#asfjflakfjlf sorry you activated my angel gender thoughts

[quietwingsinthesky]

@archangelsammy is right they would cancel you for samifer but also I think twitter'd cancel you for off-color trans hcs too (aka for having good opinions <3)

Which, ftr, is stupid and I very much enjoy them. Archangels + complicated relationships with gender my beloved

Reason #436 I have never gone on Twitter: my gender thoughts r too powerful.

Also yes yes yes archangels and complicated relationships with gender, my much beloved! I was actually thinking about that this morning, plus apartmentverse thoughts, leading to me realizing like. I have, in separate fics, talked about Adam and Nick being trans, and there is literally no one who could stop me from carrying that detail into apartmentverse in order to examine just how it would be to exist as a creature with no sense of gender (or to have one that cannot be translated to any sort of human-adjacent concept) but to have a body that was, at one point, kept by someone to whom it mattered very much how they presented.

In my head, the easiest word to apply to all of the archangels is agender (or, maybe less to Gabriel, who does have experience with human gender and has fun with how he can play with it, but that doesn’t mean he’s all in on human gender, more that he’s figured out how to translate his internal experience into ‘ha ha skirt go swish!’) Sorry, Gabriel tangent.

Anyway, what I’m saying is, agender is the right word because from a human perspective, they don’t experience gender. But they are living in a world that is soo concerned with gender at all times, and there’s a sliding scale of what things they might want to change about their presentation and how the world looking in affects them. I’m thinking like. Raphael getting irritated with the insistence on gendering them as female, not because they’re bothered by that specifically, but by being gendered at all. Would not be less irritating for them to be seen as a guy in their Donnie vessel, you know? Which is alienating in a world where they are already a stranger due to Not Being Human!

Whereas Michael has these memories of Adam’s where being perceived femininely hurt, it was upsetting and Adam made efforts to prevent it, and yet Michael does not carry that same pain when he is seen as a woman. If anything, it would probably bother him more to be infantilized with terms like ‘young lady’ and such, because he is literally the oldest person in any given room. Or bother him most if he’s out with his siblings and gets referred to by someone at a store or something as a sister because his role as the oldest brother is sooo firmly tied to his identity, but it’s in such a weird way where brother has ceased to be a gendered term? If that makes any sense. Like the experience here is that Michael is being misgendered. Technically. But his internal experience can’t really work it out that way because he doesn’t exist like that, but ‘sister’ just Is Not What He Is. it’s complicated! It’s. You know. A system doesn’t care about how you identify, only how it can perceive you, and because Adam died and got brought back at nineteen and lived in the early aughts, it’s not likely he got access to hormones or anything until he was basically an adult, so his body gets gendered female more often than male. Would Michael choose to continue that? Out of respect for Adam’s wishes or for himself? Because the thing is Michael isn’t even! A Guy! He’s just Michael. His gender is Brother. His gender is Son. (oh the evil alternative of him being seen as like. Gabriel’s younger sister. Is him getting seen as Nick!Lucifer’s daughter. Absolutely nightmare scenario for him. He will cease to function for hours.) So, maybe he would want to go back on T. Maybe not. I haven’t really worked that out yet for my fic lmao.

Okay, okay, Jesus Christ, I rambled a lot here, but point is: Archangel gender is weird. Having to live in a gendered system is even more weird.