Hello, I posted this in ''vent page'' a couple days ago but it's still on my mind and I just need to see if anybody else thinks something from what she said. So I was creating a character for a book and in this book xyr are grown from space and not made. Anyway, so I finished making my character and showed xem to her. When she asked ''who is he'' I said ''their name is [insert name]'' and I used 'they' pronouns but in a forceful manner because I knew those weren't the right ones for the character but wouldn't understand the ones I wanted to use. She picked up on this and said ''is that another non-gendered character'' in an exasperated tone. She used ''non-gendered'' with the -ed and we know that isn't okay as it's past tense. Anyway, so I waited for the show I was watching and went to my room. The way she said it made it sound she sounds like she doesn't think non-binary (or non-gender in the terms of this character) exists and that she thinks I'm being silly for creating these characters. My questions; Am I overlooking anything? Am I overreacting? Does this mean she wouldn't accept me being agender? Thank-you.
You know... Cis people have problems with grasping the "gender identity" issues. Getting cis to understand binary transgender is difficult, even more the agender, bigender etc. It would take time and resourcefulness to explain it. It's not easy. Non gendered is not a past tense thing. The same way "bored" isn't indicating the past thing, just a state. This reminded me of "assigned male" webcomic and stories&character episode (recent one). Nice read overall, maybe show it to her. There are no binary people. How about showing her real life people's stories?
To be honest if you keep something from her and she pics up on this (as all women usually do) then certain responses are a normal reaction to that isn't it? You don't trust her so she doesn't trust you back. (That's very black and white ofcourse).
Well that certainly is frustrating. Cis people tend to feel like writing multiple trans/nonbinary characters is excessive because they don't realize how few trans/nonbinary characters exist. I don't know if she means she doesn't believe in nonbinary genders or if she just thinks you're too focused on them and overdoing it. Either way, it doesn't necessarily mean she won't accept you. People can be more accepting of friends than they would be of strangers. "Non-gendered" isn't actually grammatically incorrect, although "nonbinary" or "agender" would be more fitting. Generally, "gendered" refers to objects/clothes/etc. e.g. you could described toys as being unnecessarily gendered because it's silly to ascribe gender to inanimate objects. Referring to the character as "non-gendered" would mean that the character had not had a gender assigned to them, which is technically accurate if the character is agender, but still a weird way to phrase it. The issue is with the word "transgendered".
