Do you have any resources or tips on avoiding pericisnormative language?
My 15 main tips would be:
1- Don't call any presentation inherently feminine or masculine. It all depends on culture and personal interpretation, especially since a lot of presentations (neutrality, nullity, xeninity, certain forms of outherinity, aporinity, etc) don't have any "traditional" appearances/gender roles due to severe erasure.
2- Don't call any sex traits inherently feminine or masculine.
3- Use androgenizing instead of "masculinizing", estrogenizing instead of "feminizing", and androestrogenizing instead of "androgynous."
4- Don't use "female" and "male" when referencing sex traits.
5- Use actual words for anatomy instead of "female anatomy" and "male anatomy", because not all perisex people have the same anatomy, and intersex people can have the same anatomy as a perisex person. Say mullerian duct (or the individual parts, such as cervix, uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, etc), wolffian duct (or the individual parts, such as testicles, vas deferens, seminal vesicles, prostate,) ambiguous reproductive duct (or individual parts also seen in mullerian ducts and wolffian ducts), ovotestes, vulva (or individual parts, such as labia minora, labia majora, clitoris, vagina, urethra,) penis (or individual parts, such as scrotum, phallus, urethra), urogenital sinus, cloaca, ambiguous genitalia (or individual parts, such as clitorophallus, labioscrotum, or previously listed traits also seen in vulvas and penises), breasts, increased muscle mass, thickened vocal cords, etc.
5- Integrate person/people who menstruates, person/people capable of pregnancy, person/people capable of ovulation, person/people capable of sperm production, SPETA, SPETE, SETA, SETE, SETAE, and SWPE [link] into your vocabulary.
6- Don't equate SPETE to AFAB and SPETA to AMAB, as intersex people can be AFAB/AMAB (and cultural genders that do not follow AGAB exist even for perisex people.) Remember that AGAB is just a single letter/word on a birth certificate, and doesn't reflect how many intersex people are actually raised and/or reassigned a gender later in life.
7- Say "natal sex traits" (for sex traits people developed during fetal development or puberty) and "altered sex traits" (for sex traits people developed from HRT or surgery). Do not say "natural sex traits" or "artificial sex traits."
8- Don't forget about cistrans and detransitioning/retransitioning people, pericisgender =/= "kept their natal sex traits."
9- Don't use the intersexist h-slur or fu-slur. Also learn the difference [link] between perisex, cosexual, dualsex, and intersex.
10- Be cautious in how you use terms like "passing", because a lot of it relies on the idea that you can "tell" who is trans or cis, and who is perisex and intersex. Read more on that here [link.]
11- Don't call non-binary people "they/thems", as it's depersonalizing and not all non-binary people use they/them (and not all binary men use he/him, and not all binary women use she/her.) Use the terms enban/enby (singular), enben/enbies (plural), or even just "non-binary people."
12- Remember that man =/= binary man, woman =\= binary woman, and that non-binary people can be aligned with manhood and womanhood.
13- Remember transfem and transmasc =/= trans man and trans women, and that feminine genders unaligned with womanhood and masculine genders unaligned with manhood exist. Also don't forget people who are androgynous, neutral, null, genderless, xenine, outherine, aporine, multigender, multitransitional, or unlabeled/unaligned.
14- Remember transfem =/= AMAB and transmasc =/= AFAB. People could be transitioning from binary womanhood to nonbinary femininity, binary manhood to nonbinary masculinity, be intersex and/or perisex with a cultural gender/sex and have an experience that isn't "aligned" with their AGAB, be plural with innerworld experiences that aren't "aligned" with their AGAB, etc.
15- Don't label every single non-binary relationship as sapphic or achillean (and don't use the terms yuri/yaoi unless they are woman-aligned or man-aligned, as the terms are used synonymously with "girl love" and "boy love.") Use enby-specific terms sometimes (you can find some here [link]). Some enbies identify as sapphic/achillean, but the problem is that a lot of enbies don't want to use those terms, so labelling every single relationship with an enban as sapphic/achillean contributes to the erasure of enban-specific terminology.
