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Zopilote
Joined 15 June 2024
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Nerd about trans + gender variant online history. | Nerd about trans + gender variant online history. | ||
I | I use he or they pronouns. | ||
I | == History == | ||
I started questioning my assigned gender around age 13 in 2009, experiencing a lot of confusion about whether my desires made me trans or if I was just a girl with unusual interests and a sense of alienation from her gender. That meant a lot of reading websites maintained by randoms and privately considering myself an [[androgyne]]. I remember running into a self-identified androgyne on TvTropes and feeling a sense of fascination. But there weren't a lot of people reflecting back at me a sense of how it would be to live in some unknown or shifting place gender-wise. | |||
When I realized [[Tumblr]] wasn't a website about alcohol, bizarre misapprehension I know, I started lurking and found other gender-questioning people, people with delightful senses of fashion and people who were FTM, as we called it. I made a bunch of Queer Secrets submissions that were pretty trans. I found and read Genderfork. I read Marilyn Roxie's [[genderqueer]] blog. I was closeted. I felt like a defective trans man. I felt genderless. I made an attempt to come out about my gender issues to a friend after he told me he was genderfluid. | |||
I lurked [[Transyada|a forum]] where people talked about gender stuff in a way that felt like opening up a portal to a different world. | |||
Eventually connected with a childhood friend who was now nonbinary and made a better attempt to come out to em. Attended a support group for trans and nonbinary people; at first we were the only participants who used neutral pronouns. I made more trans and nonbinary friends around this time. In 2014, I remember attending a meetup hosted by my friend's Tumblr mutual and feeling flippy in the stomach that we were giving our pronouns. And then promptly misgendering someone. Oops. | |||
Started college after a few bad, NEET years and felt a bit futile in educating people about nonbinary, so I went back into the closet. Still a bit socially isolated but more engaged and vulnerable in friendships with trans people. Neurotic about Tumblr trans discourse. Someone in my class mentioned culturally specific genders and I buddied up with them and eventually met my girlfriend through their friend. | |||
I now am known to my friends and grad cohort as male and pretty happy about it. Transitioning has been one of the most terrifying things I've ever done but, so far, seems worth it. I still feel protective and proud of my friends on a nonbinary path, who often had no role models. I hope that the small role that my generational cohort played in articulating this identity to various audiences has helped people find peace and a sense that they are not alone. | |||
== Goals on Nonbinary Wiki == | |||
Selfishly I want to document the digital spaces I was familiar with, to give a sense of older waves of nonbinary discourse. Some people reminiscence about gay bars that have long since shut down and maybe kind of sucked, and I'm doing that for online social scenes. | |||
I am also interested about what communities were aware of non-binary understandings of gender before these concepts became a bit more institutionalized and mainstream, as well as the evolution of the concepts over time. There are super local offline histories that just aren't documented, and online spaces that have been lost to linkrot. The public awareness of how early non-binary discourse was influenced by post-structuralism and queer theory is kinda low. I have tried to research zines as well as offline meetup groups to get a sense of spaces where people may have done gender in a less binary way-- regardless of whether they used that word-- or discussed related concepts. | |||
I also want to make academic discussions of related concepts and empirical research with nonbinary participants more accessible. | |||
== How to contact == | |||
Contact me via talk page or the wiki's Discord server. | Contact me via talk page or the wiki's Discord server. | ||