my gender experience as a lichtgender nonvirmina
Being a nonvirmina means I consider my gender identity deeply related to both femininity and masculinity, even though it's completely separate from woman and man.
In my case, this manifests when it comes to gender roles or presentation aspects that "feel right", especially when it comes to projecting myself in characters or situations, while I reject the idea of being a woman or a man because being categorized as either (or both, or in between) would make me very dysphoric. At times, my desire to express femininity and masculinity clashes, as certain aspects of these qualities are felt as incompatible with each other.
But while nonvirmina describes part of my gender experience, at some point I felt some kind of emptiness only describing my gender as such. Sure, it is feminine and masculine and not binary, but what else is there to it? Others use nonera/nonvir/nonvirmina to describe aspects of other genders, and, over time, I found myself identifying with that notion as well.
This is where being lichtgender comes in. This gender is defined as being better described as a big ball of light. And not only this felt like an accurate way to describe my gender when I reflected on how it looked like, it's also a very good metaphor for my nonbinary identity in general.
I am very much neither a woman nor a man. And, unlike some other nonbinary folks, this is very relevant to me: I don't want to settle down for nongendered wording when binary folks get to have their genders affirmed, I'm not comfortable being in women's or men's spaces beyond safety or misgendering issues, I don't want my pronouns to be the default ones for hypothetical people or mixed groups.
However, because of the connection I have with both masculinity and femininity, vocabulary such as aporagender or neutrois ends up being alienating to me: sure, these are labels that can be used by anyone with a gender that is neither woman nor man, but I feel like their intent wasn't to include any sort of connections to those genders.
Is my gender neutral? I'm not sure. My gender is aggressively not binary, but, at the same time, it's like it doesn't have many other particular qualities, and it's feminine and masculine as well, which can be kind of considered some sort of neutral state between various aspects. I only consider myself to have a single gender with multiple aspects to it as well, instead of a polygender person with a feminine gender, a masculine gender and a completely abinary gender.
Lichtgender, however, makes me able to express my gender in an inherently nonbinary way without having to commit to describing it as neutral or not neutral, or as aporine or not aporine, and so on. This is an advantage I don't see being explicitly talked about when it comes to being xenogender: it's not only about being able to talk about aspects of gender beyond the binary and proximity or opposition to it, but also about not having to position a gender or gender identity as possessing or not possessing one of those aspects.
I wouldn't be opposed to joining a community for censaris (people comfortable within the gender neutral spectrum with strong connections to both femininity and masculinity), if there was an existing one out there, for instance: it's definitely a closer experience to mine than, say, genderfluid or agender experiences. However, when it comes to communities more specific than nonbinary ones, the ones that are usually available to me end up being xenogender communities.
I coined the alibinary system (also at @alibinary) partly in response to the midbinary/abinary split, which doesn't acknowledge the differences between folks aligned to one part of the woman/man gender binary, folks who have connections to both sides of the gender binary and folks whose identities are related to binary genders but still not binary (not just many nonvirs/noneras/nonvirminas/nonangis, but also many antiwomen/antimen/antiandrogynes).
I consider myself ideobinary (my gender wouldn't be able to exist as such without women and men existing, but at the same time it is separate from those categories and should be acknowledged as such) and exobinary (I am neither a man nor a woman and feel uncomfortable with the idea that every part of my identity calls back to binary genders or aspects of those genders in some way). I think ideobinary may be a good fit for a fair amount of folks who fit into the subject of this blog, but, of course, each person knows best about whether their identities fit into any term or not.
