Recugender: “To identify with your birth gender, but you refuse to be cis; to be used as recugirl or recuboy. From the latin word ‘recuso’, meaning ‘to refuse’.”
“This is just cis people saying ‘cis’ is a slur!” No it’s not. There are many queer people who need words like “recugender” to communicate their experiences.
“Cis people are going to take advantage of this!” Non-queer people have been taking advantage of queer labels since they started learning about them. Transphobic cis men have been signing up for women’s competitions and dating apps in an effort to “prove” that trans women have an advantage in such places; and misogynistic allostraight men have been harassing monosexual lesbians because the patriarchy teaches them that they deserve whatever they want from women: “Come on, baby, sexuality is fluid~”. Non-queer people taking advantage of queer terminology is nothing new, and it’s no reason not to embrace queer people using language that helps them communicate their experiences.
It is never “complicated” queer people’s fault that non-queer people make life harder for “simple” queer people. The only reason some queer people are more “complicated” than others is because society centers and values non-queer experiences.
Labels can be very affirming for people. It lets them know that they’re not freaks, that there’s other people out there just like them.
People such as:
- intersex people who identify with their assigned gender. As a consequence of society being perinormative; intersex people often have very different experiences with gender, including their assigned gender; than perisex cis, perisex trans, and perisex nonbinary people.
- plural headmates whose gender matches the assigned gender of the system body.
- nonbinary people who identify with their assigned gender in some way, or alongside other genders they identify as.
- trans people who; due to rhetoric spewed by truscum, transmeds, and other gatekeepers; don’t feel like they’re allowed to identify as transgender.
- butches and femmes who have complicated relationships with womanhood.
- people who are uncomfortable with the lack of agency involved in being assigned a gender.
- people who are experimenting with their gender(s).
I hope that this helps explain recugender to you, so that recugender people don’t have to do it. More importantly, I hope recugender people have your love and support going forward.
Just because you and I might not have need for such language, doesn’t mean other people don’t. You might not need the terms “genderfluid”, “ace”, and “aro” to describe your experiences, but I do. If you can embrace me as part of queerness, you can embrace recugender people too.
Life is more complicated than binary thinking can handle. Don’t turn cis and trans into a binary either.
Additionally, if it helps, I prefer to think of it as “refusing to allow perisex binary cisnormativity define your relationship to your AGAB”, instead of the current “refusing to be cis” framing.
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