a personal zine about gender, nonhumanity and a little bit of liomoqai (it's all linked, anyway)
Finally getting comfortable with my identity as a genderless yet also xenogender nonhuman; my gender and nonhumanity are inextricably linked.
Tagging @radiomogai because I think it also archives experience posts, and @alterhuman-art as I'd like this to be reblogged there.
Thank you so much @soporine for making a term I identify with so deeply.
[Transcript/ID:
A zine with 9 pages, all off-white with black text, typically in a monospace font with a white background, but sometimes in quotations, larger with a serif font and also with a white background
i've spent a lot of time trying to figure out my gender.
(in doodled thought bubbles) am i a boy? am i a girl?
(next to doodled symbols) nonbinary, genderfluid, transmasc, demigirl
all words i've used to describe myself at some point in my life.
i got myself in a rut about it
introspecting, introspecting, introspecting.
i started looking into the core of it
(circled) "But what is gender, anyway?"
i didn't know the answer.
(next to handwritten and crossed out she/her, he/him, they/them) "Gender is the pronouns you use"
but gender doesn't equal pronouns. but pronoun non-conforming people exist.
"Gender is the way you present yourself to others"
but gender non-conforming people exist. but closeted trans people are still trans.
"Gender is what you want your body to look like"
but what about trans people that don't medically transition?
but what about nonbinary and genderqueer identities that don't have a base for the gendered body?
(cut off) but what about-
so gender doesn't mean anything?
"Guess you'll have to define gender for yourself the way it is for you"
(handwritten and crossed out who am i, anyway? drawing of anthro cat facing away)
(cut off) "Let's start with some questions, then-
"What pronouns do you want to use?"
(next to handwritten and crossed out there are more pronouns than just he, she and they?) i don't really know, nothing feels quite right.
"How do you want to present, to be percieved by others?"
i don't really care, people percieve me as whatever they want regardless of what i think, anyway
i don't put effort into presenting myself in any particular way.
"What would you want your ideal body to look like?"
i mean, i guess, i guess
does it have to be (underlined) human?
i think i'd want to be a cat.
does that count? does that count as 'gender'?
i've been identifying with 'xenogenders' as metaphors, ideas
just describing feelings i'm not sure are gendered feelings at all
does this count? this feels more certain than a metaphor
i mean if we're talking about animals,
they don't have gender, this human (repeated, underlined) social construct
(next to drawing of cat facing away, tail overlapping text) they're just flesh and blood and instincts and biology
can i be that too? nonhuman? all the way down to gender?
(handwritten and crossed out 'it/its is dehumanising!' isn't that the point?)
i got deeper into the liomoqai community, the alterhuman community, too
i found terms, genderNH, kingender, acreaturic
(acreaturic is circled, the arrow leads to the text) "a label for when you are just a creature/being, perhaps with no concept of gender, and simply pretending to be a certain gender for fun."
that makes sense. gender is so meaningless to me.
i don't think cats are a fan of gender, really
i think i'm using gender to describe other things in my identity!
i can do that!
i can do that :)
(drawing of cat, finally facing forwards, eyes closed in a pleased manner)
// pt: since 'day one': nascime, plurality, nonhumanity //
(Read on Blogspot)
Content Warnings: mentions of mental illness/being a mental illness holder in a collective, mention of species dysphoria, dormancy/merging
This 'essay', or 'thought piece', discusses being part of a non-CDD system. This blog has no DNI and allows anyone respectful, regardless of discourse stances, but it should be noted in case anyone is uncomfortable reading.
Sometimes I feel like I've been a feline since day one.
But what does that mean exactly? 'Day one'? Most people would presume it means the day this body was born. Personally, we have a more complex relationship with the concept.
This brings us to the topic of this blog post: Nascime, a term originally by daybreakthing on Tumblr, describing one who has been something since the beginning of their existence.
Keyword: Existence. Not birth.
This is important to me as my existence, as an individual with an identity, and not a body, I percieve as different from the existence of any being within this body.
So. Firstly, talking about our plurality.
My name is Kito, and I am the host of the very blurry, very parasian and very pluralflux collective known as the Cygnus Constellation. We generally function as a singlet or singlet-adjacent, but there was a time where this wasn't as much the case.
Due to being pluralflux, specifically circutien, we go through constant cycles of gaining and losing members, with me being the only recurring character. Typically, these members don't last for long, or have much of a sense of seperation from the whole, but in late 2023, we had more clearly defined members, for an extended period of time, too.
We still used Kito as a collective name, as we do now, but there was no specific member we called Kito. We had a core — Critter, and a seperate host — Kitt (not Kito); arguably, one of those would be the 'original', if we were to name one. I don't fully identify with any of the members from that previous collective, but if I were to say I was one of them, I would say I was Rev. Not a core, not a host… if anything, just a holder of all the bad feelings we had inside us. Feelings we didn't have from the day our body was born. So, I was certainly not an original, I wouldn't say I existed in any capacity before our plurality… You can see where this is going.
I don't believe my existence, as an individual with an identity, necessarily begun at this body's birth.
However, there are some complications: I don't fully see myself in Rev. I have major differences in identity between myself and him, and I do feel that parts of Kitt and/or Critter are in me too. Mostly Kitt, however. I think there are parts of our pre-plural self that are lost to time.
We don't have dissociative amnesia between members, so the lines between Kitt, Critter, me, and our pre-plural self when looking back on the past are very blurry as well.
Regarding our actual nonhuman identity however, it varies.
Sometimes we believe our body is and has always been the body of a nonhuman shapeshifter, simply having lost the ability to shift. This is a pretty simple explanation for why we would identify as nascishapeshifter (shapeshifter nascime).
Other times we believe we're a nonhuman soul which took over a human body. In that case, we would've always been nonhuman, but the body wouldn't be. This, similarly, means we'd be nonhuman since the beginning of our existence, albeit not our birth.
But the way this connects back to my nonhumanity is fairly complex.
Kitt, the host of our previous collective, was a grey fox therian. I'm not sure if Kitt was a cat therian as well, I do distinctly remember a time when we were both fox and cat, but that could've just been our pre-plural self. I also don't know if Kitt always identified as nonhuman, or if it was something that happened over time.
Critter, the core — arguably the one most connected to our pre-plural self, was a colourpoint cat therian. Our pre-plural self, as far as I remember, was a cat and fox therian, but didn't always identify that way, and spent a long time connecting to the identity, in fact originally not identifying as a therian when she discovered the term and warming up to it about a year afterwards. I would not say our pre-plural self was a therian and/or nonhuman since the beginning of their existence. Perhaps alterhuman, or demihuman, but not fully nonhuman the same way I am now.
Regarding myself, or Rev, who I was based on; Rev, I believe, formed as a tabico cat therian, and identified as fully nonhuman (I'm unsure about whether the others did). I struggled with far more intense species dysphoria than the others, although that may be due to my role as a mental illness holder.
So, given that I am or used to be Rev, at least to an extent, I've fully been a cat/feline for as long as I've been around, or even longer than that, due to being a part of our pre-plural self, to an extent. I don't identify as a tabico anymore — I'm a chocolate tabby, as well as being many other felines, but the point still stands. This complex intersection of our plurality and nonhumanity is exactly why we identify as nascifeline.
I'm a feline, I was feline, they were felines, and we're a feline.
