’t have to mash up four to five different parts of words all into one to make a word that fits all aspects of your new term’s definition. You can simplify it to keep it short, or you can include non-gendered concepts like nature or space or mythological creatures. This is very common when people create systems of gender terms. Keeping terms accessible and easy to remember is very important!

2. Start in a place of familiarity. A good way to start coining labels is to come up with some new terms based on your own personal experience with gender. You can combine different aspects of your identity into one term and give it a solid definition. If you’ve always wished there was a word for your gender, try making one for yourself!

3. Look at other languages. A lot of the English language consists of Latin and Greek root words. This is a good place to start when coming up with new terminology because it’s what we’ve always done. Try looking up “Latin word for X” or “X in Greek” (X is the descriptive word you’re trying to use in your new term.) You can also use other languages as a basis for coining terms - French, Hungarian, German, Portuguese, whichever!

4. Make sure someone hasn’t already coined that term. There are a lot of people in the neolabel community and because of that, there are a lot of terms out there that describe many different experiences with gender. Take a look online or on social media to see if someone already came up with a term. You can also ask your peers if the label you’re trying to coin already exists. While it’s great to have many different flags for the same term, it’s way easier when we don’t have the same kind of label being coined by multiple sources.

4. Try making flags for your terms. It’s nice when a new label has a flag for it, especially when it fits the term in color and theme. If you want to try your hand at flag making, start with making them for terms you created yourself. Try not to overthink the colors or make the flag too complicated to reproduce - you want to keep things accessible!

6. Dabble in the abstract. There are many terms for fluid, masculine, feminine, static, void, and neutral genders out there. There are plenty of terms that combine these ideas together. It might feel like it’s hard to make a unique term that someone hasn’t already thought of. Try, instead, to come up with a word to describe an abstract feeling of gender. Common themes include celestial bodies, plants, animals, mythical creatures, elements, weather, and many others.

7. Keep a database of your terms. Archiving information is how you keep queer history alive. Find a place to put all of your newly created terms and allow others to have an easy way to find them. This is how we learn when terms were coined and what kinds of terms someone has coined. It’s almost like writing yourself into the queer history books, even if you feel like you play a very small part in them. Your part is still important!

Now go make some cool new terms!

- Your Bigender Big Brother 💙💚

[aceofenbies]

hii new moot!! scrolled through ur blog a bit and i love what u post! hope u have a great day :3

you've probably explained/answered this on your blog, but i wanna ask how you explain your gender and what your labels mean to you!! since your blog seems very focused on your nonbinary identity i figured i'd invite you to share about it :]

hi! i'm the person behind @themaveriqueagenda btw, which is why i followed from this account.

i'm maverique, nonbinary, transgender/transambiguous, other-aligned.

if i had to describe it without words, i'd also use a colour metaphor; if male is blue and female is pink, i am yellow. if male is in one corner of the room i'm in and female is in the other, i am somewhere in space with the stars. i am an equal distance away from both binary genders.

my gender is loud and usually impossible to ignore. the only way for me not to think about my gender is if something else is louder. it's loud because it's screaming at binary classification, because it's essentially the opposite of binary gender. my gender is like someone dressed flamboyantly and colourfully, standing out of the more quietly dressed crowd. it's so far from what is considered "normal" that it's impossible for me not to perceive it, even if just out of the corner of my eye. my gender is bright and loud also because of the constant reminders that it shouldn't exist. none of this is something i actively do, they feel like inherent qualities of my gender.

when these words are too much, i am neither. "neither" has been with me ever since i've come out, it gets the point across easily without getting into details that aren't relevant in many situations.

i didn't transition away from my AGAB to get closer to the other binary gender, i transitioned into a different direction entirely. if binary transition is going from A to B, i am not going to B, i am not even going in the general direction of B, i am not somewhere along the road towards B. i am probably going to Ü, a letter most people won't think about when they think about the alphabet, in the same way most people won't think of my gender when they hear "transgender".

my ideal gender expression would result in people being confused about my gender or at least being read as both binary genders in somewhat equal amounts, which is the "best" option i can expect in our current society. i want to be confiding in my way, not in a "blending both binary genders" way. they may or may not look the same to outsiders, but the difference matters to me as one misgenders me and the other does not. since my gender is unconventional, unrecognised and unknown, it's impossible for me to figure out a gender expression specifically for my gender. but at the end of the day, no matter how i present, my gender expression is always going to be my gender. i reclaim things from the gender binary and make them my own, sucking every last binary bit out of it. ultimately i present how i want to present, and people will perceive me however they will perceive me. this tends to be very dysphoria-inducing, always having to choose between at least somewhat being seen for who i am and compromising on my own self-expression, and presenting however i want and maybe decreasing the likelihood of being gendered correctly. either way, what gives me gender euphoria is reclaiming bits and pieces of what people think is binary expression and mixing it up with my own weirdness.

i am by no means "unaligned". i feel the most in community with people who have genders that are not related to the binary, and to an extent with those who don't have a gender.

[aceofenbies]

queerness is liminality, friend (⁠◠⁠‿⁠・⁠)⁠—♡ being in a space of both being something and existing only along the fringes of it can feel incredibly isolating, but I find that trying to force myself into classification boxes so that people can mistakingly think they see me is sharp and uncomfortable, and I find it particularly hypocritical when somebody who has already been forced out of cishet/allo bubbles tries to invalidate somebody for being not the exact same as them. Finding similar people is rare, but it is possible. You are deeply you, you don't conform to others' ideas of you, and that is overwhelmingly queer. ♡

💜💜💜

[aceofenbies]

sometimes the internalised oppression creeps in and my whole queer identity feels entirely debatable.

i'm transgender nonbinary but i haven't medically transitioned.

i'm asexual but i have and like sex.

i'm bi but i've only had a crush on one person, my attraction is neither romantic nor sexual and nothing i care to act on.

i'm demiromantic but i'm also traumatised, my pattern of romantic attraction consists of one person and overall it doesn't feel all that important to me.

every other "afab" nonbinary person who's also not medically transitioning i'm seeing is dating or has dated women, nonbinary people or trans men, i've been with a straight cis man since before i came out. many are femmes. and those who aren't are masc.

most aces i see online are sex-averse or repulsed.

many bi women and nonbinary people i see do the "i'm attracted to all women and one man" thing.

i know i don't need it, but sometimes it feels like there is no "proof" behind any of my queer identities. they're all too liminal, not this or that, not queer enough, too queer.

i feel alone. i hardly really see people like me, even in just one of these aspects. it doesn't seem to be what's pushed online. and in terms of my offline queer meetup i started going to, we're not quite close enough to share all the depths of our queerness but so far i don't know of anyone who is like me.

maybe it's because other queer people have used all of this in the past to paint me as not really queer and just a "cishet invader", maybe it's something else.

i don't know. i'm tired of being alone.

[aceofenbies]

i've already watched a video where you talked about this and related quite a bit as someone who disidentifies with the concept of sex in general.

bigots will say i'm denying the reality of my body and my biology, but it's really just about what i call it and how i conceptualise it. "i'm nonbinary, thus my body is nonbinary" sums it up for me. i see ideas about this more often in german-speaking radical trans spaces, probably in part because the word for sex and gender is the same, and people are pushing back against the idea of "biological gender"/using gendered terms for people's bodies. i used to see many jokes similar to this: "a man in a woman's body? which poor woman's body did i steal?" to point out the ridiculousness of this concept when forced upon us.

also, more often than not, people treat sex like the gender of the body (or vice versa: gender as "brain sex"), using the exact same words they use for gender for sex, which is how we end up with things like "they identify as nonbinary but are biologically female" or "she's a biological man but transitioned to a woman".

and this is where i check out. if crip theory has taught me anything, it's that the body and the mind aren't separate entities. i refuse to gender my body differently than... well, me. it just doesn't make sense to me. my body is my body, so it doesn't have a different gender than me. you can say female or woman are sex terms all you want but that doesn't remove the gendered associations, nor does it make it not misgendering. i am a single, whole nonbinary bodymind. my boobs are nonbinary, my vag is nonbinary, my period is nonbinary. all of my so-called sex characteristics are as nonbinary as my toenails, my eyes, my brain.

my gender has both nothing and everything to do with my body: nothing because one is not determined by the other, everything because this body is the vessel my gender lives in.

maybe it's the (binary) genderedness people talk about sex with, maybe it's being defined by body parts, maybe it's not wanting to use many body parts the way nature intended them, or maybe it's being confused by society turning a set of random characteristics into a supposedly coherent identity - but something about identifying as any sex feels deeply uncomfortable to me. even non-misgendering terms like müllerian and wolffian would be mocked and/or just converted back into misgendering anyway. i don't vibe with altersex either. the closest descriptor i'd use at all is quoisex but i still don't use it because i disidentify with sex way too much to even use a label to describe that disidentification. the only sex term i'll use is perisex, only to describe privilege i hold over intersex people, nothing more.

if i want to talk about my body, i'll just talk about my body. if i want to talk about my uterus i'll talk about my uterus. if i want to talk about my boobs i'll talk about my boobs. i don't need a sex label for that. i don't need a word to try to create a coherent identity out of random body parts and functions i happen to share with some other people.

(on a side note: i keep going back and forth about using the term ftx, in a "this is where i come from" way", in a "i transitioned from living as female to nonbinary" way, but i know people would just misinterpret as me changing genders, medical transition or my fucking nonexistent sex.)

i said it before and i'll say it again: "biological" means "relating to living organisms". i'm a living breathing nonbinary person. i am biologically nonbinary.

My Sex is Nonbinary Too (an essay)

My sex is of a nonbinary quality. This shouldn't be a very radical statement, but sex is as heavily binarized as gender is and there are certain expectations society has about sex. Your sex has to be either male or female, and whatever happens outside of that rule is treated as an anomaly. You're expected to fall into one of these two categories and in order to move away from the very strict box you were placed in, you'd have to undergo a physical change in order to fit the opposite category. At birth, you're female, and you'll stay that way until you make the difficult decision to get surgery. Now you're male. You’re assigned male at birth and are assumed to be of the male sex. That is, of course, unless you get that surgery to change it all. It's so very linear and conventional, and quite frankly misses so many nuances to the human experience.

My gender is who I am and is intrinsically tied to most other aspects of my identity. I'm a transgender man, I'm a nonbinary man, I'm an autistic man, I'm a man of many talents. No matter how my identity shifts and expands, the same gender is always present. Gender is inevitably relevant no matter which part of me I'm talking about because it gets tangled up in all the other pieces of me, and I don't see why that can't be true for the physical parts of me. My body is a part of my identity experience because it is a part of me.

Of course, I consider this a man's body no matter how I was supposedly born or what I choose to do with it. I call my body a man's body out of a need to take control over an event - an assigned gender at birth - that I did not consent to and that doesn't fully describe my relationship with gender accurately. As for sex, this is a highly intimate part of me that has been medicalized and binarized against my will just as much as the rest of my body, but bodies aren't meant to be policed in this way. Bodies are not meant to be at the mercy of medical biases.

My gender is not a medical anomaly nor anything that derives from physical limitations. I’m not a man because of what my body does, but because of how I view my role in society and how I subvert what society expects of me. For others, they may be a man (or another gender) because they want to fill a specific role in society rather than subvert it. Either way, this is what makes a gender and not what doctors assign to us based on perceived physiology. Likewise, my sex should not be placed under the scrutiny of doctors just so they can call it what they want based on their personal biases and my sex should not be relevant to what is expected of me in society. The sex binary is a construct that I've happily broken away from just as much as the gender binary.

Sex has always been a concept that was forced on me: It determines “what's in your pants” (according to cisgender and transgender people alike) and there are two categories that trans people have to fall into. People have this viewpoint that gender and sex are separate, but somehow they bastardized that concept into the idea that your sex is immutable but your gender is not. I've been told by both trans and cis people, both allies and bigots, that I will always be female because that's what my sex is called. In order to change that, I would need extensive surgery and hormone replacement therapy, according to them. Even so, we are often assumed to always be the sex we were assigned no matter what we do.

I don't subscribe to the sex binary in any way. While my gender has some overlap with the gender binary, my sex is a different thing altogether. I refuse to give my sex a binarist label and even reject sex-related terminology that is typically expected in the trans community: I don't talk about my AGAB, I refuse to call myself “FtM” or “MtF”, and I don't call my sex male or female. No matter what my physiology is, I consider my sex to be of a nonbinary quality, existing outside of the sex binary and being unable to be contained within the typical allotted binary boxes we're often expected to fit into. As someone who is transmaverine - maverine being a quality outside of pre-existing governance - I exist outside the governance of bodily convention.

When I began to really be aware of all the intricacies of my identity and all the pieces that make my gender what it is, I looked into how binarism limits my self-identification. As I grew to understand myself more and more over time, I began to shed all the baggage that comes with conformity and convention. Eventually I landed on the topic of sex. Whether we want it to or not, sex plays a huge role in gender exploration, and it's often expected that we either have a sex that matches our gender or that we subvert sex linearly (that is, we move along a straight path from assigned sex to a new sex.) None of this was ever appealing to me as a concept and so, instead of playing a part in this performance, I decided to reject it altogether.

Some folks are of the male sex, some are female, some consider themselves to be in-between, and some are null of sex. Many of these concepts are physical in nature and have a defined blueprint, which is what society expects from all people. But I don't feel like any of these terms accurately capture how I view my sex and I don't believe that changing my physiology is the only way to gain access to a nonbinary sex. If my gender can be man without having to change myself on a physical level, then my sex can be nonbinary in quite the same way. Nobody should have to undergo costly and stressful surgeries just to be seen as who they truly are.

There's a particular term that was always thrown my way whenever I brought up the idea of having a nonbinary sex. That term is altersex. It's a word for those who wish to change their sex to something unconventional or who view their sex in a way that does not fit societal standards. For a while I had assumed that the desire to physically transition was a prerequisite for altersex people to use the term, that there had to be some kind of physical change planned in order to fit the label, but apparently the definition was expanded early on to include those who simply viewed their sex in a nonconforming way. Still, this term goes out of its way to separate itself from gender labels, but I prefer to use a label to describe my sex that is typically used to describe gender. I don't see my sex as something incompatible with my nonbinary gender and I don’t believe my gender and my sex should use entirely separate and distinct descriptors. I call my sex nonbinary and I think that it would benefit a lot of trans and nonbinary people if they tried to do the same. Try to say “I am a man and this is a man's body, therefore my sex is male,” or “I am nonbinary and this is a nonbinary body, therefore my sex is nonbinary.” This can work for any kind of gender, really.

Of course, there are dozens of labels out there that can describe sex in nonconforming ways - neumel (neutral sex), aporale (aporine sex), oumel (outherine sex), enbinmel (nonbinary sex) - and a number of them may come pretty close to describing exactly the way I view my sex. Enbinmel is right there as a word for having a nonbinary sex, so why don’t I choose this one? To me, it’s empowering to use a term that is typically used to describe gender to describe sex instead. It’s a way for me to queer sex with the same aggressive nonconformity with which I queer gender, to say “fuck you” to all convention and label myself on my own terms, even if it makes no sense to most people.

That’s really the struggle right now: Trying to help make sense of nonbinary sex for people who view sex as a physiological two-part model, because I can see myself having to explain that my nonbinary sex doesn’t have a specific “look” and that it’s just what I call my sex. I call myself bigender, which in turn also doesn’t “look” like anything. I call myself a man, neutrois, transmaverine, and none of these things have a “look.” But people tend to hold on to the material and seem to prefer some kind of visual evidence of gender. Masculine is masculine and feminine is feminine. To some, nonbinarity should have some kind of visual signifier so that they can wrap their heads around the concept. The problem is that gender is not that simple and while sex may be assigned based on specific observed traits, it’s not that simple either.

To those folks, I say: Gender is a construct that is entirely mental and traditionally, there may be some kind of perceived aesthetic that matches or subverts specific genders, but it’s otherwise more flexible than traditionalists tend to view it. Sex is something assigned based on biases and can pave the way for how we are raised and what is expected of us in society. We can call our sexes whatever we want and we can choose to break away from our assignment if it means living a more authentic life. Sex, gender, and many other aspects of our identities are very personal and it really shouldn’t concern others how we choose to navigate these concepts. It often feels like all of society is an oppressive force of conformity with few options for exploration. Many of us choose to look at all the options forced upon us and simply say “no thank you!” or “not applicable!”

I never talked much about my physical transition goals in videos or blog posts and the older I get, the less inclined I am to do so. I don't need a specific transition plan in mind just to convince others to view my labels as valid and I'm sure as hell not shelling out money for a surgery that can “perfectly” encompass all the many facets of my gender. Few nonbinary people even have access to nonbinary options for surgery because of the heavily binarized medical field and the expectation for sex to be of two distinct physiological categories. This is why being able to call our genders and our sexes what we want, both equally, is far more beneficial to our individual journeys of self-exploration. We are valid because we are self-identified.

[aceofenbies]

if you're a bus driver and you see someone with a white cane at a bus stop, you stop, even if they're not waving you down. you will NOT drive past someone waiting at a bus stop who is making themself visible as a blind person.

If you take the bus, wave to the driver and thank them as you're getting off the bus.

Being a bus driver is an underappreciated and difficult job but still very vital to society. They still have to do customer service and deal with rude and even aggressive passengers, and on top of that have to deal with traffic and other drivers all day (and let's face it, there's a lot of bad drivers out there who aren't considerate about sharing the road). All while providing an invaluable service of getting us where we need to go. Showing them some appreciation can go a long ways for someone doing such an important job that usually gets little to no recognition or thanks.