#utrinquegender
Hello, my name is Alannah. I’m here to present a new term that I hope is as useful to others as it is for me. Please hear me out.
I’m an alter in a dissociative identity disorder system. I am a [nonbinary] girl, and I use she/her pronouns. Our body was designated female at birth, and at the time that I split (2011), I probably could have identified as cis.
However, around 2013, I went dormant, meaning I wasn’t around at all, no input on our actions whatsoever.
When I resurfaced again, it was 2017. Other alters had begun taking testosterone in 2014. I awoke to having male-passing body. A different body shape, a deep voice, thick body and facial hair, a new legal name, and a new legal gender, amongst other things. Now, whenever I present as myself, I put myself and the system as a whole at risk. I deal with a great deal of dysphoria, and a great deal of fear regarding things as simple as how to refer to myself and which restroom to use, how to be me and not risk our life and career. I have to do a lot of work to make sure that I “pass” as my gender.Because of this, I cannot identify with the cis experience. Some parts of it, maybe, because I live in a body born with a vulva and uterus, and others alters have the memory of being raised as a girl, but the majority of it I cannot. There is actually much more that I can connect to in the experiences of trans women. But I am not, and can never be, a trans woman. There are elements of that experience that I can never know, and it would be wrong for me to claim a label that does not belong to me.
So I experience parts of both experiences, but live neither life. There is not a word that describes this experience, so I have decided to make one to exist alongside of cis and trans.Utrinquegender
Orutrinquefor short. It means “both sides”, in line with cis (“on this side”) and trans (“across”). It is a modifier, and NOT a gender.
It is a word for people who genuinely experience aspects of both trans and cis experiences, but do not fit either label: female-aligned alters in dfab DID/OSDD systems whose system has medically transitioned to male and male-aligned alters in the reverse situation. I am also open to it being used by individuals that have hormonal conditions that cause them to produce far too much of the “wrong” sex hormone, causing them to develop secondary sex characteristics, if said condition has done so. If you have another situation that I have not mentioned, feel free to ask, because I cannot list every applicable scenario.
I really hope that this can be a useful term for others, because I know I’m not the only one that has been left without a word. Please do me a favour and spread this, so that this term can gain visibility and usage.
