#like in the two blocks of tags that i've italicised

[crispyjenkins]

mandalore the young cont.

original post/discussion here! it was just getting really long and i for one hate scrolling so far, so. here's this. have also added this au to my masterlist in my pinned post!

@malcontent-crow

#i had a whole wall of tags and it didnt save! lets try this again#i am loving this. the potential for world building and the consequences of knowing more than you should (literally)

#i had forgotten that DW wasnt in peoples thoughts as a threat during the Clan Wars#and the idea that Pre was so far underground with the movement is a very good thing to remember as well! #on one hand you have this driven and spirited young verd that is inspiring Clans to start reassessing who they are fighting and why#on the other you have this clanless outsider that knows waaaaay too much about all the potential major players and is saying#that this major threat isnt really as gone as everybody thought and hoped. sith parallels out the wahoo for ppor obi#and hes standing there watching them all argue over his head about this threat that he KNOWS needs to be dealt with#he is seeing himself as pretty on par or above with the Old Guard in terms of mental age or prowess or large scale battles#so he sees them doubt him maybe even to his face and knows he'll need to get things started on his own

#and becauae everything in the galaxay has at least one person watching it from the outside... how quickly does the news of a jedi padawan#going off the rails on this mission get out? whos keeping track and who points fingers at the jedi for attempting to control the outcome#of the war of their historical enemies in their favor? the senate (read sith) want mandalore defanged before their war but what does it look#like the jedi want? how does the council answer for his actions? do they condemn or condone him? do they try to stay out of it?

#the world building potential of the Manda and the Ka'ra is delicious.#what does it mean to be a mando or darmanda? can you walk around and have people look at you and know you have failed in your oaths?

#and ouch! Obi-Wan considering the fact that he has never been allowed to be his own person.#from padawan to knight/master and then a general and councilor and sheesh. hes really never had the chance to see who he is as a person#outside of his responsibilities to everybody around him and right now hes a war worn adult in a war worn teens body#hes always had somebody else there. as a battle companion a teacher a student as somebody to protect and guard and guide#and now he has this entire culture looking at him and waiting for his next move. and im guess it still feels like less than a burden than#the care and raising of an entire child on his own. sure he had the temple resources and other jedi to lean on but anakin always looked to#him first to solve any problem or teach him something new or cuddle him after nightmares as hes trying to hide his own dreams#and grief and flounding to find his footing as an independent adult

#so right now hes looking around at the entire mando population and realizing thats he might need to reshape himself again for somebody else#to make himself what others need and knowing he can and will do it if it means saving somebody else

#and when exactly did he come back from the war? did he have satine die in his arms and see the ruin that is madalore after a pacifist reign?#does he see the potential for that ruin to happen right now if he doesnt succeed? where does he see himself in regards to the jedi?#has he considered the consequences of stepping up to be the Mand'alor to this culture he has never seen as his own?#has he let himself think about the choices he needs to make and how some things you cant always come out the other side the same as before?

(following the trend of each of these getting longer, this has hit just under 5,000 words, so just a heads up lol? so much world building is happening in this one)

sorry you had to rewrite so much! that last exchange was cursed, it seems lmao

it's so easy to write Obi-Wan as prescient, or the route I'm going with in Dha Kar'ta, so i think it's a fun change-up to have him knowledgeable for completely different reasons! I'm actually going to avoid visions almost at all for this Obi, but everyone else certainly won't know the difference, and he doesn't tell them otherwise (though he won't encourage it either. I do actually have a Naruto time travel where Nart pretends to be psychic à la Shawn Spencer, so that isn't the route I wanna go for this Obi). the consequences of knowing too much, indeed

hmmm many of these questions depend on how deep into Jedi and galactic politics I wanna go, and I'm not sure it's very deep at all. or at least, not very dragged out. i'll explain in a mo

SO first: yes, this Obi is from after Satine dies, in 19 BBY, maybe a month or so after, but before the bombing of the Temple so before Ahsoka left the Order. He was back on the front, no time to properly mourn, though he was doing his best, and was meditating on the whole war, but especially the Sith and their hand in everything that happened on Mandalore. It went deeper than Maul, he knew, had been going on longer than Maul and even Dooku, and it occurred to Obi-Wan that the Sith either wanted a Mandalore that will side with them but not be too much a threat, or they wanted them not a threat at all. He realised his hand in that, in helping put the New Mandalorians on the throne that led to the demilitarisation of the entire sector. Obi-Wan had practically teed Mandalore up for Dooku and then Maul's interference, and if the Republic won the war, he could all too easily see them doing another excision. won't get too much into it to save it for the fic, but he is mediating with something beskar, and he gets a lil too deep into the Force, and of course this is post-Mortis so...... 👀

so this Obi-Wan, back in time, is helping Mandalore to prevent any more Sith machinations in the future, to change the future for the whole galaxy, but even before he's Chosen, he realises he's also doing all of this for Mandalore. for his own hand in its destruction, for the Jedi's hand in the Excision, for his personal connection to Satine drawing Maul to it. it's for atonement, for reparation, and also because Mandalore deserves to be saved, and Obi-Wan is in a place he can help do that. it isn't just about the health of the galaxy, anymore.

I usually shy away from having Obi-Wan leave the Order, no matter what AU I'm throwing him in because I believe in the fundamental goodness of the Order and the people in it, and Obi-Wan is fundamentally a Jedi, one of the best, one of the best. however, in this case, I don't think he can have his cake and eat it too. if Dooku had to leave the Order to accept his countship, then Obi-Wan would have to leave to become Mand'alor. Jedi are (supposed to be) politically neutral, and Obi-Wan is all too aware he'd nullified his own neutrality the moment he decided to go for Keldabe to find Jango.

one of my favorite... tropes? in time travel fic is Obi using his future fellow councilmembers' access codes to get into things he shouldn't, and he certainly knows how to work the Order's internal systems in his favor, so he

wait so i was gonna have him go in and tender his resignation from the Order directly into the systems, and backdate it for before the Mandalore mission, so that anything he's done on Mandalore so far cannot be blamed on the Jedi BUT WHAT IF he just. deletes himself. like completely. from admin to the Archives to the crèche's own internal systems to the Shadow's private servers, Obi-Wan Kenobi was never a Jedi, was never a Temple bastard, was never Qui-Gon Jinn's padawan. his mission records are all in Qui-Gon's name now, his medical file simply doesn't exist, his crècheling clan is listed as simply having been a person short compared to other clans that year. he goes so far as to delete comm histories with him or mentioning him, it's like Obi-Wan Kenobi just doesn't exist anymore.

he does this first thing after leaving Jango, he spends the entire week back to Mandalore ensuring he's been completely erased from absolutely anything relating to the Jedi, and then uses his future councilmember knowledge (and lessons from Quinlan) to erase himself from Republic systems, too. any planet he'd helped as a padawan will suddenly have no records of him as having been there with his master, so the senate or Order can't subpoena them for the info, though Obi-Wan knows he can't have gotten everything (such as any planet not in the Republic, or who don't have holonet access to their files, or both, like Melida/Daan), but he figures he's done enough to absolve the Order if anyone comes knocking about what he's doing.

he buries his lightsaber in the deserts of Mandalore, not knowing that in his old future, he'd have done the same on Tatooine.

so as far as the Jedi are aware: Obi-Wan went on a mission with Qui-Gon that (predictably) went to hell, got separated from his master for weeks to months, then suddenly changed, at the same time their Jedi with the highest prescience collapsed due to his visions, which have also changed. Obi-Wan left Qui-Gon behind to hightail it through the Mandalore sector, and Qui-Gon couldn't catch up or find him, and then Obi-Wan disappeared from anyone's radars for two weeks. then Qui-Gon senses him reenter the Mandalore system, right before breaking his training bond with him, and the Order wakes up to Obi-Wan completely erased from their systems like he never existed in the first place. everything is going so so wrong, and yet. and yet.

and yet the Force is telling them all that this is right, that this is the least Dark course of action, that whatever Obi-Wan is doing is indeed the Will of the Force

so the Order mourns one of their own, and tells Qui-Gon to let him go. and then the Order ups their cyber security because what.

i think he leaves an unsigned letter/comm message for a few people. Bant, Quinlan, Mace, Feemor, his old crèchemaster, Yoda, maybe Jocasta Nu. it's short, basically thanking them for their hand in his upbringing (Feemor hasn't even met him before so is very confused by this), apologising for leaving abruptly, but to follow the Will of the Force, he had to leave; the first part of the message is all the same, but ends with little individual notes. he apologises to Madam Nu for fucking with her archives and hopes she can one day forgive him; he asks her to keep her friends close and to mend the tension between her and Dooku, that Obi-Wan should not know about. He tells Yoda that the future is always in motion but they must move with it; he asks Yoda to meditate on his dwindling lineages and learn to accept all that he cannot control. He reminds Quinlan to wear his gloves and asks him to thank Tholme for looking out for him when Qui-Gon wouldn't or didn't; he thanks him for their years together, and asks him to check in on Feemor every now and then. He apologises to Mace for all the shatter-points he likely caused and will continue to cause, and suggests he put a permanent reminder in his comm to remember to refill his migraine prescription that sixteen year-old Obi should not know about. He asks Bant to look out for a young Togruta initiate that will join in seven years, and suggests Bant might like the healer track rather than the knight corps; he thanks her for being his longest and most dearly-held friend. He thanks his crèchemaster for realising his visions were more than dreams (which will inadvertently lend credence to that theory for why Obi-Wan changed so suddenly), for supporting him when Bruck was at his nastiest, and for always being someone he could turn to even after he became a padawan. For Feemor, Obi-Wan apologises that they hadn't had the chance to meet before then, and for the relationship they won't have anymore; Feemor has no idea who this message is from, until he starts hearing the gossip that Obi-Wan Kenobi has left the Order again. He too mourns never getting to know his padawan brother.

and Obi-Wan sends Qui-Gon a message, of course, thanking him for his teachings, apologising for "leading him on" as an apprentice, leaving and coming back so many times only to permanently leave this time. he reminds Qui to reach out to his friends and his support system, asks him to at least consider talking to a mind or soul healer about Xanatos (knowing that once it gets out that Obi-Wan is a planetary leader, it will likely badly trigger Qui-Gon), and asks him to at least try and mend his relationship with Dooku, though understands if that's not something Qui-Gon is willing to do. asks him to keep Satine safe, but to deeply think about why the Republic is so intent on helping her faction, and why Qui-Gon had questioned so little of the New Mandalorian ethos.

so by the time Obi-Wan finds the Old Guard, he's broken from the Order completely, has buried his saber, has broken his training bond, has cut his braid. I think he shaves his head entirely to let it grow out at the same rate, because the padawan cut is *Eliot Spencer voice* Very Distinctive. he paints his armour white for, yes, his men, his vod'e, but also for cin vhetin. he can't be the man he was before, nor the teen he was before, neither are who Mandalore needs, and as long as he can stay true to his morals and upbringing, he will be what Mandalore needs him to be.

okay now onto the Manda vs. the Ka'ra vs. the Force. the Force is a scientific concept of an energy connecting absolutely everything in the universe, and the Jedi have a religious view on the scientific concept. for both purposes, the Force just is. I really like the idea of other non-Jedi ideas just being different aspects of the Force, different religions and cultures based on the same scientific concepts. for Mandalorians, their "aspect" of the Force is the Manda, the collective souls of every Mando'ade that's ever marched on. just what it means to be Mando'ade has varied greatly through history, and is varied between different groups even now, but none of that changes what the Manda is, which is an aspect of the Force only Mando'ade can touch. sort of like their beliefs of it being separate from the Force have made it so?

now I haven't really talked about this before, but from the beginning of me writing Mandalorian related things, i've separated Ka'ra from ka'ra, which was a little bit me misremembering there was another term for "stars", and then it became it's own thing. kar, meaning "star", with it's plural kar'e or kare, to me, means physical stars, the way we'd call our sun a star. ka'ra, uncapitalised, is the more poetic and/or spiritual "stars", the way we might say something is "written in the stars", which actually aligns with how jate'kara is spelled; for my writing, i've used this form for Mandalorian Force-sensitives being Star-touched ka'ra-touched. Ka'ra, capitalised, is that "ruling council of fallen kings", the Mandalorian myth and it, the way I've always interpreted it, is a separate part of the Manda made up of specifically the souls of every Mand'alor already marched on. So, Tor Vizsla could have joined the Manda after death, but not the Ka'ra; make sense? all that ka'ra vs Ka'ra worldbuilding was done very early in my writing for star wars, and has since expanded to include the idea of the Manda as something separate, and I would now actually consider Manda-touched over Star-touched to describe Force sensitive Mando'ade, because that's really what I think Mandalorians would consider causes their supernatural powers: ancestors rather than the stars.

so what does that mean for this fic? the Manda is directly influenced by all those that consider themselves Mandalorian, Force-sensitive or not. it is, however, not affected by New Mandalorians, unless they worship the Manda in some facsimile, and I think many, many, many do not, not the way they were raised to. this worship looks different for every clan and every individual, and I've always interpreted it as more of a broad spiritual practice across the whole culture rather than a religion, per se, the way a real-world broader culture might pray at shrines at New Years even if individuals themselves or their family aren't religious. this is what I'm referencing when I say the Will of the People: the alive Mando'ade and their choices and emotions affecting and influencing the Manda, the collective amalgamation of every passed-on Mando'ade, and it's when these two are in tandem that they "pick" a Mand'alor. HOWEVER, such a pick is also up to the Ka'ra, the Mand'alor'e that have all marched on; to one day enter the Ka'ra themselves, a Mand'alor must be "picked" by both the People/the Manda, and the Ka'ra. Tor would be "picked" by a significant part of the People and the Manda, and so would Jaster have been, but (according to me, myself, and i, obviously), only Jaster had been chosen by the Ka'ra. Pre is "Mand'alor" only in name, only in a tenuous loyalty existing in House Vizsla and Death Watch, not even by the Manda; just simple human (et al) loyalty. Jango had a weaker "pick" from the Manda than Jaster did, but was picked by the Ka'ra, meaning if he did not declare himself dar'manda (even just internally; I don't think he's ever said it out loud), he would have joined the Ka'ra after death; if he ever reconnects with himself as a Mandalorian, I like to think he'd have that chance again. Canon Jango, though, who went on to make the clones? Absolutely not.

what does this all mean for Obi-Wan? he'd spent weeks inadvertently drumming up support in the people and therefore the Manda, and maybe most haven't really looked at him and thought "sure I'd follow him as Mand'alor", but they have looked at him and thought "that one has mandokar, that one wants what's best for Mandalore, that one is touched by destiny". I dunno, man, like. Obi-Wan is their hope before he is their leader. That will make all the difference when he does end up uniting them. His searching out Jango had made Jango finally confront that he feels dar'manda, until then he hadn't really lost the Ka'ra's support, but that severs that connection. and now the Ka'ra are without a Mand'alor, but look at that, there's a mandokar'la little idiot right there, already strong in the Manda, already rallying hope and purpose, already so invested in the nurturing and the future of Mandalore, how could the Ka'ra not choose him?

I posed the question previously whether or not Mando'ade can tell who has been chosen to be Mand'alor, and I think I've ironed out what that'll mean for this fic. non-Force sensitive Mando'ade will have this sense when near their Mand'alor, a subconscious and inherent trust in them, and indeed, some will be disturbed by this and fight it. that's alright, that's their right. Some never clock this extra sense, some are aware of it always, some just chalk it up to "gut feelings" and the like. The more spiritual or religious Mandos maybe put a little more stock in this feelings, I think especially goran'e and other spiritual leaders, but the fact that the Manda can technically pick more than one person at a time (like Tor and Jaster, and then Jango), this extra sense isn't a perfect indicator of a properly chosen Manda'lor.

now. what about Force sensitive Mando'ade? Well, the Manda is an aspect of the Force, and is in fact how said Force sensitive Mando'ade connect to the Force, by going through the Manda, first. their relationship with sensitivity is inherently different from others in the galaxy, at least those that connect to it directly. they are the ones that can sense or see if someone is chosen by the Ka'ra, depending on their sensitivity. Some see the ghostly line of previous Mand'alor'e stretched out behind them (like the Avatar cycle lmao), some see a wavering crown of stars around their head, some just sense there is a duplicity (/neutral) to their Force presence that doesn't exist in anyone else. how common is Force sensitivity in Mandalorian space? not fuckin very. Jaster had three in his entire faction of aprox. 2 million (fanon number), at least that were aware they were sensitive. Jango only had a few more, and only because he had gained a couple hundred thousand more followers before Galidraan. so i'll make the nearly-arbitrary number that Force sensitive Mandos are 1 in 1,000,000, across the entire sector. by some calculations, in the whole galaxy at around the time of the Clone Wars the number of Force sensitives is 1 in 5,000,000 but these calculations do not generally include societies and species with a near or 100% chance of Force sensitivity, because we simply don't have the data for it. does this all make Mandos slightly more likely to be Force sensitive than others, by my own numbers? sorta. which i'm making an issue of underreporting, based on Mandalore not being a part of the Republic, and also contention with the Jedi and Sith; they don't consider those Manda-touched to be Force sensitive, and with the way I've built this, they aren't exactly wrong.

for the purposes of this story, there are maybe eight Manda-touched Mando'ade in the Mandalore system at this time, and all but one are goran'e. that single non-armorer is part of the Old Guard. I have the roster for the Old Guard decided, so I'm debating whether the Manda-touched one is Cort Davin (a journeyman protector), or one of the women. Instinct wants Vhonte Tervho, but I have plans for her to be related to the goran Obi-Wan got his armour done by, who I wanted to be one of the seven Force sensitive armorers, soooo. lmao how fucked would it be if Isabet Reau is the Force sensitive one? I like the angst of that, since I definitely do not plan on redeeming her, but I kind of want the only Old Guard that can sense Obi-Wan is Chosen by the Ka'ra to be really quiet and accepting of it, while everyone else is arguing. hmmm I have an unnamed Wren as part of the Guard, that I haven't fleshed anything out for yet; perhaps them?

okay I think I've solidified what it makes a Mandalorian, at least for the function of this fic. it is tied to the Resol'nare, and following it, which does allow those who had Chosen Tor Vizsla as their Mand'alor to technically still be following the Resol'nare, and are therefore not dar'manda. at least not for that. but part of the reason the Resol'nare is even able to determine who has a Mandalorian soul, is because they believe it does. Those alive and those dead influence the functionality and reality of the Manda, which also allows for those pre-Resol'nare to still exist in the Manda. What causes someone to become dar'manda, if they are technically following the Resol'nare?

maybe it's reductive, or over-simplified, or maybe even too broad, but it makes sense to me and allows for many many different types of people to still fail, and this is obviously not the only way to become dar'manda, but one thing that will always strip someone of their Mando soul? treatment of children. caring for children. not harming children. this allows many of Death Watch to still maintain their Mando souls, but still be fucked up awful people in other ways. It allows even True Mandalorians to have lost their souls and not realised it because they otherwise adhered to the Resol'nare, because they'd chosen to interpret "defending oneself and family" and "raising your children as Mandalorians" to not include other peoeple's children. Or maybe they were abusive in the belief they were caring for their children. This would also make every single one of the Cuy'val Dar dar'manda, which I think is a fascinating concept.

to answer your question directly, no, one cannot look at someone and know they're dar'manda, even the Force/Manda sensitive ones. one will only know in death, whether or not they have a place in the Manda.

NOW what does this mean for New Mandalorians?? well, by technicality and the way I've set the Manda up, one can interpret the Resol'nare in ways that could align with New Mandos. Perhaps they interpret "armour" as more than specifically "beskar'gam", maybe they wear armourweave or other protective fabrics. Maybe they interpret "defending one's family" as putting down arms instead of raising them, in order to create a peaceful future for their children. I think there are plenty of New Mandos that technically tick off all the boxes, and believe in themselves and their fellows so much that the Manda is like "yeah sure why not, we'll make that count". I think some tenants are more easily... bent, like swearing to the duchy in place of the Mand'alor, but I think an easy one New Mandos miss, is "speak Mando'a." I think many New Mandos were all too quick to switch to Basic for everything except religious and spiritual ceremonies, and I think those already in the Manda would find that very hard to forgive. I actually get into this a little in Dha Kar'ta very soon, but for this fic, i'll have Satine not outright outlawing Mando'a, but it is socially heavily discouraged. you're not allowed to speak it in the palace unless in aforementioned ceremonies, you cannot fill out paperwork in anything but Basic, you're not allowed to use Mando'a titles (including Mand'alor), you're not allowed to teach it to your children. no outright like. punishments for speaking it in public, but if your kids are caught, there are repercussions, including investigation into how else you're raising your kids, and if you're found to be doing anything else, they can take your kids from you. not every New Mando agrees with this, of course, and go about adhering to the Resol'nare as best they can in secret, but so many do give up the language by convincing themselves it's not as important as the other tenants and, well, the duchy hasn't steered them all wrong yet, has it?

okay so on the subject of what the outside galaxy is seeing. I like the headcanon/trope/idea of like. the one thing all factions of Mandalorians agreeing on is fuck everyone else. oh, the New Mandos will emulate the Core and the Republic, but they aren't the Republic nor want to be, and this animosity extends to keeping as many internal Mandlorian issues just that: internal. no faction can keep news from leaving the system or the sector, obviously, but there also isn't a lot of interest in Mandalorian news? "oh look all the Mandos are fighting again", except that's been the standard for like. actual thousands of years. I like when fic have people outside the sector not evening knowing there are different factions, so I'll be doing that here, too, and I like the idea of non-Republic sectors having their own holonets, separate from the Republic one. so like, if Obi-Wan happens to go a little viral during his mad dash to Keldabe, that would be on the Mandalorian holonet, not the Republic one, so even if Obi-Wan was visibly still a Jedi (and he wasn't), actual news of him wouldn't reach the Mid and Inner Rims until like. possible years after it happens.

could this maybe be expedited by Sith machinations? absolutely, though I'm not sure I want to go that route, since I don't think the Sith are overmuch interested in Mandalore at this point, at least not in any hands-on capacity. I'm unclear on whether them funding Death Watch is fanon or not, but it is a headcanon I subscribe to, and I think they'd have stopped funding DW after Galidraan, to cause worse infighting and prevent DW from gaining enough power to actually restart their imperial conquering days. Palpatine has been senator for about ten years by this point, but has very little political power overall, and Demask would be looking basically anywhere but Mandalore at this point in time, both of them having written it off until they actively need something from the sector. if anyone had clocked Obi-Wan as a Jedi, this all would have gone very differently, news would have spread much further and quicker and I think undoubtedly would have reached Palpatine, but since I have Obi-Wan just... cutting ties to anything Jedi, news of him remains in-sector. is this perhaps unrealistic? maybe, but I kind of want to focus on Mandalore and not worry about galactic-wide politics for once, lmao, actually very much like Obi-Wan is doing. however, he will clock a lack of Sith interference and thinks That's Very Weird.

haven't decided how he finds Palpatine out yet, but I think it'll have to do with his Manda senses being different than his Force ones, maybe the Ka'ra even gives him a few tips or gifts to sense Sith since they've allied and fought with them so much in the past. regardless, that'll be after he's become Mand'alor and united the clans.

now to actual plot progression! Obi-Wan meets up with the Old Guard, they don't know what to make of him other than "he's kriffing weird. and young. and creepy. and probably Manda-touched." whatever other verd is Manda-touched will see him blessed by the Ka'ra, which causes them to look inwards more closely and realise they trust Obi-Wan inexplicably, which means they're blessed by the Manda and the Will of the People, too. they wonder if Obi-Wan has noticed, if any of the other Old Guard have noticed. they are one of a few that notice Obi-Wan sneaking back out while everyone is arguing.

Vhonte Tervho is another. She's at this lil summit to represent clan Tervho, tho isn't the clan head, because her ba'vodu, a Manda-touched goran, had sensed she needed to be at the summit. said ba'vodu is of course the armorer who reforged Obi-Wan's armour (need to find a name for them hmm), who had told their clan they were to cease fighting until their new Mand'alor called on them. Vhonte sees Obi-Wan, realises at the same time as everyone that he's the Kih'Manda, the Mand'ika that the entire system had been gossiping about for weeks, and she thinks of what her ba'vodu said. she looks inwards, like they had taught her to, and finds, yes, she trusts Obi-Wan, just like she used to trust Jango. And, well, her Mand'alor is obviously leaving to go do something, and she isn't going to let him go it alone.

the Manda-touched verd doesn't go with them, wanting to see what comes of this, but they already know Obi-wan is Ka'ra Chosen. they will come when he calls.

[lactose-intolerant-nihilism]

okay I have been Thinking and I'd like to propose a different way of thinking about gender through the lens of like brain function and stuff. it'll require me to talk about ADHD for a while but bear with me I'll get to gender eventually

(also this post is very long and kind of structured like an essay, so I've had to split off some clarifications and things into footnotes at the end. They look like this (12), and correspond to entries in the bit after the read more tag. Also lots of things are italicised or bolded because I have ADHD and it's hard to read long blocks of text without that.)

TLDR: Gender is a collection of many, many traits, not a single trait. The ideas of gender we use are just tools for understanding and communication, and multiple can be true at once.

That said, here's:

Gender, Brains and Boxes - An Essay I wrote in the Middle of the Night for No Good Reason

Terminology - Traits and Conditions

In which I try to set up a framework through which you might understand me

So the terminology around mental traits and conditions is a bit messy at the moment, which makes sense considering the field is only a little over a century old, so it hasn't had the time to cycle through different models and terminology that other scientific fields like physics, biology etc. have had. For this reason, I'll have to clarify some terms here at the start:

A single characteristic of the brain's behaviour is a 'Mental Trait’ (1).

Every characteristic of a person's mind (except memory which is more complicated) is a mental trait - your skill with a certain instrument, the degree to which you can focus on certain types of tasks, the fact that certain stimuli always make you sad, the ability to recognise emotions on faces or patterns in things you are seeing, etc. These are all mental traits of one kind or another. (2) The causes of these traits vary - some may have a purely genetic basis, some may be caused by environmental conditions (the trait of being skilled at piano is gained by learning piano, the trait of being scared of certain stimuli may be gained by trauma relating to them, etc) and many are ‘phenotypic’, meaning they are caused by a combination of both genetics and environmental factors.

There are certain mental traits which commonly appear alongside each other, either because one trait leads to another or because they both stem from the same cause. Because of this, it can be useful to group traits together. A mental trait may be caused by different things, meaning the root of them is different and only the result is similar (for instance, a lot of traits overlap between autism and ADHD but the ways of managing those traits are very different between the conditions), so these broader patterns are important to understand.

This is where the terminology gets a bit messy - since the terminology was first developed to describe mental illness, all the terms traditionally used to describe patterns of traits imply to some degree that what you are describing is ‘wrong’, ‘harmful’ or otherwise a problem. There is no consensus on how to describe a benign pattern of traits. However, more recently and generally in regards to autism, some have begun using the term ‘condition’ to describe a set of traits that is not harmful, so I will be using this terminology here.

What Separates Different Conditions?

In which I talk about ADHD in more detail than was probably necessary

To explain mental conditions properly before I move on to applying them to gender, I’ll use the example of ADHD:

ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (a name I have some objections to, not least that every single word in it is definitionally at least a little bit wrong, but it’s what it’s called so I’ll stick to it) is a mental condition. In some contexts it can be seen as a mental illness, while in others it can be seen as benign, but the exact definition of illness and harm is far more complicated (3) so I’ll be ignoring it here. 

What is now called ADHD used to be seen as two different conditions - ADD and ADHD. Nowadays, it has been realised that these are one condition which can present in different ways for a number of reasons. This is an important clarification since ADHD can pass genetically from parent to child, but may present differently between them, so you may not otherwise recognise it as the same condition.

There are three ‘presentations’ which ADHD individuals may be grouped into - ‘predominantly inattentive’, ‘predominantly hyperactive’ and ‘combined’. These terms, on the surface, mostly speak for themselves; while there are certain mental traits which constitute ADHD, some may only appear in certain presentations, or may be stronger in one presentation than in another.

Of course, if you’re paying attention, you may have noticed something strange about that definition - what’s the difference between a ‘condition’ and a ‘presentation of a condition’? There isn’t one. A condition is a set of traits, and a presentation is also a set of traits. The different presentations of ADHD share most of their symptoms, so it makes sense to link them, but ADHD also shares many of its symptoms with autism. It makes sense to separate ADHD and autism due to their differing causes, but ADHD, autism and a number of other conditions such as Tourettes and OCD are comorbid, meaning someone with ADHD is more likely to have Tourettes or autism than someone without it (and vice versa, for the most part), thus meaning either their causes overlap to some degree or they are themselves factors in the causes of the others. If you take this to its logical extreme, it would be possible to call ADHD, autism, Tourettes, OCD etc all presentations of a single big condition.

We don’t do that for the same reason we make a distinction between mammals, reptiles and fish even though all animals are, taxonomically speaking, fish: if we didn’t the terms would no longer be useful to us.

Models and Relative Truth

In which you realise that nothing means anything without intent and spiral into a fun new variety of existential crisis

The odd thing about this sort of terminology is that, despite describing real phenomena, ideas like ‘conditions’ are arguably fictional. This is true of all models; they abstract the fullness of the truth into a much smaller, easier to understand idea which is close enough to the truth to work in practice, so that humans can deal with complicated ideas without having to understand the fullness of time and succumb to Lovecraftian madness. They are still true in the middle, at the cost of the truth fraying slightly at the edges.

To continue my example from the previous section, taxonomy is fictional. Groupings like ‘species’ and ‘class’ don’t exist in nature, we made them up to help us more easily understand the actual phenomena, which they do in nearly all cases. However, you occasionally get outlier situations like ring species (4) which expose the fact that certain complexities of nature don’t fit into the model, meaning that for these outliers the general model is no longer useful.

Let’s return to the example of ADHD presentations. The presentations of ADHD are generally described with these three boxes, but this is only a model. The exact traits of one person with predominantly inattentive ADHD may differ from another person with the same presentation. The reason they both fall into that label within the model is because those two individuals will be more similar to each other than they will be to a person with predominantly hyperactive ADHD - these terms are not untrue, only relative. They exist to be useful for communication.

Both me and my father have ADHD, and as far as we’re currently aware we both fall under the ‘combined presentation’ label. Despite this, my father expresses more hyperactive traits than me, and I more inattentive traits than him. You may have noticed that ‘combined’ as a label communicates much less information about what it is describing, and that is because it is describing a broader area of presentation - everything that is not one of the other two groups. If, finding that this trinary model starts to break down in this area to the point of no longer being useful, you wanted to model it another way, you could validly model ADHD presentation as a spectrum between the poles of inattention and hyperactivity, like this:

Oh hey, I feel like I recognise this from somewhere.

This spectrum is also a model, though this one is designed to be able to more accurately describe the otherwise hard to describe points in the central section of the spectrum. However, even this model is not perfect - it presupposes ideas like that presenting more inattentive always means presenting less hyperactive. In these cases, this model would break down just like the last one did, and you would need to formulate a different, even more specific model to represent them, such as breaking it into two spectrums of inattentiveness and hyperactivity which both run from low to high. But this model would too have its outliers, and would beget an even more specific and specific model - this complexity is the price of accurate communication. This is why fields often have specific jargon which is impenetrable to outsiders who aren’t familiar with it - to communicate specifically and accurately, you need very complicated models.

The rub here is that each new model is not more true than the models before it, it is only more specific. It is just as true to call ADHD one condition as it is to call it three presentations as it is to call it a spectrum of presentations as it is to call it a collection of mental traits. They are all just different models, some more useful than others depending on the situation in which they are used.

The Prestige

Sike I’ve been talking about gender this whole time also

Gender is a deeply complex concept. We don’t yet fully understand its causes or effects from a neurological perspective, but I can say with near-absolute certainty that most of this confusion and complexity comes from gender being a system of traits rather than a trait unto itself as it has been viewed historically in most societies. A ‘condition’, to put it in the terms we have been using here, though I’d tend to avoid that term for gender due to its pathological implications I discussed earlier.

In most societies, including the one I’ve grown up in, the socially accepted model of gender is a binary - either male or female. In some societies, there is a third or fourth gender added into this group-based system, (5) but nevertheless gender is split into a number of set groups. Within a set group gender system - particularly a binary one - it is thus easy to see gender as a single trait. 

First, queer groups and certain medical fields began to notice the furthest extreme of this system breaking down; binary trans people. Where the previous model had equated gender to biological sex (7), they were seeing that people could be male in a female body and female in a male one, so the model had to change (as much as that change was and still is resisted).

More recently (on the scale of history, by which I mean in the past 50 years or so), queer groups have begun to recognise states of gender for which the binary breaks down altogether - nonbinary people. ‘Non-binary’ as a label functions similarly to how ‘combined’ did back with ADHD. Nonbinary genders have been modelled countless ways, from the hyper-specific labels of MOGAI to broad umbrella terms queer and nonbinary. The exact meaning of certain terms will vary depending on the person using them.

All of these models are true. As with the other models I’ve shown, the only distinction between them is how useful they are in a certain context.

If we treat gender as a system, a ‘condition’ of the brain, the broadness of varieties of gender - presentations of gender - makes much more sense. Like any condition, like any model, gender is a useful fiction. An abstraction. The only things within gender that are objectively real are the specific mental traits - certain presentations (such as clothing, pronouns, etc) feeling right and others feeling wrong, certain parts of one’s biology feeling right or wrong, etc, etc, etc. A million traits and subtle variations on traits which appear in a million million different combinations to produce the system we understand as the singular concept of gender.

As far as I can tell, nobody’s gender is exactly identical to anyone else’s, not even cis people’s. The majority of people are just close enough to the poles that they don’t feel wrong. A person brought up in a binary society may be one gender and feel no issue with that, while if they had been brought up in a more loosely gendered society, they would’ve been something else - something more specific. (6) Another person may be so far off of the binary pole they were ascribed that they can’t comfortably exist there at all.

It all varies, it’s all made up, and it’s all true. Brains are just like that, man, welcome to being human.

— FOOTNOTES AFTER THE READ MORE —

There is contention over this definition in the field stemming from drawing the line differently between the 'brain' and the 'mind' but for my purposes I will be ignoring that and treating them as synonymous.

One could also quibble about what exactly constitutes a 'single characteristic', since things that outwardly appear to be a one thing may actually be the interplay of multiple traits, but if a century of science hasn't been able to find a hard line there then I'm not going to be able to in a tumblr post so this definition is good enough for me.

One of the many problems with pathologising mentality is how vague the definition of ‘harm’ is for conditions that aren’t literally killing you. A mental illness is just a mental condition which is harmful to you or others, but what exactly does that mean? Sure, depression is clearly harmful since it includes traits that stop you from experiencing joy and can lead to suicidal ideation, but is autism harmful? Having autism can cause you many forms of social harm, but that harm is at the hands of a society not built for autistic people, not the actual behavioural difference, so if you called autism a mental illness you could just as validly call homosexuality a mental illness on the grounds that society treats gay people worse. It’s all a subjective mess so I’ve just been skirting around it.

A ring species is a species that populates a range around some geographic obstruction, wherein every adjacent group can interbreed, but the groups at either end cannot, meaning they are both the same species and different species simultaneously.

Notable modern examples include the ‘hijra’ or ‘kinnar’ of India and the ‘two-spirit’ or ‘gender variant’ people of the First Nations (the latter of which is a fairly recent term invented in the 90s to offer a unified term for the many, many different examples of third genders which appear in different American Indian cultures). Historical examples go back as far as the ancient greek myth of Hermaphroditus and the sekhet of ancient Egypt. I’m not an expert on this stuff so go look for a more primary source if you wanna know about this stuff.

This isn’t so much a footnote as a personal anecdote, but this is Tumblr not an academic paper so I can do what I want. I’m nonbinary - I’m male, but I’m not just male. Depending on context, I can be anything from male to female to both to neither. In wider society, though, I am male. It’s not necessarily a matter of being closeted like it would be for many others, I’m only ever a kind of closeted at the worst of times; wider society uses a model of gender in which the closest option to what I am is male, so in those contexts I consider myself to be male. The whole system is interpretive and contextual, so what I am, what the truth is, is contextual too. That’s true of me specifically, and may or may not be true of anyone else, I don’t actually know, but that’s the kind of very specific, contextual, variable gender which can’t fit perfectly into any of the models I’ve ever seen, and must be abstracted into something similar-but-not-quite-the-same to be able to be easily communicated. ‘I both am and am not a man’ is too confusing to mean anything without clarification, after all.

Due certain grey areas in our models of sexual biology, biological sex itself isn’t actually a binary either, hence the existence of intersex people, but that’s a topic for another time.