biidkyloren:

harleyismyhero:

clitcheese:

I’m actually not sure.

It became a thing in about 2014 when truscum discourse was at it’s peak (your basic anti-nonbinary, only 2 genders, trans is a mental illness type bullshit that we’re still seeing today), and at the same time, the otherkin community was first starting to be visible and was under attack by trolls. I remember 4chan had multiple attempts to take over the otherkin tags with gore and porn. and otherkin had to change their tags about 4 or 5 times in a few months to keep in hiding

so with these both happening at once, a really effective tactic they found was to purposefully confuse the two communities. pretending that people being trans is anything like identifying as something magical. things like frostgender and dragongender and cupcakegender came up, there was a lot of troll blogs coming up saying they identify as a food item, or random household objects, or things that were only funny because they’re hyper specific. one really embarrassing troll blog claimed to be a specific crumb that fell into Abraham Lincoln’s​ beard at some point in history.

and Reddit had tumblrinaction, which was really bad at the time. all the troll blogs made up by redditors would get shared on Reddit, who would then take it seriously and think, holy shit are otherkin really this embarrassing? which would inspire them to go harass otherkin and nonbinary kids on anon, and posting gore in the tags and stuff like that, and then make their own fake blogs to share on Reddit about how bad otherkin are. it was a really gross cycle. people laughing at troll blogs because they assumed all the troll blogs were authentic, it was really the definition of a circlejerk

so. about frostgender specifically. i have no idea if a single real person has ever actually identified with it because it came into being at that time. i’m sure it was to make fun of other abstract genders like voidgender and spacegender, which from what i hear are still common in some nonbinary circles? someone who uses them could probably explain it better. there was a big, big pushback against specific genders, like, people were coming up with new names for their experiences and then got mocked because “only one person is this gender, so how could it possibly be real?”

remember that, really every gender is abstract. they’re either an abstraction built up by the patriarchy like Man and Woman or they’re an abstraction you make for yourself. i think a lot of the pushback was a lot of people’s anxieties that gender had to be based in something “real”, even though i don’t really know /why/ i’m trans and no person can really explain their gender with empirical evidence. I can’t take my gender out of me and show it to everyone in the room​

(quick aside, even TERFs still tend to describe cis-womanhood as something vaguely sacred and holy to them, as if all women are connected by “feminine energy” or “shared girlhood”, often talking about how women are the intrinsically Nurturing gender. even if they can assign vaginas to their very abstract beliefs, they’re still not really evidence-based, u get me. Terfism took a lot from those old, radical feminist wiccan cults. are they still around? does anyone know?)

it’s important to know that, the otherkin community from what I’ve seen is really respectful and has never claimed to be anything like trans. also, i’ve only met otherkin who are also trans so far? don’t ask me to explain how. but i know that, there was never any confusion as to wether otherkin is a trans thing or not until all this happened. i know a lot of trans people still treat otherkin with suspicion for a lot of things like, making trans people look “crazy” by association. all the made up genders was actually a really effective tactic and, well Otherkin is still just a huge cringe thing 3 years later and that might not end for a long time.

so yeah. i really just used frostgender as shorthand for those rare, uncommon nonbinary identities that very few or no one outside trans communities would believe are real. to say that people aren’t really going to trust in people’s individual identities if they aren’t backed up by something like 2 thousand of years of cis-sexism, for example

Hey! So I’m on mobile rn and can’t provide any handy links at the minute, but basically what you’re talking about is known as xenogenders, which are a subcategory of nonbinary genders, and they are very much a thing! I’m not sure if frostgender is one or not, cuz there’s a lot of then and I can’t remember them all, but probably.

A lot of xenogenders are related to being otherkin or neurodivergent, but not all of them.

A lot of xenogenders are related to concepts or nature, like stargender or cryptogender

And yea, xenogenders tend to get even more backlash than more well-known nb genders, especially ones that very few people id with, but that doesn’t make it any less real (or gender in general any less made up, depending on how you look at it I guess)

Also the Wiccans you’re thinking of are called Dianics

Pocket Gendered is also a good term for when less than like, eight or so people identify with a specific gender label! (such as most of mine are)