Fictional worlds can have all sorts of things not directly derived from either what is expected to be their inspiration or within themselves, but specifically the moment it has anything to do with suppressed groups, people began to get pissed.

Thedas has nonbinarity, has it by that name, and if someone doesn't welcome that, they should deal with it.

Of course, it is good if it also has different manifestations and names for similar concepts, just like in real modern world as well; and just like in real modern world, they can use "nonbinary" in more than one place.

And very yes to the "if it was a different term people would be arguing that it isn't really enby"

The 2024 Gender Census is now open!

[ Link to survey ]

The 11th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 13th June 2024.

It’s short and easy, about 5 minutes probably.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful - it’s what helped us get 40,000 responses last year.

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

For the curious, you can also spy on some graphs and demographic data for the incoming responses here.

Thank you so much!

[ Link to survey ]

Image credit: Malachite and rhodochrosite.

Thursday 16th May 2024 - day 4

This morning I woke up to about 28,000 responses, not bad! And looking at the graphs, it seems like the response rate is much higher than last year. The usual is about 40,000 responses, but this year there might (might!) be over 55,000? It may depend on how much promotion I am able to do!

[ Link to survey ]

I don’t think adding nonbinary to Victorian’s gender system would’ve fixed their weird sexism. If anything I think it would’ve made them weirder and sexismier

Someone needs to write a satirical etiquette book in the style of a Victorian with rules for Ladies, Gentlemen, and Honorables in Polite Society.

Oh please someone do this

It would go something like

Of course, fashionable Honorables may be consternated by the proper open collar blouses as there is no way to tie a bow or cravat around it. In such cases a bow may be worn upon the top hat. Or a slim ribbon may be tied around the bare neck, however, given the salacious reputation some hold for such an accessory, that is best left to married Honorables.

YES. the way this hasn’t left my mind….Like okay they’re still Victorians. They’re still sexist and homophobic. My thought for this alternate history is third gender people are expected to only marry into already married couples. And they’d probably throw in a lot of Christian Holy Trinity and Mary Joseph God imagery to religiously validate triads.

Or three people (of all different genders of course bc again. They’re Victorian) could marry all at once but the courting situation would be a nightmare.

My question is,,, would Honorables have a dowry?

First thought: coverture. Coverture is the legal idea that a married couple is one entity, with the wife not having an actual legal identity of her own. This is why there's the old-fashioned convention of women taking on their husband's entire name (e.g. "Mrs. Robert Smith"), why men could control any inheritance or money their wives had, and also the origin of some now-obsolete laws (like making it impossible for a wife to sue her husband for damages, because it's as if she was suing herself).

This is why it was so important for women to marry well: even if you worked as a married woman (and many women did), your money wasn't actually yours. It's one thing to have to live with a drunk asshole; it's worse to have that drunk asshole be the sole person who decides if that paycheck goes towards rent or more booze.

So, having a trinity/three parts of one whole entity would totally fit Victorian ideas of coverture. I think you'd still have it be men > everyone else, because they'd expect some kind of hierarchy, and even within the Trinity, God is still the leader.

Second thought: separate spheres. The Victorian era was very heavily focused on men being involved in the "dirty" business of work/politics/etc., and women being more morally pure and better suited to the domestic sphere (the whole "angel of the house" thing). Obviously this wasn't actually or practically true a lot of the time, but it was the aspired-to standard, the thing you'd measure people against to say if they were acting appropriately as members of their gender or not.

So you'd need a third sphere for Honorables to inhabit that is completely separate from the work/domestic dichotomy, or create an entirely different three-way dichotomy. Basically, you'd need a thing to point to, like "X is very ladylike" or "Y is not manly," but for Honorables.

So, extrapolating:

I think the third sphere might be something in the domain of the spiritual mediator; “honorables” are perceived as more connected to god in a way that allows them to smooth the transition between the inside and outside spheres. Honorables would be expected to handle the family’s spiritual life, and ensure that the husband and wife be functional with each other.

Agender, abinary, gender neutral, androgynous, unalighned nonbinary rights and dignity.

If we want to cement the idea that binary alighned, very masculine or very feminine nonbinary people exist, not only 'ey 'emselves need to be explicitly represented, but other nonbinary people too.

Say it when someone is agender, abinary, neutrois, unalighned, neutral.

Don't treat us as the boring default.

Don't let the idea that, deep down, everyone actually has to do with binary genders creep in when xou celebratest nonbinary people who have connections to the binary.

Don't treat us like someones who already have it all and need to move to make space for the binary-adjacent.

I have the full understanding that naive concepts of sexless creatures, androgynous people of indeterminate gender, nonbinary-as-a-third-gender, genderlessness of robots or aliens and so forth give people with genders like mine a bit of a headstart in the collective societal understanding of the whole concept of being nonbinary.

However, the naivety of these concepts provides very little sustainability, and once someone starts understanding how someone can be both nonbinary and non-neutral in relation to binary gender, they get a temptation to reject these concepts altogether as constructs created by binary people in order to see genderqueernes as a trait of The Other.

There are many binary essentialist pitfalls to fall into after arriving at that conclusion, and if one doesn't want to get stuck in one of that binaries all over again, the most radical action seems to explicitly take the binary and blend it up in the most disruptive, offensive, in-your-face girlboy dykefag beard-and-breasts way possible. Which is absolutely a valid way for a personal gender and gender expression to be, but as a trend, it essentially leaves those of as who strive for neutrality behind as if we were thralls to cis people's desire to sterilize qenderqueerness. Which we're not.

the two genders are yes or no

and im STILL nonbinary!

so call me maybe

via @bagginshield

[Screenshot of a tag: #carly they jepson]

A certain species of gamer: Dungeons & Dragons games were better back in the day when we didn't have all this woke pronoun shit.

Blood & Magic, a licensed Dungeons & Dragons RTS published in 19-fucking-96, two years before the FIRST Baldur's Gate:

[Picture ID: A character creation screen with the option to select your gender as "Man", "Woman", or "Other". End Picture ID.]

[Image description - Images of a genderqueer, nonbinary maverique and aporagender pride flag with the text: None of the above, but still something. End description.]

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Tumblr needs to understand that two groups with what are considered to be different or even opposite experiences can actually face the same issues, often within the same social systems.

Systems can have parts language forced on them when it is detrimental and other systems can have people language forced on them in the same way.

Bi people get told they'd be better if they were gay and gay people get told they're better if they're bi

Physically disabled people are told its to difficult to accommodate their needs and so are neurodivergent people.

Binary trans people get called by "they/them" while nonbinary people are told that "they/them" is to confusing as a singular pronoun and only he or she is acceptable

In our experience often the people who are doing the shitty thing are the same people in both cases. As easy as it would be if everything was nicely paired opposits where everything that happens to group a is the opposite for group b life doesn't work like that and acting like it does causes hurt and miscommunication all around.

Hey…

Can we talk about how all but one points here are “group A that needs x gets y forced on them and group B that needs y gets x forced on them”…

except for disability, which is just “group A faces z, group B faces z too”?

I know you didn’t mean anything malicious! I am absolutely, absolutely not attacking you here

But this *really* showcases the falsehood of this binary

(also like. Again. My adhd-bipolar-migraines-nerve damage post (this one (link))

There absolutely are things like this with disability, of course! Like both visibly and invisibly disabled beings having their own sets of problems which “contradict”, and more.

Thank you so much for this post, and hope you’re okay with me adding this.

just to be clear about this, since midbinary is not a well-known term:

sometimes i will talk about abinaru and midbinary people on this blog, and i want to clarify that the term midbinary does not include binary people but only refers to non-binary people with genders related to the binary (demiboy/girl, androgyne, femache, non-binary man/woman, marfluid, venufluid, libramasc/fem etc.). it does not refer to binary men and women. i just want to be extra clear that i'm not grouping in all of those non-binary experiences with binary ones.

and of course, maveriques can be midbinary alongside maverique.

it bothers me when people use "gendered" synonymously with "binary gendered"/"male/female/masc/fem gendered", because that still implies that those are the only two options, the only two real genders, when in fact there are so many people who are gendered in ways those people probably wouldn't comprehend. like, i have seen people describe maverique as "not having gendered feelings" before, which is only true if you mean binary gendered (and neutrally gendered), which only works if you think male and female are the only existing genders. it's subtle, but it still has implications.

same goes for "nonbinary people don't want to be gendered". i mean, yeah, a lot of us don't, even those who do have genders, but others very much do. i want to be gendered as maverique, just not as binary. that's part of why i use neopronouns rather than they/them, because to me, my neopronouns feel gendered in a way that's specific to me, whereas they/them pronouns are often referred to as non-gendered pronouns.

of course, most people will only know to view me in a binary-gendered way or in a non-gendered way, so i choose non-gendered, but that doesn't mean that me and many other non-binary people are necessarily non-gendered ourselves.

gendered =/= binary, as there are more than two genders.

people shitting on orientation labels that describe attraction to non-binary people because "non-binary isn't a single third gender" and "you can't tell by looking at someone if they're non-binary" is honestly wild, because:

a) i mean, you're right, there are many non-binary genders but people can still be attracted to a variety of those genders, including non-binary men and women. what's your point?

b) not all attraction is based on looking at someone. quite a bit of attraction is based on actually knowing someone. some people's attraction will appear or disappear when they find out that someone has a certain identity.

c) people only bring up "you can't tell by looking" when it comes to non-binary people, when you can't tell anyone's gender by looking at them. you can't go around proclaiming that non-binary gender doesn't have a look but then pretend that manhood and womanhood totally do. and the fact that people only ever bring this up to shit on explicitly stated attraction to non-binary people is just telling. it just feels like a way to say that it's basically impossible for people to be attracted to who we are, that we're always misgendered, that people can only be attracted to us when pretending we're binary, that our genders make us undesirable.

you all don't do the same thing to attraction to men or women, despite manhood and womanhood not having looks, despite manhood and womanhood not being monolithic experiences.

it's weird that we keep being singled out as the weird people to be attracted to. you all just can't bear that people actually acknowledge our existence and actually desire us.