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3:18am July 3, 2014

morethanmysexuality:

i’ve been working on my novel for about 2.5 / 3 years and i’m starting to realize that while my main female character is in fact heterosexual i actually think she is not cis-gender… i think that she may be agender, or nonbinary or genderfluid… it’s hard for me to say because of my limited knowledge on the subject, but i think i know for sure that she is not cisgender.. anyone with more knowledge that would be willing to help me?

Well… I can’t help you entirely. But I can say that (sorry if you know any or all of this already, I’m just assuming you know as little as possible just in case):

Agender generally means that a person doesn’t have a gender at all. Occasionally it means that someone has a ‘neuter’ gender. Not having a gender at all, from my perspective (I’m genderless, what some people would call agender) is like… everyone else has this experience that they call gender, and it’s a fundamental part of their identity, whether they are cis or trans.

Nonbinary is a catch-all term for people whose gender is not male or female. A nonbinary person may have a gender (usually does), but can also be agender. Pretty much all agender people are nonbinary by definition, but most nonbinary people are not agender. Most nonbinary people have genders, just not male or female genders.

Genderfluid means someone whose gender changes over time. They might be binary, nonbinary, or both. They may sometimes be agender and sometimes not. Sometimes their changes happen so fast that they are different genders at different moments of the same day. Other times, genderfluid means that at one point in their life they were one gender, and very, very slowly they turned into another gender. They may cycle through ten different genders, or only two. The genders may be easily recognizable to other people, or completely alien to what most people experience as gender.

You may already know those things, but you were asking for help, so I thought I would give you a brief description of each. Even within each type of gender (or lack of gender), you can get three people with three utterly different experiences.

And as usual, something I try to explain to people who are writing an atypical character of any type: Be sure you write your character, and then make them genderless or nonbinary or whatever. As in, make sure that they are a well-rounded character, not just a walking talking agender person, or disabled person, or whatever. Characters are 1000% more relatable when they are a character first and a category second. Not that their categories aren’t important to who they are, but they don’t create who they are. Like… I’m genderless and disabled. But I’m not just genderless and disabled, I have an entire personality, I have interests, I have pet peeves, I have motivations, and only some of those things can be traced back to my disabilities or my genderlessness. And even when they can, I’m still a complex human being with complex motivations.

I hope some of this has been useful or helpful to you in some way.