#gender identity definitions

[the-two-of-clubs]

A r/limbuscompany Reddit thread titled "Why do people refer to Dante as a boy?" had a lot of answers given that frankly depressed me, so I wrote a huge essay. And because it's huge and the Redditors are definitely not going to listen, I'm going to repost it here. For non-Limbus fans, Dante's the game's speaking protagonist of indeterminate gender.

People will just straight up say "I just don't want to use they/them pronouns, it's either he or she and I get to pick, sorry!" and be the top upvoted comment in this thread.

When I encourage you to use they/them pronouns for Dante that's not even because they're nonbinary, it's because it's what Dante is always referred to in the game they're from, and it's because it's a less clunky standin for "he or she" as well. "They" can refer to anyone, that's why it's the single best fit of any common English pronoun for an ambiguous character like Dante. They/them is the only way to refer to Dante without making up a headcanon, whether that be a fan theory that they're Ayin or Benjamin or whatever, or a self insert projection.

They/them is something you (yes you! the reader!) could be getting used to being able to use, for multiple reasons. One of which being for nonbinary people, and another reason being not constantly being forced to assume everyone's gender all the time. To smoothly be able to use language that doesn't constantly exclude women. For example, hearing someone talk about a doctor and immediately leaping to "he/him" is a microaggression, because female doctors are constantly confronted with the assumption that they're either men or nurses.

The more you use they/them pronouns for others, the more natural to you they/them pronouns will seem. And Dante could be a great starting off point for some of you to start doing that. Using they/them pronouns can make somebody's day. It would be real self improvement that matters. You probably know a trans or nonbinary person, whether you know that about them or not.

Some of you are 100% telling on yourselves that you couldn't handle being around a nonbinary person who uses they/them pronouns in real life with this thread. The pronouns are so alien and unusable to you you're performing mental gymnastics specifically to get out of using them. Yes, nobody can stop you from using he/him for Dante, knock yourself out I guess. But also, what is your actual reason to do that? And not just some casual excuse that you're throwing out, like "you can't prove Dante's NOT a man" (why not use she/her then, hm? what if she's a woman? at the very least the correct pronoun for this would technically be "he or she", right?) Or "Dante is a male name" (the entire Limbus main cast has male names and you don't see people "he/him"-ing Faust. Seems like a specific issue you guys have with they/them and Dante.) Really ask yourself why. Why ARE you so convinced Dante is a man? No really I'm serious.

And when that question does get asked by OP here, people are arguing in this thread that men are the ones who play Limbus Company, and that of course everyone's calling Dante he/him because almost all gamers use he/him, with the whole self insert argument. Which is dismissal and erasure of women, who apparently don't exist and it doesn't matter if the game's self insert mascot represents them, despite showing up in this thread to tell you that they and their presumably from context also female friends play Limbus. This self insert argument will never make Dante a binary man, it would make Dante another type of nonbinary which is pangender or genderfluid, because Dante represents all players that play them or whichever specific player is playing them, and to refer to Dante as the concept, the gestalt, the infinite-mirror-worlds Dantes that exist on each of our phones, they/them still suffices in a unique way, to pay homage to other players with different genders than you and their Dantes which would match those genders, I think.

Calling Dante "he" is an active choice you're making, going against the way the game refers to Dante.

Using the pronouns that the character always gets referred to in the entire game they're from is the norm. You guys never don't do that, except in cases like this where it's so you can ignore they/them pronouns. You do have an actual reason, conscious or subconscious, to actively change which pronouns you're using. Some of the people referring to Dante as he/him here absolutely have biases that make them unwilling to refer to Dante as they/them and therefore they're going out of their way to contradict the source material, namely transphobia. That might not be you, but it's some of the people you're sharing this take that Dante uses he/him with.

I am under no illusion that Dante is necessarily intended to be nonbinary representation. However, some of your reasons for "he/him"-ing Dante are very much trans exclusionary. "Dante has a masculine frame"... People who look like men to you sometimes aren't men. Heck, sometimes they're cis women. And if this is the first you're hearing of it, yep! That's always been true and you should keep it in mind. We live in a big weird beautiful world. People who look like men to you might be nonbinary and use exclusively "they/them" pronouns for example, and being referred to as "they" rather than "he" might go a long way to their happiness and comfort because of a thing called dysphoria, which can be medically dangerous for people if they suffer too much of it from being misgendered too often. These people can't somehow get a different skeleton structure and look even more androgynous than Dante does in order for you to refer to them respectfully. Training yourself out of jumping to pronouns because of the width of someone's shoulders can do real world good just like training yourself out of jumping to pronouns because of somebody's career. It all helps you act respectfully and challenge your assumptions. And that can start right now right here. You can just refer to Dante or any nonbinary video game character you've been neglecting as they/them, sound it out in your head, nothing is stopping you.

And yes, before someone starts whining that I'm making "too big a deal of this" because I dropped the dreaded T-word that will get me downvoted, Dante isn't real and can't have their feelings hurt by the fact that people keep referring to them as he/him even if they turn out to have been a woman this whole time. I know I am aware. You should know that nonbinary people are reading the posts you're making and seeing how casually and thoughtlessly you're willing to dismiss even the concept of using they/them for a CLOCK who doesn't even have a human FACE let alone an obvious gender, and I for one know that were we to meet, you wouldn't gender me correctly either. You'd take one look at me and thoughtlessly assume you're always right.

Does referring to Dante as anything at all matter directly? No. It's fiction. However, words inspire people. Everyone is just referring to Dante as he/him because everyone else is and it's considered normal. A creative thinker, a leader rather than a follower, is someone who questions what everyone else is doing, and comes to their own conclusions. Coming to your own conclusions is what you will have to do with what I have written here.

For the Tumblr audience this is probably just an unsurprising PSA that Limbus fan Redditors are being weird about they/them pronouns and a bunch of weird arguments they're using to do so. I'm not trying to come after any queer person's he/they or she/her or any pronoun set Dante headcanons in particular here either, you can tell by the explanation of what dysphoria is that's not the target audience. If you headcanon characters having different pronouns when it's not just because you can't be assed to use they/them we're cool that's very cool of you.

[scentofpines]

have you ever considered...that identifying out of woman/girlhood because you don't relate to the societal implications, expectations, etc... contributes to making womanhood (feel) even more restrictive? maybe you feel better when thinking of yourself as anything but a girl/woman because you do not feel like a woman (what does that even mean?) but in my opinion you just added another brick into the prisonwall that is gender.

[serpentface]

What's the Wardi cultural take on Akoshos sleeping with/partnering with/marrying other Akoshos?

It's not highly regulated to a degree that there are overwhelming cultural norms about it. There's a lot of societal focus on akoshos being theoretically suitable sexual partners for both men and women due to being dual-gendered, but not to an extent that relationships with One Another are stigmatized.

They also largely get to escape from the most severe concerns about penetrator/penetrated power dynamics because they're not regarded as Men (they're regarded as dual-gendered, and they're a female social class on every practical level), there's no status of manhood to Lose by receiving sexual penetration. The only real thing you see in that department is people assuming that one acts as 'the man' and one acts as 'the woman', but this is largely due to preoccupation with a notion of sex being Penetration With A Penis (and that Penetration With A Penis means that one person is in a Man's Role and one person is in a Woman's Role). But this will not be regarded as unnatural as in same-gender male relations, akoshos will Have to take up a position in this sexual dichotomy if they want to have Real Sex (Penetration With A Penis) with each other, and this is not unnatural and doesn't involve gaining or losing status since they are simultaneously male and female, not men.

So like you might see individual culture critics finding stuff to nitpick about it as their annoyance of the week or a singular Guy here or there who thinks it's weird, but this isn't a widespread norm. The vast majority of people don't give a shit about akoshos having sex with each other. The worst thing you're likely to experience Solely by virtue of being in an akoshos-akoshos relationship is someone asking you (probably with genuine curiosity) which one does the man stuff and which one does the woman stuff.

Akoshos also don't experience Hard expectations for marriage (though there are societal pressures that make marriage an attractive safety net all the same, ESPECIALLY marriage to a man) so unofficial life-partnerships between akoshos are pretty much the Only same gender partnerships between unwed people that are going to go unquestioned. ((Sworn brotherhood is technically a same gender life partnership for men that is Functionally similar to marriage (in that it's a kin-making practice between unrelated adults), but the tradition is Built upon the assumption that both parties will be married to women and that a primary goal of this kinship is to provide security for both parties' wives and children)). Marriage obligations in general are more lax in the economically secure but not Wealthy lower mercantile classes (as obligations to support and perpetuate one's family are universal, but these obligations can be filled simply by having at least One son who can get hitched, and marriages in the lower classes have no political functions and therefore there's less reason to ensure All your children are wed (there's still incentives like dowry, but this is not desperately needed when a family is economically secure)). So akoshos in this class group tend to have a Lot more freedom in terms of their life arrangements and chosen partners (though still experience the limiting frameworks of structural misogyny in other capacities).

The only thing that is out of the picture is akoshos/akoshos marriage. Marriage in this society has a predominantly reproductive function, the concept of reproductively non-viable marriages is generally considered absurd. This is not JUST this culture's form of homophobia, as marriage is a very practical arrangement at its core - both in a reproductive capacity and as bedrock for the patriarchal blood-kinship family system that forms the core social unit. The idea of same gender marriage isn't just absurd because 'ewwww weird' it's like, that Cannot work within this system, it Cannot fill core functions of what a marriage intends to do here, the ways on which marriage and kinship are BUILT makes same gender marriage practically (rather than just socially) untenable.

The sole exception to the 'marriage = reproductively viable" rule is that akoshos can be married to men (which in practice is almost always as a remarriage after a man has secured At Least an heir). This has a Little bit of internal logic here in that they perform predominantly female social roles (thus are suited to being a wife, even if they can't bear children) (and also on practical levels of them having the same legal status as women) but it's really more of a 'this is just how it's always been' kind of thing. A lot of the older pre-Wardi identity dual-gender roles that got mashed together under the 'akoshos' name would have involved marriage to a man as a second wife/concubine, in addition to his primary wife who would bear his children. Men potentially having multiple spouses has not been retained as a cultural practice, but the notion that an akoshos Can be a wife to a man has survived into modern day legal and doctrinal practices around marriage.

So like this being said, marriage as it is legally defined is only between a man and a woman, a man and an akoshos, or a woman and an akoshos. In practice the latter two are comparatively VERY rare- a man/akoshos marriage cannot provide children (though an akoshos can practically fulfill all other obligations and duties of a wife), a woman/akoshos marriage Can provide children (and while akoshos cannot function as a male heir, these children Will take their akoshos-parent's family name (though the wife retains her father's family name)), but akoshos are legally grouped with women in terms of rights and privileges (including being permanently under legal domain of their father unless they have been legally handed off to a male husband) and Cannot provide hard power patriarchal support that this family system is built upon and therefore depends upon, which makes these marriages socio-economically insecure. They can obviously still be a good partner and parent, but this is not the same as having the Legal hard power of a patriarch.

Akoshos marrying each other would be reproductively and socially nonviable, and is treated as a similarly absurd concept to a man marrying a man or a woman marrying a woman. It's just not a part of the marriage and kinship framework, it's not a thing that you can Do.

[cynicalmusings]

[moodyvoid]

Gender discussion in the tags 👀

[shoezuki]

i wanna depict sampo in my fics as being queer in some way but i wanna keep it undefined yknow. like i don't wanna write him jus saying 'i'm genderqueer' or smthin like that so i been tryin to sprinkle in some bits into some his dialogue of him refering to himself as other than a dude sometimes. idk if its working but i Did have one comment on the doctor fic bout it and i am still riding that high

[queeringclassiclit]

Éowyn

from The Lord of the Rings series by J. R. R. Tolkien (1954-1955)

submitted by anon

[focsle]

Do I still have to see people blanket defining bisexuality in a reductive and incorrect way in 2023? Do I?

[in-tua-deep]

Book recommendation for yall! Found this in the library and checked it out bc I was a curious. It’s a really interesting look at the lives of women in the UK and the lesbian community, and has lots of chunks of stories from the various folks who were interviewed

The stories are very honest and very interesting! It has a lot of different answers to questions such as “how do people conceptualize themselves when they don’t have the language to do so” and is super insightful, I think a lot of it is applicable to non-UK folk as well

If your local library has it, definitely give it a read!

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Pluralities

sci-fi novella

a burned out 20-something with premonitions has a gender-questioning journey, after quitting their job and becoming friends with benefits with a trans guy

with a parallel narrative about a runaway alien prince in a space empire and his complicated friendship with his sentient spaceship friend

audiobook arc from netgalley!

[mantisgodsdomain]

Now that we are being followed by people, we need to make some thoughts and opinions clear so that people are not later Shocked And Disgusted or whatever by thoughts we have held for many years. We think it's weird and also bad to treat queer people like they're a different species from cishet people, and we think that treating things like Having A Sexuality makes a character better than if they have a different sexuality is bad no matter what way you put it.

We also think that, if in your setting queer folks are widely accepted and straight isn't a "default", it may be worth noting that, say, a straight woman might need just as much self-discovery to work out she's straight that a lesbian does nowadays. In the same manner that, in Ace Attorney, Larry Butz needs to tell Phoenix that no matter how many photos of handsome men he shows him, he's tried, he's just not attracted to men,

[stevieharringtonwifeguy]

i love the rise of intersex male omegas for a/b/o aus now bc although i've always loved the genre i'll be honest the anal birth has squicked me out in the past

but i feel like this version of the au tends to gloss over Presentation as a thing or otherwise make it so that the pussy just like. Appears. which is fine. but i think kind of an untapped potential of a/b/o in general is in the gender fuckery of it, and like the fact that male omegas and female alphas have more or less the same deal down there

so i propose that until puberty, it could be that female alphas and male omegas are entirely the same- treated as their own neutral gender bc no one can tell if they'll end up alpha or omega until puberty hits and the hormones make the relevant changes

like you could do so much there?? like the usual 'well OBVIOUSLY im going to be an alpha wait what im an omega?' but also the potential 'people were so sure i was gonna be an alpha that they used feminine pronouns for me even before i presented and the change to masculine has me feeling Some Sort Of Way (positive or negative)' or 'people aren't treating me neutrally anymore and i don't care for it' or 'yeah im glad im an omega but i was hoping i'd get to be a woman' or 'i've hit puberty but people still can't tell if im an alpha or an omega. What Do'

like a/b/o has so much gender you could be doing with it (literally as a trans guy who wants to be pregnant some day i think it's genuinely helped me to come to terms with that) but i feel like people still end up with a dichotomy of gender when you could be doing So Much More

[colorpicked-flags-from-one-guy]

The unlabeled flag picked from this one frame of Zuko!!

[serpentface]

Given what you've said about braids and their relation to traditional feminity in the Wardi Empire how does it impact Couya as an odonii priestess and as an upperclass women very involved in politics. How is Couya wearing a men's cloak viewed? What are gender expectations for odonii priestesses?

Partially elaborated in another post, but I can expand. It's complicated because Odonii experience reduced pressure to conform to expected women's roles, and a degree of 'masculinity' is accepted and normalized.

This is most prominent in that they do not marry and are expected to remain celibate (marriage and childbearing is otherwise basically a given for women, especially in the upper classes in which marriages are almost invariably arranged and a means of brokering alliances between families). This both frees them from very practical social restrictions and costs, but also of perceived spiritual pollution otherwise considered inevitable to women via pregnancy and as receiving sexual partners.

Their involvement in the military sphere (otherwise considered wholly the realm of men under normal circumstances) also by proxy frees them of certain dress standards. A lot of their base clothing would be considered 'masculine' in other contexts, being less physically restrictive and more practical for free movement. (This style of clothing would also be associated with poverty- ie women who have to perform hard labor, but this association is offset via expensive blue dyes and other visual signifiers).

They occupy a unique, somewhat nonbinary space in the cultural gender framework- they are considered women but without flaws and weaknesses considered otherwise innate or inevitable to women (and in a material sense they are afforded legal rights and privileges otherwise only accessible to men). So a degree of 'masculinity' can be not only accepted but deemed highly positive, reflective of their superior qualities. But this is only the types of 'masculinity' already implied by their roles and function (ie physical strength, practical dress, an assertive and commanding personality, etc).

This doesn't mean they are entirely freed of gender presentation norms. Couya wearing a men's style cloak is in the 'acceptable' range (would be clocked as pretty masc, but acceptably so for her station- masc dress=freedom of movement and a display of strength, appropriate for someone who serves as a physical embodiment of military might). Frequently wearing hair loose and unbraided is Not similarly appropriate. It's not just that she's diverging from an expected women's beauty standard, but that it also culturally indicates laziness, looseness, and inappropriate masculinity. It (combined with everything else) crosses the line from appropriately de-feminized to inappropriately masculinized, and will receive some scrutiny and judgment. But the very, very powerful social status of Odonii means that most of the consequences are immaterial.

So Couya more or less gets away with it, but this has contributed to her being generally unliked and a frequent subject of gossip and jokes (tends to be of the 'good thing no one has to marry THAT' and 'she swore virginhood because no one was gonna fuck her anyway' ilk, including from other priestesses). And more of this social scrutiny means her other unfavorable traits become more apparent (social awkwardness, inappropriate bluntness, etc).

Just in general she was not set up for success. She is technically an illegitimate child- her father had an affair after his wife's second son was born fatally premature. She was claimed and given the family name to avoid the associated shame on her father and legal mother above anything else.

From a young age she was considered slow, antisocial, strange, devastatingly unconcerned with presentation, and annoying (she's autistic and does not exist in a context where that is like, understood and going to be readily supported), which only further disincentivized her parents putting any real efforts into developing her into a suitable female heir. They were kind of just running through the bare minimum motions of raising her. She grew up with the (TREMENDOUS) benefits of a very wealthy family, but had no chance at receiving a good inheritance and would have been married off at the first profitable chance. She and Janeys both experienced some pretty horrific parental abuse after Faiza was selected as an Odonii (chosen by the Odomache herself, a Big Fucking Deal) and removed from the household, and this four year period kind of shaped everything she is now.

Faiza was the only member of Couya's immediate family who actually liked her, and was motivated enough to get her out of there to persuade a senior priestess to select Couya as an Odonii. Their parents readily encouraged this once the possibility became clear (becoming a high-status priestess would be of greater benefit to the family than anything Couya could have provided via marriage, and it was a little concerning that they were losing out on another chance of producing legitimate heirs, but it would be alright since they had a legitimate son who was Totally going to do that). Couya performed very well in this context and was inducted and sworn, which pretty much saved her from a life of privileged misery.

She takes her role very seriously, and on a more personal level her unconventional presentation is a matter of pride. She's kind of flaunting her status by consistently presenting this way and experiencing few consequences worse than mockery. She gets to behave and present in ways that she was punished for throughout her childhood, and there's nothing anyone can really do about it. There's definitely a "FUCK YOU MOM" undercurrent to it, but it also pleases her on its own terms. (On a less profound level, she just prefers this style of clothing, likes having a masculine presentation, and doesn't like how braided hair feels).

So like all that being said, her status as an Odonii is a powerful protection against things that would otherwise be RUINOUS for a woman of her stature, and she is Not a good case study for how her presentation would affect a woman of her political standing. She gets away with a lot and faces mainly petty social consequences.

[retributory]

on another note though i really. gotta get off my ass and write about xie lian and his gender expression because TO ME. that is an extremely important part of how i interpret his character and i always see people express confusion or distaste at the idea that he could be viewed as genderqueer when TO ME. it is very clear

[fallershipping]

I love Looker and his gender-nonconforming wife

(I love Anabel and her gender-nonconforming husband)