yeah idk i don’t really understand what people get out of having a specific inscrutable gender label instead of just saying “nonbinary” and not elaborating, or saying something cheeky but intelligible to other people like “my gender can’t be expressed in human language”.

The entire point of xenogender labels is that to the people using these, it is a way to make their gender identity legible to them and being able to conceptualize it. It’s the very opposite of inscrutable. Even when we view gender as a spectrum between the poles man and woman, there’s people who do not find themselves anywhere on that, they are outside of the charted territory of what Western society views as scrutable gender expressions. So they need an approximation of how they feel about and understand the gendered part of their personality, a shorthand for their concept of the self, their body image and their gender performance. Nonbinary is in large parts a catch-all term, and it is one that says what people are not. Saying “i’m not this” does not answer the question “what am i?”. I like large, open-ended labels a lot, but i get the need that many people have for microlabels to articulate their experience.

And i’ll be honest here, i’ve met more than one nonbinary person irl where it would have made perfect sense for that elflike being to say “my pronouns are fae / faer”. I wouldn’t have doubted that one second. I’ve lurked in communities of people who can best conceptualize themselves as androids or energy beings and none of that seemed anything stranger than the self-image i have on a good dose of LSD - when my mind is able to produce such a state with a few microgramms of ergotamines, i do not find it hard to grasp that some people feel that way all the time even when stone cold sober. Especially when they’re nonbinary and present in ways that make people call them a “thing” or an “it” to begin with. A lot of NB folks have had experiences of what they call “being creatured”, having their humanity and even their personhood doubted and denied to them. Is it such a stretch that some of them arive at a point where they wonder if they even need to view themselves as a person when just acting naturally means others cannot see them that way anymore?

As a trans person, i understand both that our gender identity can be hard to grasp for outsiders and that we have a right to self-identification, and i also know the transmedicalist history (and in many parts still ongoing present-day status quo) of excluding non-binary people from community support and from access to gender-affirming care. So i’m not going around doubting other people’s gender identity or saying their pronouns do not make any sense, and it’s honestly kinda sad to see how quickly xenogender people are doubted even in a space like this. DroneRights probably was more than a bit of a troll in that it came off as willfully antagonistic, but i don’t think it was trolling us about that it could best understand itself as a de-personalized borg drone.

Yeah, I suppose if someone does have an unusual gender identity they would expect other people to not understand and ask questions. I don’t really understand non-binary gender too well, but as a cis-gendered person, it’s basically just because I’ve never thought about it. It’s not something I’ve ever had to question or examine within myself. I think that is why so many cis people refuse to try to understand people different from them. They’ve never thought about that stuff, therefore no one else has. Or something, I don’t know. I just want to be nice to people.

Thanks for that! It’s always good to try and get more perspectives on things, even if it isn’t a firsthand account of what it is like, it’s still good to empathize with another person, even if we don’t fully understand what their inner life is like.