Okay, so, you may have heard, there's this word out there. It is a word that a person named H A Burnham coined back in 1995, and it seems to be a word that a lot of unbinary people have decided it is a word that fits their identity. That word is 'Neutrois'; you have men, you have women, you have androgynes, and you have neutrois, apparently. It's great that so many people have found a word to identify with, yay for them! However, the other day, i stumbled on a thread on Asexuality.org's forums asking what the difference was between 'agendered' and 'Neutrois', which seemed to consist almost entirely of people who were neither agendered nor Neutrois opining about the definitions of both. The consensus seemed to be that Neutrois experience bodily dysphoria and may wish to transition, whereas agendered people simply do not care what gender people regard them as and completely dismiss the entire concept of gender as it applies to their person.
So, basically, Neutrois are a type of transfolk, and agendered people might fit in very well with one of my favorite asofterworld comics. Right? Uh... wait what?
i have never identified with the word 'Neutrois'. To me, it is still defining itself by the binary. Men are men, women are women, androgynes have aspsects of both, Neutrois have aspects of neither.
i don't want to define myself as 'not-man, not-woman'. i am my own thing. i know there are other people like me, so i'm not some sort of special indeterminable thing that nobody else could understand ever. It's not that i dismiss gender; it's that i dismiss conventional gender and everything that has to do with it, and even then only for myself. i recognize and respect the genders of others. i do not think that 'abolishing gender' is a good idea. i do experience dysphoria, pretty severe dysphoria actually, and if there was a safe and legal way for me to physically transition i would. My presentation might sometimes be read as masculine, sometimes as feminine, but i am neither.
i used to call myself 'gender-neutral' or 'genderless' or 'null-gendered', but the first is clunky, the second is still somewhat applicable but not my preference, and the third is both equally clunky as the first AND implies a removal of gender; once i had it but now i've been nullified. i'm not sure on my feelings on the last one. But 'agendered', to me, is shorthand for 'a-binary-gender'. Not man, not woman, not on the 'spectrum' of man and woman, not even in the same solar system as man and woman. i am othergendered. My ideal sex, honestly, would be 'robot'. Binary does not compute!
If gender is not a spectrum but a constellation, then i see and respect your Earth genders, but i hail from a different galaxy - one where we have a lot more options than just 'masculine' or 'feminine'. There aren't any English words for my gender, so i just say 'agender' and leave it at that, and explain it better to people who ask politely. After all, who gets all invested in and bothered about what 'man' means to the masculine-presenting person walking past? It's a man, it's a him, labelled and passed by. Unless you're trying to get into my pants, you just need a label and some pronouns and you're good to go, yes?
Besides, i really just don't like the sound or look of the word 'Neutrois'. It's like nails on a chalkboard to me, no clue why. And really, a big part of being comfortable with my trans identity is that i don't let other people cover me in labels and sticky-notes. i am non-stick! i am the Teflon of genders. i get to decide what label i'm most comfortable with, and if other people call me something else, well, it just slides right off.
No comments:
Post a Comment