As a bonus, murogender is supposed to at least partially defang NLOG, a term often used against neurodivergent women and also weaponized against AGAB-dissident people while misgendering them. You are NOT an internalized misogynist for experiencing alienation + murogender (to the extent we are) is probably not the default experience of gender for either cis men or cis women, people invalidating the direness of your experiences are being emotional vampires.
Not that this kind of sentiment is unique or specific to the perception that people want to detach themselves from womanhood — I am nonbinary + cis man, and before I made peace with my AGAB, people also used to say I only claim nonbinary to dodge reflecting on my privilege, and they mocked the concept that gender could be anything but a benefit with the ever so odd inconvenience to people deemed male by society.
As if most cis men feel forcibly compelled to reckon with their male privilege at all, as if people took "male-read DMAB nonbinary people aren't privileged" (this is not a statement/discourse) very seriously even in the trans community, and as if being a cis man is necessarily always the experience of being a celebrated jock that just comes naturally and that you could only feel good about.
I would definitely be murogender even if I wasn't nonbinary, and maybe I am only nonbinary because I was always (~age 5, at least) very muroboy*. Or, I don't know where one thing begins and the other starts, which is part of why I claim both nonbinary and cis man.
* {I don't consider myself gender nonconforming. You would guess I am LGBTQIA now that I am 30 and don't give "nextdoor dad/working man", but not necessarily so when I was 18. My voice is very ambiguous, but more so boyish (girlish at the phone or in recordings, but not irl).
I knew that I liked boys in a way that was deemed atypical at 7, knew that people would be up in arms about it at 10, but only realized this fully meant I am bi and ~queer~ at 13 (before I was 12, I kinda thought gays and lesbians were trans people who were too poor or too scared to transition, and that me being 'a dog' [bi] meant I wasn't a mean, picky trans-amorous person towards the gay men who were also all potential trans girls, but still fully a man [straight and adjacent] myself... people in Brazil often contrasted gays with men), which promptly made me come out (as you can see, I have the type of ADHD that makes you yap), but this was a brave decision. It's tiresome that people keep degendering gay and bi men, like... we fought in Troy, we fought for Thebes, we fought for Alexander, we were samurai. /j
I don't relate to the kind of oppression experienced by men perceived as sissies + transfem sissies, people just sissyzone all kind and nice boys and all bi and gay men, but effeminacy is not really my situation. I am abinary and too autistic to try to binary, but GNC feels like it should be about femininity when discussing people like me, and I never really felt feminine.
To explicitly state it, I am not invalidating people who are GNC and all over the spectrum of gender of course, it's just that another thing people claim in Brazil is that "nonbinary is afeminada erasure". I was never an afem, in fact even while I fully claimed non-man, my gender was still closer to hegemonic man than to afem. But if you know anything about gender norms, it is that in order to embody them, you need to commit yourself to it, and as an auDHD person I am quick to reach a limit and draw a boundary.
Nonbinary felt comfortable because it came with a baggage of stereotypes that fit me way better than those associated with afems. Plus, it was still the woods here when I first came. GNC, as much as some people find it less dumb than nonbinary and explicitly try to erase us with it, to me really sounds like people believe you can only be a man, an afem (or a butch) or a woman. It's particularly dumb coming from other Brazilians. If you understand that travestis can be different from trans women, you can understand there's something other than afem between hegemonic manhood and being transfem.
I like murogender because it could make people think of "GNC" in a more "oh, like autistic people struggling to fit in" (gender in the way society is societying is not a language they feel comfortable with) way as opposed to "oh they're afem/tomboy" (they give 💅/💪). And it's explicitly made to include cis people since many are so quick to try to dismiss the possibility that nonbinary people have our own sort of separate qualia regarding gender. "Oh but perfectly average cis men and cis women have those issues too" This label is also for them!
And if you're a potential cis muroguy or murochick reading this, please don't feel like I am only including you to own the exorsexists. This consideration was always part of my sentiment. Like, one could easily identify I am autistic from the way I feel like a giant boy that happens to have reached 30, as opposed to a man. I am not making this up, one of my internet friends from Facebook says I speak Portuguese with the same diction (dexterity and energy of intonation) as an 8-year-old (and I don't have issues "feeling like an adult", it's just something that gets brought up).
And the man thing was something I always genuinely rejected growing up, because it would be like becoming an entirely different person who is not me, and then if I started to look like a man, they would expect that from me, and to me it would be like getting misgendered. Even before my teens, I thought it was really silly how everyone told us we needed to do things to "grow big and strong"... Why would I want to resemble random men more than my mom or grandma? But maybe people who are like me in almost all regards never had that particular chip on their shoulder, but somehow I am a gender minority and they are not... It feels arbitrary. And I didn't want to turn into a woman like my mom, I just wanted a grown up version of myself, which I felt very strongly would and should be [somewhat] distinct from being a man.
When I first came out as nonbinary in 2013 (age 18) by being presented with the concept,£ I came out as demiboy, but in 2014 I navigated towards just claiming the abinary, genderfluid and pangender parts of my gender since people implicitly or explicitly deemed DMAB demiboys "a cis NLOG inviting themselves in and appropriating a concept and struggle that's not theirs".
And this is ridiculous. Nonbinary encompasses the whole spectrum of having beef with the Western gender binary because it feels like it cannot accurately represent who you are. Through the course of my 20s I started feeling more comfortable being honest with others about my own manhood.£
(I wasn't disingenuous about it, my [googlable + quite outdated] 2018 gender equation has stuff like "proxvir", "oblimasculine", "exiccopostboy". But I feel like it detracts from me being a DUDE dude.
Cis people they/themmed me [not my pronouns — he/him here — but idrc] even when they hated me, which felt surreal but also driven by the consensus created by other nonbinary people that others must respect us. And I was unsure if they did that genuinely or because it was the PC thing to do.
But they didn't need to. I can handle people in their honest forms just fine. I can talk to people where they are as both a very inclu MOGAI coiner and as a performatively masculine cis man. My own way to handle my murogender means I always expect other people's views of gender as a language barrier that I will try to diplomatically overcome.
It's distinct from the way most trans people/most other nonbinary people perceive misgendering as a violence. I didn't like the accusations and twisting of my words from exorsexists I encountered though, of course, and until 2019/age 24 THAT made me dysphoric [more so in an RSD way than gender dysphoria way... I don't think I experienced gender dysphoria outside of ages 13-19]. But I am cis because I can see where other people are coming from in the way they see me.)
£ (I was also never disingenuous because I used to really be so nonbinary and muroboy that I was trans. [Again, this is not a statement on what trans is, just the way I interpret it to label myself] I had been telling people I wanted to stay androgynous and to grow long hair and dye it purple ever since I was 13 in 2008, but it wasn't taken very seriously and no one really understood why that was such a sore point for me, even though I did already relate that to transness the following year, and my worst dysphoria year was 2011.
But as soon as I had the language to express myself properly, the shards were expelled, the wounds healed themselves, I witnessed all the discourse from the perspective of a non-cis person and as a non-man, and I often tried to bridge things and clarify how my own experience was atypical... And I was often too 'meh' to feel like the hurt was my own... So, paradoxically, being openly nonbinary in progressive and leftist spaces was the thing that hegemonic male socialization couldn't do, turn me into a cis man.)
Anyway, back to the point, maybe murogender can help drive the point home that nonbinary shouldn't be a hierarchy or a competition, as murogender identifies an even greater commonality between almost all of us than gender nonconformity, dysphoria, the possibility of getting misgendered, so on.}