hey, we really wanna get your opinion on something, cause it's actually bothering us quite a lot
our primary gender label is atrinary. this is a very integral part of our identity. but we just got told that it's a harmful label and that we should use outherine instead. but we like this label a lot and idk how to feel about this
i don't have an easy answer to this, it's not an easy topic. i'm coming from a general opinion that identity in itself has no moral weight though actions do, that broadly-speaking the collective outweighs the individual, and i'm speaking about gender in society through the basis of the Western colonial gender binary {more specifically also, Canadian and anglophone}
i suppose the most important question i can give you to chew on here is, what does atrinary mean to you? additionally, what does it feel like? what does the word describe? is your atrinary identity based primarily in experience with the label being secondary, is it based primarily in label with the experience being secondary, if either of those at all? what does trinary mean to you? what do you consider the gender trinary to be, what do you think most people consider the gender trinary to be? what, in your view, distinguishes atrinary from outherine, if anything?
given that gender arities {gender binary, gender trinary, and such} are not personal identities but rather are descriptions of how societies view, perform, and enforce gender, we do consider them stricter than personal gender identities. they are located not in the individual but in the collective, and they involve social, legal, and material elements, among others. we don't consider there to be a gender trinary, at the least not in the society we belong to. given that there is little social and legal recognition of a third gender {whatever one may consider that to be, as the answers vary} and there is social and legal punishment for deviation from the female-male binary, we firmly disagree on the notion of there being a gender trinary. we do agree that there is an unfortunately prevalent view among those who do recognize gender beyond female-male to see nonbinary as a third point in a triangle, rather than the broad, expansive umbrella that it is; we do not believe this sufficient to constitute a true gender trinary
i don't think change needs to happen instantly. i'm a firm believer that half-assing something is better than not doing it at all. i'm a firm believer in giving people time, and in teaching the same material to the same person multiple times without punishment for them needing it if relevant. that is to say, while i am personally of the opinion that the gender trinary is not a legitimate construct and that personal identity labels derived from it base themselves on an idea which is both unsound and indeed harmful {and for the explanations of this harm, i will refer to the essay Deconstructing the Gender Trinary (link)}, i also do not believe that you are causing immediate harm through self-describing as atrinary, and i don't think you're performing moral harm through this {not to a degree i'd consider detectable for lack of a better word anyway. think of it like how TicTacs are legally sugar-free despite including sugar in their manufacturing because the amount they use is underneath the minimum to be declared as sugar-using}. i encourage you to reflect on the questions i asked above, and to take your time on them. i don't think you need to rush through them, i don't think this is an emergency. introspection is a lengthy process. gender theory is complicated and often difficult to parse. if, in the end, you find yourself reaffirming the idea of a gender trinary and the concept of atrinarity as a personal identity, then you can do so knowing that you have a solid grasp of why you believe it to be so that takes into consideration the criticisms against it
tl;dr: spend some time really thinking about what gender trinary and atrinary means to you. we disagree with the idea that the gender trinary and identities derived from it are legitimate. we don't think you should be punished or feel shame for this identity. we cannot determine your gender identity for you