1, 6, 9 - alti
🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ In response to the OC Pride ask game! 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈
1. What's your OC’s gender identity? What's their relationship to their gender?
9. Are there cultural or lore specific aspects to their identity? If applicable, does their species affect it?
Taking these two questions together because they are kind of inextricably linked for this character! I am assuming original flavour Lolthite drow Altonnar here, for the baseline answer, although I will give a bit of time to some alternate universe thoughts at the end, because Altonnar is one of my favourite dolls to play gender with.
If you asked him, Altonnar would look at you strangely and not give you an answer, and if you pressed a bit more he’d roll his eyes and say that he’s a man, obviously, but it’s very important to me that all of you reading this know that Altonnar is fucking nonbinary. He’s genderfluid with bits of agender floating in the suspension. He just doesn’t have a framework for that and interrogating his feelings about it feels like standing too close to the edge of a bottomless pit.
The problem is that Altonnar does realise on some level that he feels disconnected from his assigned sex and uncomfortable with being gendered explicitly in conversation with other drow, but he doesn’t see that as evidence of dysphoria, and more as a general response to the sexism of his culture. Altonnar takes it as a given that being a male drow is a fundamentally degrading and humiliating experience, rife with physical and sexual violence, and he assumes that most men (at least, the ones who are intelligent enough to see what's going on and to think for themselves) feel the same way that he does. He doesn’t have dysphoria, stupid, nobody likes being a man.
Also complicating all of this, is that he does identify with his oppression and doesn’t necessarily resent being a man all of the time (just a chunk of it) and also that he doesn’t necessarily want to be a woman at least, not all of the time. I think it’s that lack of a clear decisive attraction to or repulsion from either side of the binary that keeps him sitting in this uncomfortable gender malaise without feeling strongly enough to do anything about it, because it would cause more problems than it would solve, especially given his Matron Mother’s hardline stance on anything she considers heretical.
In our Call to the Netherdeep campaign, where an alternate universe version of Altonnar makes his escape from the Children of Malice as a young adult and eventually regains the memories of his past lives as a consecuted member of the Kryn Dynasty, including his most recent incarnation as a female drow, Altonnar is a little less resistant to examining his gender more closely, but it still takes him a while to stop thinking of himself and his incarnations as distinct people (and thinking of Astra in particular as just a separate woman riding along in his head) and to come to the conclusion that it’s the same soul in different bodies with different experiences to shape it. The he/him > he/they > any pronouns pipeline is manifesting, just slowly.
I don’t know if you've ever read that one tumblr post where someone posited the question of, if you were born as the opposite sex do you think you’d be cis or trans? A lot of people said they’d be happily cis, but interestingly, more than a few people said their transness was more intrinsic to them, so they’d still be trans, just on the other side of the divide. That’s Altonnar to me. Culture and species play a huge role in it, because the element of uncertainty that comes from questioning “am I ‘really’ trans, or is it just trauma from living under the constant grind of sexism?” is important to the character's experience of his own identity, and that looks different for drow versus humans on modern day Earth.
6. How does your oc feel about labels? Theirs, or in general?
Even in scenarios and universes where Altonnar has accepted he’s got some Gender going on, even if he’s started the process of transitioning or has transitioned already, I think he finds trying to label himself frustrating and limiting, because his own feelings about his identity are so changeable. Also, because it's nobody else's business. You don’t have the clearance level necessary for that information.
With regards to other people... Altonnar is nosy by nature and likes to know all of the information, but I don’t think, at least in most cases, that the minutiae of a person’s gender or sexual identity would be particularly useful or interesting, so unless he already had some personal curiosity about the person for one reason or another, the response is just kind of a shrug.
