My xeno gender + Neo pronoun manifesto
Ok so, a lot of people(understandably) don’t really get neos/xenos. It’s super complicated, different for everyone, and there’s not a lot of us around anyways. It feels like most people’s (including mine) first exposure to the community is usually phramed in a “woah look at how wirrd this is!” Type setting that doesn’t explore why we do what we do. Also this is an ask based blog, questions are extremely welcome!
I first should define what xeno genders and Neo pronouns even are.
Xeno genders: genders that fall outside of how we traditionally think of gender. It’s a way of thinking that rejects femininity and masculinity in its traditional forms, and is often neglected all together.
Neo pronouns: pronouns that are not she, he, or they. It pronouns are kinda on the cusp simply because they are not typically affirm in to most people and are therefore unconventional in their own right.
I got involved in xenogenders after i accepted myself as trans. It took me a long time, and a lot of that was due to my very self-distructive veiw of lables.
See, the last time I’d had to do lable searching was when I was 12 years old and trying to figure out if I was lesbain, bi, pan, etc.
I had an extremely restrictive veiw of sexuality labels, and I agonized if I was really attracted to boys or not. Same with nonbinary people. I, being 12 and stupid, thoight that bi and pan were extremely districtive lables and that if I was attracted to NBs I couldn’t be bi. Not to mention, I thought that nonbinary even had a “look” in the first place.
Somehow, i concluded I was bi. And I still use that label to this day. Even though I’m attracted to NBs. lol. But it wasn’t easy to get to that point. I had daily meltdowns where I destroyed my room and would then do the humiliating work of picking everything up while sniffling. It wasn’t healthy.
But I was 16 at the point I was finally ready to question my gender. I felt myself slipping into old habits almsot immediately. But I thankfully had the self awarness at this point to stop and think clearly about what I was doing.
With someone who has enough negitive momentum surrounding lable searching like I do, I can’t exactly expect all of this to go painlessly. But I also don’t have to activly make it worse for myself. I realzied that I believed I needed to find my “lable soulmate” and that I should not allow myself to rest until I find the one true lable.
So instead I decided to passivly watch my gender as neutirally as I possibly could. Without trying to name it anything, just watching.
I learned that I felt very masculine at that point, but alos that I noticed fluidity in both my gender and gender presentation. But what suprized(and scared) me was how it was fluid. It coincided with the barometric pressure. I didn’t want to believe it. I knew what it would mean for me if it was true. I knew I’d be lonly, misunderstood, and might never find a word to describe how I feel. So I kept watching my gender “move.” Sometiems I wouldn’t even notice the pressure would change, just that my gender did. And my dad(has seasonal depression) would casually comment on the shift. Fuck.
I should probably mention now that I have quite a few conditions that are affected by the pressure too. And my others are of course impacted by my other disorders acting up so…I’m no stranger to feeling majorly off kilter when it rains or something. It also made sense how I never noticed my fluidity, I was always caught up with my symptoms. And dysphoria, I mean, it just felt like a miscellaneous symptom that could be from anything.
I’d been admiring xenogenders from afar for a couple years at that point…and I decided to take a look. I mean, my gender is already weird , right? It might as well be weird in a good way. On my terms. In any case, I felt so disconnected from the trans community at large due to my disabilities and odd gender and felt much more at home with the xeno gender ppl I saw online. That’s typical for me. I never really got along with normal people, and I’m ok with taht. Mostly.
I flourished. For the first time, lable searching wasn’t toruture. I was crying. I was throwing things. I wasn’t hating myself. For the first time I felt JOY doing this. It became a fun pass time looking at different flags, noticing the Latin roots tin lable names(I love Latin), it was like window shopping but I could have everything I wanted. There is no limit. No consept of “soul labels,” in fact its commen hoard even hundreds of genders.
I felt true freedom in my identity for the first time. I got to have whatever happened to speak to me in that moment and it hardly even felt like the choise. Or at least enough of a choice to trigger my terrible decision paralysis. It was truly amazing to experience. No lable had all the power in my identity, in fact power wasn’t even the point. Just words that feel good. Flags too, they were the biggest deciding factor. Suddenly it felt like my dyslexia was accommodated in a conversation I had never realized it wasn’t.
Suddenly I veiwed genders not as attempting to articulate consepts in ways I’d never otherwise articulate them, and were put into MY language. Metaphor. Colors. Tastes. Feelings. Memories. Ideals. All the abstract goings ons in my mind no longer needed to be translated. They could simply just “be.”
Metaphor is probably my favorite aspect of xenogenders. It’s how I best express myself. Ever sense I was 3 I had to explain medically impossible symptoms to docters who had no idea what I was talking about. So i used metaphor. Over and over and over. And now, I can’t imagine not using metaphor. About anything. I struggle not to use them. And now I had a place to use them.
The genders I chose to hoard can be found here but they mostly boil down to:
Fairy + pagen + nature themed
The endless combinations of boy, girl, and nonbinary that may incidentally fit me due to my fluidity
For reason #1, this is segnifigant because both my birth first and middle name are light/sun related and I always strongly identified with them before I stopped repressing my dysphoria.
Also, the sun is often used as a symbol of divine masculine. I really like that because it is masculinity without the consepts of physical bodies or my current gender identity getting in the way. It’s just…masculine. In complete, beautiful isolation.
I would also like to say that, after coming out as transgender to my fellow spirtual cirlce, a commen response is that we are all beings of light. And, to be honest, when someoen asks my gender I wish I could just say “I am a being of light.”
For reason #2, it is of course related to my faith as well. Turns out, when you tell a bunch of tree hugging hippies that your gender changes based on one of the Earth cycles, they will treat you as if you were graced with a rare gift. I have also been told that it brings me closer to the faries and nature. I mean thsi genuinely when i say that the spiritual ppl in my neck of the woods are more accepting than the LGBTQ community. No discorce, no need to justify anything, etc. just love, man.
And, well, I think reaosn #3 is pretty self explanatory. My fluidity is much less of a light swtich between “boy” and “girl” but more like a constantly changing gender blob that lazily makes its way across multiple gender territories at a time to various extremes.
Now on to the Neo pronouns!
So I use one set of Neo pronouns, jusr fae/faer. I won’t reiterate my connection to fae, but I do have another reason I connect with fae/faer.
It was actually the reason I started using them in the first place. See, when I was in fourth grade, I discovered the wonderful world of gay ships. As in, male x male. Me, convinced I was just a girl, had no idea why I was drawn to them. But I was completely obsessed. It turns out that attraction hits the same as hyperfixation. So I jsut assumed it was hyperfixaiton, not a budding attraction to men that was inherently queer. As well as a strong connection to the effeminate, shy, characters that were always swept off their feet by strong masculine ones.
My intrest in twinks and effeminate men was always sort of curious to me. Because I had no…intentions? I was drawn to them but not because I wanted to kiss them or date them or anything like that. When I was finally exploring my gender I realized that I wanted to BE them. I saw my pre hrt self in those fem guys and I was floored by how sought after they were by the other male love interest. Their gender nonconformity was not seen as weird but as an inherent plus. And their awkwardness was seen as cute, not weird either. Yes, I was the wierd kid. Moving on.
So, anyways. I found that I was drawn to fae/faer because I felt that it honored my gender’s inharent connection to being a queer man without necessarily needing my current gender to line up with it. Because, at the end of the day, gay romance shaped my gender development in a huge way. And that influence on my life won’t vanish the second I stop being a boy.
Before I go, I want to dispel a commen misconception. People often assume that we demand others use our Neopronouns. And I want to come out and say we don’t. Because you know what? Most of us are mentally disabled. And if there is anyone who understands just who difficult learning a new skill is, it’s us. We don’t expect others to use them at all. And any small effort is seen as a miricle to us. So please, if you feel like being extra nice, go for it! But you don’t have to. 99% of us will have at least one set of conventional pronouns you can use instead.
Hope this cleared some things up! And as I said questions are incouraged!
