What It Means To Be Slime

27 June 2023

Preface:

Gender experiences that we'd now refer to as xenogenders have existed forever. They're seldom recorded but they are real. Unfortunately, they're hard to find and access in terms of information, because, until recently, there was no unified term for this type of "alternative" gender experience. Because of this, research materials are limited for historical examples. Similarly, much of the 2014 Tumblr discussion that formed the modern idea of xenogenders, and some of the documentation of the formation of xenogenders themselves, has been lost to deletion and link decay. I rely a lot on the LGBTQIA wiki and Christine Feraday's thesis for the  2010 era documentation in this article. I know those sources are controversial, but the information I've used is sound, and I did bolster/confirm it with from-the-source Tumblr info. I also want to state that I'm going to be discussing this from the lense of the English language. I'm not trained well enough in any other languages to speak on something as linguistically complex as neopronouns in languages outside English, though there are many examples.

The Beginning of The Modern

The first recorded use of the word "xenogender" was on Tumblr in 2014. A user called baaphomett coined the term, defining it as:

"a gender identity that cannot be contained by human understandings of gender; more concerned with crafting other methods of gender categorization and hierarchy such as those relating to animals, plants, or other creatures/things"

Baaphomett created the term to fill a pressing lexical gap that some nonbinary people were experiencing when trying to denote traits of their gender. This experience can be hard to explain, why wouldn't nonbinary suffice if the most notable aspect of your gender is that it doesn't fit the binary? It can and does suffice in most conversations with outsiders (cis people especially) but this lexical gap was pressing not for communications with outsiders, but for internal communication- within the self and the ingroup.

I think one of the first steps for many queer people's self exploration, especially in the age of the internet, is poring over labels and their literature. Tons of trans people discuss how they "didn't have language" for what they were feeling, and when they discovered transness as a concept, they felt more whole. This is natural, we are a language focused people, language is how we actualize things that can't be actualized physically yet (or ever). Speaking true words about yourself can act as a sort of manifestation, not in the magical sense, but in that those aspects feel more real to you when uttered. It creates a self fulfilling prophecy, of becoming, when we say "I'm trans" for the first time, even if entirely alone, we become. It's because of all this that language is an especially powerful tool when inspecting gender, particularly your own. When I was first making a real effort to understand myself, I'd say stuff aloud, or type it, to try out how it felt: "I'm bisexual" "I'm a trans man". Doing this with statements about yourself spurs an instantaneous physical and emotional reaction, and worked, for me, as a kind of detector for my subconscious. I called myself a trans man for awhile, but every time I'd say it, it felt like a lie, uncomfortable, like I needed to force the words. I, like many trans people, didn't have the language for what I really was.

Tumblr (2014ish) and Mogai

The coining of the term xenogenders came at an interesting time for Tumblr. 2014 is one of the most iconic years for the website, because of the boom in interest in queer and "leftist" theory that occurred around then. The site was no stranger to theory, it had been present there since its inception, but the reach of the theory hit new heights from 2012-2014. Folks that had never heard of queer theory knew Tumblr for its interest in this-mom's and dad's and aunts and uncles were being introduced to advanced theoretical concepts (that had been run through a pale grunge game of telephone) via their 14 year old family members. YouTube videos and blog posts elsewhere discussing the literature and writers there exploded. A part of this explosion was the movement from which "xenogenders" was born- mogai.

Mogai is an acronym, standing for "marginalized orientations, gender alignments, and intersex". The term was coined by a Tumblr user, a 14 year old called cisphobeofficial or cloud. It was created during a discussion about the ever-lengthening LGBTQIA acronym, and the difficulty of true inclusion in language. The discussion occured over multiple years, with the acronym changing many times, but the sentiment remained the same- we want to communicate the experience and oppression of less common and multi-intersectionally marginalized types of queer folk while not excluding anyone else. The community eventually settled into "mogai" sometime in March 2014. After establishing mogai and the community around it, "xenogender" was the first new term created for identities under the umbrella. It was followed closely by "neurogender" and "egogender", both of which would be regarded as xenogenders today.

The mogai movement contained some polarizing beliefs- that queer had been a slur and thus shouldn't be used in general ways to describe our "community" members, and that we needed to find an all-encompassing, perfect acronym that could be easily and quickly typed.  This, combined with mogai's focus in coining xenogenders and the young age of the folks involved, created a storm of controversy within and without the queer community. Many folks took issue with the reliance on language within xeno spaces. They feared that folks would start to build their identities and selves around the words, that they'd become prescriptive rather than descriptive. Especially for young people. Other folks thought some of the new-formed genders were offensive, particularly the neurogenders like autismgender. They believed relating transness so closely with neurodivergence would mean cis/straight folk would adopt queer identity via their neurotypes or mental illnesses. Others thought it made transness seem disordered, a belief that was opposed by many in the community. But to be honest, the most common anti-xeno statement at the time, and now, is that we're cringy, immature, and unreal.

Immature

In November of 1752, a child was born in Rhode Island to a couple of quakers, their 8th. The kid's life was as regular as a quakers could be until 1776. At the age of 24, having just been expelled from their quaker society, and while recovering from typhus, they had an epiphany. They declared themself The Public Universal Friend, stating who they were before had died. The Public Universal Friend denounced gendered pronouns and chastised those who used The Friend's dead name. The Friend denied being male or female, but something else, a friend. The Friend eventually started Friend's own Quaker Society and amassed some like-minded followers. Some of these followers became close friends of The Public Universal Friend's and, even in their private journals, referred to The Friend with PUF's  full name, PUF, or The Friend.

In the 1980s a group of British nerds invented a tabletop war game that would later gain a rabid following. The game is known for its complex but satirical lore, a large part of which being the factions and their deities. One of the most popular of these deities is Slaanesh, an anthropomorphic horned goat deity of excess and hedonism. One of the books detailing this deity includes an aside explaining slaanesh's gender situation. It reads:

Shem's pronouns were accepted by the Warhammer community, and the game would go on to do more gender fuckery, albeit with thankfully updated language.

In the 1810s, a person called Simon Ganneau was cooking up a new religious ideology involving androgyny and the combination of the masculine and feminine, named Evadaisme. The mapah created a new word the mapah would be referred by- the mapah, a combination of mater and pater, the Latin words for mother and father respectively.

In the 2023 gender census, a yearly online census of trans people, "it" pronouns were reported as preferred pronouns by 19.4% of respondents, up 3.2% from 2022. And xe/xyr reported as preferred pronouns by 12% of respondents.

Our experiences and stories as xenofolk have been pushed to the fringes of recordation. In researching this article, I turned up next to no sources discussing neopronouns, in relation to alternative gender alignments, before the rise of mogai. The sad thing is, I'm sure they exist. I'm sure people were writing about this before me and before mogai, in handmade zines from the 90s and previous. But it's gone now, lost to time and genderqueer basement boxes. I know it can be cheesy to discuss historical examples of queerness. It can read almost neolib in its display of value- see this is old so it's good. But this isn't about age, it's about relation and precedent and development. I wanted to show how similar ideas about alternative genders have always been, how similarly they're born and evolve and that people like us have always felt this way and gone out of their way to record it. And similarly, that there's always been an interest in us, though not always positive.

Much of the anti-xeno sentiment is that it's a newfangled trend of internet-sick teenagers, that it's a delusion specific to the globalization of the modern world. A contagion of nonsense spreading via ocean-bound cables. Xenogenders and their discussion have flourished with the internet /because/ it gives us a place to record. A place to lay bare the sticky strange aspects of our genders for other genderweirds to see. The lack of information about us meant that when folks began sharing, and when the sharing caught traction (see mogai), an electric excitement hit the airwaves. This, too, is why the initial mogai boom resulted in a sort of mad dash of gender creation. Gender creatives had been stifled, convinced they were unreal for too long.

Unreal

When mogai hit the mainstream in the 2010s, it was closely followed by a preexisting, but strengthening movement of transfolk called Truscum or transmedicalists. These trans folk are defined by a pathologized belief of gender and transness- namely that transness rests upon the diagnosis of a mental disorder called gender dysphoria disorder. These beliefs are the modern iteration of the original blanchardism from the 80s, that designated gender dysphoria in the DSM, and recontextualized the concept to the cis and trans public alike. This medical model had sprung up previous to the 80s, but the DSM with Blanchard's involvement solidified the medical pathway to transition as being the definitive- the only real- transness. The ideology also predominantly focused on trans women, leaving trans men often without medical care and trans women under the panoptical microscope of the medical industry. Many trans people, including myself, believe this to have been devastating to the "trans community"

at large, and to trans activism. This obsession with quantitative transness would be the basis of much intra and inter community violence throughout the 2010s, and continuing into the 2020s.

I started coming out in 2015, in the midst of the worst of the YouTube hate campaign spearheaded by these "real transexuals". I watched Blair White and the truscum crew bully xenogender minors to the brink of suicide and get nary a blink from anyone but other xenos. I saw Twitter and Facebook posts with the attack helicopter joke go viral weekly. I watched Isobel Fall, a transfeminine writer of great talent, get bullied into silence, and possibly detransition, because of her amazing work "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" and its metaphorical discussion of non-human genders. The vibe in the studio was RANCID and I fell into community with trans men because I wasn't sure where else to go. I knew I was trans, but I didn't know how, and the sewage from these creators was leaking into me. I thought the only way I COULD be trans was to be a man, even though that didn't feel entirely right. I experimented with bigender, but made the fatal mistake of googling this phrase and was met with dozens, if not hundreds of posts calling bigender people, "insane freaks that don't understand sexed brain theory".

Small aside: Sexed Brain Theory

I think this shit was some of the most damaging shit I ever read and subscribed to. Multiple studies have been done throughout the years trying to prove fundamental differences in the brains of differently sexed people, but it's never been conclusive. More and more neuroresesechers have come out to denounce this theory, and point out how previous studies claiming to have proved it, had an agenda.

I felt very confused, especially because I just didn't, and couldn't relate to the experiences of most of the trans people around me. I didn't feel a burning sureness for HRT, I didn't experience gender euphoria when my friends all switched to entirely he pronouns. I bought a packer, but it took me 2 weeks to find one because I was frustrated that they were all "human skin colors" and refused to buy one that didn't have suspended glitter. When making lists of transition materials, I'd find my mind wandering to neon body paint and tattoos rather than binders and T. I lamented that the surgeries I'd thought up were rarities in the medical field (both sets of genitalia, getting one breast removed), or that other procedures I wanted required years of HRT (hysterectomy, both types of bottom surgeries). At first, I thought these "weird" thoughts and wishes were standard for budding trans people, and this was confirmed by a dominant belief at the time- that nonbinaryness was primarily a stepping stone to "binary" transdom, rather than a robust and singular alignment. So I found solace in the idea that one day soon, I'd love being a man. But that day never came. Instead, I grew increasingly uncomfortable with being a man, my hidden self becoming more sure this label was incorrect. I started to panic at the realization that these desires- for unnaturally colored skin, for unknowable traits, for amorphousness, for glitter, for transparency and androgyny and ooze- were my true desires. I was a trender and my existence was harmful to "real" trans people.

Initially, I swore these thoughts weren't real. That they were just my slimegirl fetish rearing its ugly head at the wrong time. But I felt longing like I'd never known looking at the molasses swamp monster on the Candy Land box. I felt real kinship, and burning jealousy, watching that anime where the guy becomes a slime. I felt sureness and becoming in slime characters, the way my friends described they did with similar, more standard trans representation. The feelings continued for months and I cried myself to sleep most nights, violently clutching my tits, hating them for their inability to morph. I plunged fingers into my pussy and sobbed at the small strings of slime that clung to them, wishing to hate them, and wishing to be them. I felt insane and I am, but not in the way I thought. I knew I was right when I started to feel suicidal. I hadn't told anyone about my newfound gender, not even my partner and best friend of many years, and the isolation with these thoughts and the truscum YouTubers was pushing me to the brink.

I mustered up the courage to ask my roommate and best friend to use "it" pronouns for me in 2018, and the reaction was negative. It's understandable she had this reaction, and I do not hold it against her (she has since some around), but it was an incredibly bad time for this lack of understanding. I'd spent the last few years in a bad bad way, homeless off and on, struggling with addiction, and facing this bizarre gender "problem". And the first time I try to share it with anyone, they repeat the rhetoric I'd been self harming with online for the last 3 years. It was in response to this reaction that I sought solace in the mogai. Seeing folks openly discuss their bread-related gender dysphoria was joyful, and kind of funny, and a breath of fresh air among a sea of transmedicalist smog. Those kids helped me find myself. For all their warts, they were, and are, true radicals, and the only people to understand me when I was at my lowest.

Cringy

The main thing the Mogai helped me with was confidence. My confidence had been beaten down for years as I shrank more and more into myself. I doubted my every thought and was convinced I was deeply lying to myself. Lying for attention, to be interesting, to be included in the trans community, all things the truscum crew taught me. But when I shed the cringe I grew my skin. I began exploring more with what brought me euphoria, and dysphoria. I found that a moisturizing regiment with sparkly products was one of the best ways to trigger euphoria. I'd get the bathroom perfectly steamy and emulsify the lotion and the glittery oil in my hands, imagining the barriers of skin and glittery goo breaking. I was replenishing my ooze after the harshness of the day. I loved my glittery packer and wore it often to work and the grocery store. I experimented with makeup looks, deciding on glittery inner corners and stamped black hearts to depict floating detritus in my goo. I researched purple body paint and made art of myself in the goo image. I found blue raspberry flavored things made me feel gender euphoria, and watching media with goo characters. Any process by which my body made goo became nearly sacred, culminating in a small mental breakdown when my birth control made my pussy dry (lol). I'd been performing a strange hyperfemininty at the time because I was working in SW, and I shed that for my more natural butch presentation. I chose rich, vibrant colors, and fingers full of rings that I wished could sit suspended in my hands. Oversized clothes helped me feel formless, and I stopped binding or wearing bras of any kind because the bounce and jiggle of my boobs reminded me of goo. I put on weight to capture more of this jiggle (and recover from previous homelessness). Nowadays, I have my partner and friends to help with euphoria. My partner said to me recently, "it's so weird to be around family that calls you 'she'. To me you're just so clearly an 'it'". My best friend sends me Halloween creatures and says "thought of you. Spooky gender". My friends on Twitter call me Dirty Bubble.

I felt dysphoria at the hardness of parts of my body. One time a sex partner said my body was "so tight" and, while a compliment, made me feel strange. I wished my hair thicker, so it would be heavier, and move more like a viscous material, but it's thin and fine and stands straight up. The dryness of my skin really bothered me, having dry hands or feet made me inconsolable. Having to dress in rigid clothing (items I once previously enjoyed) was horrific. And then of course all the standard enby-in-a-world-of-excessive-frivolous-gendering triggers or hey-youre-a-woman-you-know-that-u-birth-babies-and-have-a-womb-large gametes-womanly hips-youre-invited-to-the-women-only-wedding-shower triggers.

But with my new confidence, I could face the world as myself. As an ooze, as slimegender. As silly as it sounds, it's real and I'm me. I don't know how this happened, I don't really care anymore. It's cringy and weird and hardly anyone gets it, but it doesn't matter. No xeno or any other flavor of trans person needs to explain their inner machinations to anyone else, especially not cis people. But I think there's value in sharing. Complex and dedicated accounts of the xeno experience are few and far between and this can leave new xenos confused and pushed to trans spaces that are not meant for them and don't want them. There is no shame in relating to gender weirdly, through objects or concepts or fictional characters. And while I don't think the mogai's infinitely genderful world is plausible, or even a good theoretical solution, I think there's great value in being creative with gender relation and alignment. The established language for gender is still very finite and binary and the abstract expression of the messy feelings that are gender can be well encapsulated with equally as abstract and messy language.