December 9, 2024
Nonhuman Nuance on Gender...
I have never been a consumable presence in this world. Everything about me has always been this labyrinthine ocean that refuses to be domesticated. There are parts of my identity that I've been able to recognize with familiarity from childhood that some people don't even notice until adulthood. Gender, the expression of one's own, and the standards of humanity as a species are things I've thought about since I was as young as three or four years old because nothing about my assigned sex or species has ever felt reflective of who and what I really am. The expectation of behavior for both humans and girls are much different than those for wolves and boys, and I realized very early on that people were expecting things of me that were, in my mind, simply unnatural and foreign.
When I got older and started really thinking about the implications of these feelings, being both transgender and a Were. And I didn't initially connect the two together the way I do now. It took a bit of time to realize that my gender is intrinsically linked to my nonhumanity. Sure, there are times I feel like a human man, but I'm also never a "normal" human man... both my nonhumanity and neurodivergence making certain of that. There is a disconnect between me and other human men that I can not explain away with being transgender.. It is more than that.
Wolves do not display obvious sexual dimorphism, if you went to the zoo and saw the wolves, you would not be able to distinguish the males from the females with a quick glance. Their social behaviors are also not typically structured by gender, male wolves can be just as nurturing and submissive as females. In these ways, among others, I relate my gender more to wolves than humans. No matter how close to human I feel, there are always these subtle nonhuman nuances to everything about me. My body language, my fashion sense, my interests, the way I interact verbally.. even the way I process information. It's all wolven. I talk about this a little in another post, but I've realized that this connects to my gender as well.
Put simply, while transmasculine is my primary label, one that I love and wholeheartedly connect to in every way, there is an undertone to it that is canine; and I would like to express that more openly. I know the term xenogender exists, and I feel that I technically do fit it, it's just hard for me to connect to microlabels in any meaningful way. What xenogender experiences do you all have?
