I'm not going to lie, gender and particularly gender non-conformity is a minefield right now. Its been lied about and demonised and heavily politicised to the nth degree. Its an intentional wedge issue to drive extreme social change and restrictions in its wake. Couple that with the human propensity to not really understand how someone else's experience of the same thing can be different to your own and I'm probably as dumb as they come for even attempting to explain even one tiny aspect of what is really a vast kaleidoscope.

I'm still going to try and if you are at all interested in learning something from someone else's honest and frank experience then all you have to do is remember one thing, that someone else's experience of the same thing/event/interaction/way of being can be different from your own and they can both be true.

Gender is two different things come together; gender is experienced and gender is performed. For the majority of people these lines are absolutely invisible, because the gender they experience is the gender they perform. It is so much a part of them that it never even crosses their minds that they are performing; they're just being themselves, who they are is how other people see them and how other people expect and want them to be and it just fits so perfectly to them that they can't even see it. That is gender conformity and for the majority of people it simply is.

For a small minority of people that's not how they experience their lives and themselves and that is where we enter gender nonconformity.

Gender nonconformity is like shooting the white light of the gender binary of men and women, male and female, into a prism; it reveals a vast array of visible and invisible light. If you've not got any experience of that it can be mind blowing, but for that small minority that is how they see and experience themselves and the world and there's a whole lot of light there to find a place in.

The sheer breadth and depth is why it often all gets lumped together as "queer" and that's a good a description as any. I am happy to say that I have a queer identity and experience and perspective, that I am queer. For those that aren't queer its important to know that how I experience queer can be wildly different to how another queer person experiences it; its not a rigid box, its a wild spray of colours of light.

For the majority of people how they may have encountered gender noncomformity is in the presentation and discussion of trans people in the current manufactured moral panic. A huge slice of that rainbow of light gets lumped together under "trans" in that and its innaccurate to do so and loses all nuance when there is, in fact, a lot of nuance and I'm going to try and explain a little of that in explaining genderfae.

There is a joke amongst trans people that when they are describing themselves to someone from the majority that they'll say "I'm trans" or "I'm non-binary", but when describing themselves to another queer person their description will be long and very nuanced indeed. Queer people have been finding each other online for decades now and having that opportunity to say "What, you feel the same way too?" and finding that they're not alone in their experience and perspective, that others share it and, in so doing, put names to that in shared belonging. Nuance and specific detail, as specific as each of the individual colours in the prism spray. Sometimes we combine them to make very specific flags that say "Here, this is where your people are" to others.

Under my own flag of soft shades of green, yellow, pink, white and purple is found genderfae. This does not mean that I think I am a faery or some mythical creature, lets leave the swift assumptions to those who use "I think I'm an attack helicopter" to mock the gender diverse.

Instead, I'm anticipating some questions that you might want to ask me personally; you can see them and my answers below.

What does Genderfae mean?

Genderfae is a fluid way to experience and express gender. It is not a fixed gender, but one that moves along a spectrum between binary femme and non-binary androgyny. A genderfae person can find themselves on that spectrum at any point and still be genderfae.

They may experience their gender moving slowly over longer periods of time, or swiftly multiple times a day; there is no fixed definition of how this works.

How does it work for you?

I tend to feel my own gender experience and expression moving more seasonally; the months of spring and autumn I find myself tending more towards the binary femme, while in the months of summer and winter I gravitate more towards non-binary in my gender expression.

This isn't set in stone, I've been known to glam up for events in summer and winter, or wear mainly pants and fleece all autumn, but its a general seasonal trend for me.

How can something like gender be seasonal and fluid, isn't it innate and unmoveable?

It can be experienced as seasonal and fluid in a similar way to how the seasons themselves can be experienced on different places on earth.

If you live on or near the equator, then you don't really experience seasons.  Each day and night is the same length as the one before, the weather is much the same as it was yesterday and how it will be tomorrow. Seasonal changes just wouldn't be a part of your lived experience and if you never lived anywhere else then you would struggle to believe that they were real.

If you live in the far north or south of the planet, however, then you very much experience seasons. Night and day lengthen and shrink, temperatures fluctuate from freezing cold to baking hot, green things grow with wild abandon or die back to near non-existence. These changes happen and they are a huge part of your lived experience, dictating what you can or can't do and when, impacting hugely on how you feel or how you can comfortably be. Living in such places the much steadier state of life at the equator is difficult to grasp.

Perhaps then gender fluidity is best thought of as gender seasons, for those who are unable to immediately grasp that it can be a thing. If you can understand seasons then try applying that same idea to people.

Are all genderfae people trans?

This is a bit of a yes/no/depends answer, which is seldom welcomed by those desiring a swift certainty but is honest nevertheless.

I am transgender because I was assigned male at birth. My body later said otherwise in how it developed, but I'll save talking about intersex and differences in sex development for another time, because if you think this is long then hooooooo baby would that be a long piece to write and read.

I experience my womanhood as a transgender woman (trans literally just means "across", like a transatlantic flight just means a flight across the Atlantic Ocean and not a plane full of trans people) which is a different experience to a cisgender woman (cis just means "the same as", as in your lived and experienced gender is the same as the one you were assigned at birth). Both women, both with different experiences and perspectives, both subject to many of the same negative experiences associated with being a woman in the world today.

So, this particular genderfae person is trans, but not all of them are.

Personally I consider being non-binary to be trans also, because you are still experiencing and expressing gender differently than what you were assigned at birth and were socialised as etc, but not all non-binary people agree with that, as they have the right to do of course. Trans is a very big umbrella and not every gender-nonconforming person feels its for them.

So, this particular genderfae person is trans no matter how they are experiencing gender in the moment.

There are also women who consider themselves to be cisgender and genderfae and this is valid also, because their gender is experienced on a spectrum between binary femme and non-binary. They have never experienced binary femme as a transgender binary femme, so in that way they are not trans, but they are experiencing non-binary gender experience and expression and so in that way they are trans. That's not my lived experience though, so I can't definitively speak to whether or not that counts as being trans for them.

And that's why its a yes/no/depends answer to the question!

What's with all the pronouns?

Don't some people really manage to get their panties in a wad about pronouns! Curiously, its people who are cisgender and who only have experience of that who get most upset, even though it impacts them the least.

Its curious how those who are swiftest to call "snowflake" are the ones who melt down and get upset the fastest.

The most common pronouns for a genderfae person would be a combination of she/her/they/them. Perhaps all 4 are fine, perhaps just she/they and that's good too. Personally I'm happy with anything from she/her/they/them, but if I was meeting someone for the first time and they asked me my pronouns I'd likely answer "she/they" for brevity and ease.

So, now you know my pronouns.

There are also other pronouns that lumped together as neopronouns and that list is a great deal longer, long enough that I perhaps only know about half of them or less. Personally, I find they are not for me and not something I am interested in using, but other genderfae, trans and non-binary people find them to be useful and hugely important to how they experience and express their gender.

If you're not sure about someone's pronouns its better not to assume that you know, but to simply ask. Its nicer for the person, more comfortable for you to know you're getting it right and not making that person uncomfortable and you might even get to learn something new.

Is all gender-nonconformity being trans?

No, not by any means. The wider queer community has a long history of being gender-nonconforming while still being cisgender; butch lesbians, effeminate men etc, while also having examples of strong gender conformity such as lipstick lesbians or bears.

Gender-nonconforming can be a part of gender for straight people also and the boundaries of this have fluctuated hugely throughout history. That's a whole other long subject to talk about, but enough to say that no, gender-nonconforming is separate from being trans, which is part of what makes the current trans moral panic so dangerous; its a means to enforce much more rigid gender roles and expression across wider society, not just to attack trans people, and in trans people's rights being rolled back and restricted lie the seeds of rollbacks and restrictions for all women. Its already being experienced by many gender-nonconforming cisgender women in the midst of the various bathroom bans that are happening, as they find themselves harassed and even assaulted by those challenging them in bathrooms.

Isn't this all just a new fad?

No, its just talked about more now, and when I say talked about I mean negatively portrayed, mocked and attacked.

Trans people have always existed in cultures across the world and always will. You can't just legislate that away.

The historical facts are freely available to discover, but perhaps now is a good time to ask yourself why are you hearing so much more about it now and it being overwhelmingly negative when you do? Who does that serve and why?

No, its not a fad, its just the latest fabricated moral panic that is making you think that. Just like there have been moral panics about marriage equality, interracial marriage, civil rights, women's rights, votes for women...its a long list of panics that have happened which people now consider to be perfectly normal. There used to even be a moral panic about left-handedness and when that finally changed and left-handed people weren't forced to do things right handed then then number of people being left-handed increased until it reached its natural level of around 9-10% of the population where it has remained ever since.

When people aren't tightly controlled, when they are left to be their natural selves, everything finds its own level in time.

This was far too long, I've scrolled to the bottom just to see the conclusion!

I get it, its a lot of words for sure. If you want a briefer, more accessible and easily digested version of this and wider queer culture I strongly recommend the short graphic novel "A quick and easy guide to queer and trans identities" by Mady G. Its a really valuable resource if you really want to find out for yourself.

Full on TL:DR conclusion? Believe people when they tell you who they are, how they experience life and what how they want to be. Everyone, including you, will be happier if you start with really listening, not just waiting for a gap to make your pre-prepared point. Nobody knows you like you do. Believe that's true of other people too and life can be so much better for us all.