equatin’ neutrality with genderlessness is problematic for a few reasons.
first, there’s the inability to conceive of genders outside of binary specificity. i tend to struggle with this too as a black transneu, as i feel like sometimes whenever i present as neutral or draw myself that way i feel too masculine. black people inherently be seen as masculine by society, so that extra layer of internalized racism make neutrality hard to easily pinpoint in myself. i should not have to forcibly binarize myself to make genderin’ myself easier.
second, it make it easier to make neutral people who see themselves as gendered out to be doin’ too much or even “recreatin’ binaries”. i cannot stress how many times ive seen neutrality (falsely attributed to as androgyny) be treated as exclusively a white, skinny, young people thing and use the social genderin’ of racialized people as a reason why neutrality is impossible or some progressive, utopian, perfectionist fantasy and that “positive” or “unbalanced” androgyny (which is just androgyny) is more realistic. they’ll try to claim regularly gendered things like clothing, pronouns, nicknames like “girl” or “dude” are actually neutral because xyz, despite us (and trans women, too, when not wantin’ to be called “dude” or “bro”) voicin’ our discomfort to be associated with those. they push their equally harmful ideas about genderlessness and agender people onto transneus: “neutral = genderless, so you must not care about gender at all! that means i can push whatever i want onto you and you can’t say anything cause you’s supposed to not care.”
i think because of this, there’s need to be a genderless/neutral solidarity, especially between black genderless and neutral people, considerin’ the overlap between our communities. we both deserve respect and recognition.
