On xenogenders and neopronouns
Added 2024-12-10 04:48:34 +0000 UTCDipped my toes into some meaningless twitter discourse and got inspired to make a short second channel video about it. it's available to you now, but it goes public tomorrow.
Fear not. I am not condemning xenogenders or neopronouns. As you'll hear in the video, my qualm is with the hypothetical idea of centering xenogenders in trans activism. I don't think xenogenders/neopronouns are politically effective or radical enough to be a key part of a queer movement.
But ultimately I think this xeno and neo shit is a small small subset of LGBTQ+ communities. They're a marginalized group that are easy to blame. In the face of transphobia, some trans people want an easy scapegoat so that we don't have to deal with the reality that some people just hate us. Conservatives would hate us with or without xenogenders. So what do we do in the face of that? What role do xenogenders play, if any?
Comments
From what I've seen in my Xenogender friends, pronouns are the gender technology they have the most immediate control over. Like one friend is struggling to get insurance to approve finasteride (to treat middle-age hair loss) but it costs $0 to request "meow" pronouns. Now from my outside perspective I have to hear mew explain mew's pronouns over and over again till I wish meow would shut up about it already, whereas I get a medical update maybe once every few months. On the flip side, we all wish my father would stop telling everyone he meets about his medical history, while his pronouns are never in question. I guess the lesson here is that the greatest crime against society is that of inconveniencing others. /sarcasm/ Even having "they" pronouns, I had to make a choice between making myself smaller or making every communication subtly related to how politicized I am. It's obvious the xenogenders aren't the start of the problem and they're far from the end of it.
Leaf
2024-12-11 00:44:06 +0000 UTCIn my experience a lot of conflicts have arisen from someone finding a label, identity strongly with it, take it on as their own, as them, as their personality. But then say that anyone slightly different cannot use that label. As widening the label would in their optics change them, if a label is what fully describes themself. Even if a community has used the label for a decade to mean something specific, I have seen people come in, take on a label and try to redefine it with aggressive passion. Labels can indeed help, they helped me. But when people identify with one so strongly that they feel ownership to exclude others from it, conflicts arise. Luckily I have mainly seen this in people under 30, but I have now seen it destroy several communities with in-fighting over who can or cannot use a label. Labels can both help and destroy
Patreon Supporter
2024-12-10 22:20:27 +0000 UTCTwo things: I get the distinction between access to physical technologies (hormones) vs linguistic ones (pronouns). But I'm also not sure they are completely separable. I'm on HRT for ex, but my physical form does not pass. Here the linguistic battle matters and can't be justified or supported by the physiological one. Same for people who are not currently undergoing medical transition but who want social recognition. And the the other point is that in the absence of oppression people use microlabels all the time. Someone talking to a metalhead might say they play a specific subgenre of music, while if they talk to a classical musician they might say they play rock. And we decide on the fly how granular to get. It is the existence of oppression that makes this fluidity hard with gender microlabels... because even if they are used within communities that understand them, outsiders will weaponized it against the whole community. Its like using the existence of black-doom, blackened death-doom, and death doom on Wikipedia to invalidate the whole category of metal music. 😑
Hope Jasentuliyana
2024-12-10 18:57:31 +0000 UTCGreat video!! That's the type of content I most enjoy from you. The way you are able to succinctly articulate social constructs that are formed around material realities and the distance that exists between those two things is admirable
Not a Lady Maria, She-Bear of the Global South
2024-12-10 11:36:01 +0000 UTCThat gynecomastia point hits different.
Antonio Sarcevic
2024-12-10 08:27:01 +0000 UTCI’ll also leave the term “hermeneutical justice” here as well. I feel that it may be relevant, somewhat.
Unproductiveness
2024-12-10 05:27:29 +0000 UTCI don’t quite have the energy to watch the video right now, but here’s my two-cents: Xenogenders are, for the most part, microlabels used to further articulate gendered experience. They are surprisingly useful when the more common macrolabels (man, woman, enby, etc.) describe one’s experience _somewhat_ but not fully. That… seems perfectly fine. I don’t understand those who have issues with that. On neopronouns, I have little to say. It’s a pronoun. To get angry over that would be as reasonable as getting angry over a verb or a noun. All things said, the targeting of those who use xenogenders as a form of self-description is, to be honest, nonsense. It’s attempting to placate the right (read: conservatives, the alt-right, other such groups) by culling our in-groups of “undesirable” people, those who aren’t tolerably queer. It’s a warped self-defense mechanism, cannibalizing ourselves because MAYBE, just maybe, we’ll be accepted and allowed to live our lives if we become _normal_ in the eyes of the right.
Unproductiveness
2024-12-10 05:21:22 +0000 UTCi can’t believe we’re still litigating this stuff 😭 i expect your take to be a helpful one tho
Lily Alexandre
2024-12-10 04:49:52 +0000 UTC
