Plaidophile

deviantART, binarism, and transphobia: on LGBT Spirit Day, a user took dA to task for no longer allowing accounts to sign up with a gender set to "other/unspecified." The results were not good, and it ended up motivating a huge number of neutrois and neutrois-sympathetic users to disavow dA and leave.

One particularly nasty thread on the support issue also finally motivated several people (including the person who started all this) to start preferring "it" as their personal pronoun (as I have for years, at least in an online context).

The situation has also motivated me to get a bit more political with my gender identity. I've been seeing a therapist for a bit over a year now, the main reason being me figuring out what I want to do about my identity (or lack thereof) and finally move forward after that. Until the deviantART kerfuffle, I still didn't really know what I wanted to do. I felt trapped by the lack of options, and still felt fairly alone (despite knowing a few others). But the fallout from this situation has made me realize that there are lots of people out there like me (including some who are quite prominent), and I'm sick of the binary cis-normative society that imposes a false dichotomy on everyone.

For now, the best option that people have had has been to essentially lie and overshoot their neutrois/epicene goals, because the Harry Benjamin standards of care that practitioners are supposed to follow don't allow for anything other than going from one extreme to the other. They were written around 60 years ago and, despite being updated several times, still have that same basic, ridiculous fact behind them, and there hasn't been anything to make any practitioners change their policies. The only options have been going with cutters or shady Thai surgeons (and being at the whim of their psycho-analysts to decide whether you're actually ready for it, regardless of how long you've been living neutrois or seeing a therapist who believes that it's the right thing for you or whatever).

My therapist has written quite a few letters for recommending MTF or FTM patients (and has a couple of form letters to speed this up), but never anything for neutrois, as all of his clients have ended up just doing the lie-and-overshoot-and-back-off approach. He hasn't had any template for discussing neutrois or making a recommendation. But now, he is writing a letter for me, which we will be sending to the various practitioners around, and which will hopefully become a template for others to make use of as well. Maybe by adding voices into the chorus, we can finally do this thing.

This is something I've known I've needed since I was 14. But I couldn't wrap my head around it and felt alone and kept on trying to figure out which side of the polar binary I would be least unhappy in, or how I could go about publicly fitting in the binary while privately being neither/nor. Now I just want to go straight for the middle. I've been waiting too long for this.