Q&A: “you mention neutrois having ‘some bullshit requirement of dysphoria and a desire to transition’. What did you mean by this?”

jenovaii said:

Hi, I’m at the crux of being upset, but I want to make sure I’m not just misunderstanding. In your discussion of why you coined the word maverique (which is a really nice-sounding term btw), you mention neutrois’ having “some bullshit requirement of dysphoria and a desire to transition”. What did you mean by this? I’m sorry if you’ve already answered some similar clarification; i did try to look through your blog for answers before asking. You can reply privately or not, nbd.

hi and thanks for asking for clarification. 🙂

to quote the post in question more fully:

i repeatedly saw people (wrongfully, imho) associating and/or confusing neutrois with agender and genderlessness, as well as throwing around some bullshit requirement of dysphoria and a desire to transition.

in the above, i never actually said who was throwing around the requirements. i may be wrong, but i’m guessing that you’re on the verge of being upset because: a) you feel like i’m accusing neutrois people specifically of throwing around their own personal identity or b) you agree with said requirements and take offense to me referring to them as bullshit.

in either case, i may or may not be about to upset you more.
-insert sigh of resignation-

during the ~2 years that i identified as neutrois and gender neutral, i was constantly confronted by people defining neutrois by comparing it to agender and saying that “neutrois people are basically agender but experience dysphoria and want to medically transition.” in other words, people defining neutrois by saying that a neutrois person is a person who is gender neutral and who invariably wants to undergo surgery of some kind and/or HRT in order to change their body.

yes, some of these people identified as neutrois themself and as such the definition that they gave may have been their own personal definition for their own identity as a neutrois person. that’s fine, i have no problem with that. however, the vast majority of people who were defining neutrois this way were not even neutrois themself, they were just rehashing what at that time had become The Definition of neutrois. a definition that i took and continue to take issue with.

to be clear, let me say again that i do not have any issue with people self-identifying in that way. if a neutrois person feels like their gender is inherently tied to their dysphoria and desire to undergo medical transition, i respect that. i can even relate to that. that isn’t even what i was referring to when i spoke of “throwing around requirements.”

what i took/take issue with is people using dysphoria and a desire to medically transition as a means of judging the validity of a person’s identity as neutrois. i literally saw people everywhere telling others things like “ah, you don’t want to transition? then you’re agender, not neutrois, because neutrois people want to transition” or “agender people are transgender but neutrois people are transsexuals who want a sexless body” etc ad infinitum.

not only did i see people making overgeneralizations about neutrois people as a whole while propagating dysphoria and a desire to medically transition as prerequisites to a neutrois identity, i saw people policing their own gender and the gender of others to uphold that requirement. i can’t even count how many times my own identity as a neutrois person was questioned or how many times i’ve bumped heads with people, neutrois identified or not, over this issue.

the dismay and frustration that i felt and continue to feel over this issue leaked into how i worded the statement in the above quote. in February 2014 i made a post on this blog titled “The Neutrois ‘Standard’” lamenting how deep the connection between neutrois, sex and medicalization had become within trans and non-binary communities and it wasn’t long after that i decided that i couldn’t deal with that bullshit (yes, it is bullshit to me) anymore and stopped identifying as neutrois. by June 2014 i’d coined maverique and, as i said, my feelings were still very raw and thus leaked into what i wrote about my experience with identifying as neutrois prior to coining maverique.

needless to say, i haven’t stopped being confronted with the issues surrounding the definition of neutrois upon not identifying as neutrois anymore. every time i open my mouth or voice any sort of contrary opinion regarding the medicalization of neutrois and how it affected me personally i inevitably offend  / piss someone off, so…

i’m resigned to the fact that this tl;dr post probably just pissed you and someone else out there off. sigh.