i've been thinking about gender and archetropy lately. my thoughts aren't super tight right now but i'm gonna try and put some words to things.[READ-MORE]this was stirred up by a conversation me n rook had a couple days ago about how there seems to be this prejudice that bigender people are doing a gender essentialism by acting like stereotypically masculine men and feminine women. i don't use that term for myself, but i think i fall under the definition and feel affected by Bigender Issues, i'm just like. 90% a woman with a little kernel of dude in there somewhere lol. and yes, i do see the crude, oafish parts of myself as the Male Parts. you could call that regressive, but it really feels true to my personal experience.i don't believe that women are essentially sweet and refined and men are essentially boorish, obviously, because i'm a woman and i'm also a whole person who is all of those things. and also just a little bit a guy. all at once! it just so happens, and it seemed that rook felt similarly about faer experience, that when trying to describe the contours of that internal feeling of polarity, it's useful to reach for the language of tropes.i was raised relatively androgynously by a mother who was a business owner and a father who was a stay-at-home husband and only really started having encounters with what everyone else agreed gender was in middle school. so it's always seemed contrived to me. and so while i've had a relatively consistent inherent disposition this whole time, i've called myself a feminine man or a genderqueer person or a trans woman depending on... i guess what felt like the widest channel for those feelings to flow through at any given time? i've experienced my masculine and feminine traits as being diametrically opposed, or interlocking, or one being suspended in the other like oil and water, or various other metaphors. i've experienced traits that are considered masculine as being feminine for me, or vice versa. i've used (and coined) various labels, and pointed to various fictional characters and real people as referents.it feels like things are a stable emulsion now. and in this state, 'woman' feels like the thing that opens more doors for me than it closes. figuring out exactly what that meant to me has been inseparable from exploring and cultivating my identities as a shrine maiden and as a horse. these extra modifiers shrink the possibility space of womanhood down into something i can work with, and also let me reclaim and integrate traits that the stereotypical, prototypical Girl seems not to permit. it's through those that i've refined what kind of woman i am: nurturing but also practical, sensitive but also strong. at some point in this journey, i'm idly searching 'horse' on vrchat to look for avatars, and i come across this japanese world that has these arrays of pretty anime girls with horse ears and tails to try on. i think this is very novel and kind of funny! i've never seen a horse kemonomimi before, and i've never heard of whatever this anime is - it seems to have pretty much no presence in the english speaking world. i pick one i like the color scheme of... and i have that moment that so many trans vrchat players talk about. i start thinking about what it would be like to be not just feminine, but female.it's silly, but because of the way it happened, uma musume felt like my little secret for a while. until, completely out of left field (to me), it released to the west last year, and god damn was it popular. all of a sudden, everyone around me knew about the horsegirls too. the idea of what being a horsegirl means, all its tropes and associated mannerisms, presentation and values, basically exploded, fully formed, into people's minds, as defined entirely by this piece of media.and so all over again i'm having this experience of some doors opening and some doors closing.having 'horsegirl' be a cultural touchstone that online people were now familiar with, made me feel like i had a seat at the table among the ranks of trans catgirls and puppygirls. it felt easier to access and study the archetypal horse virtues of hard work and spiritedness and adventure seeing them embodied in people who live in human society. on the other hand, i hate running and being competitive??? and that's like, the thing that uma musume is about, and that all of its characters are about. it's said that there are umas working in other fields, but we don't ever see them as far as i'm aware. i've seen fans speculate about draft horse type umas doing blue collar jobs, and there's a gorgeous horse therian out there who calls herself a real life uma who does powerlifting as an expression of that. so there are alternative ideas floating about, but they're not mainstream.and, well, that's basically true of being a girl in the real world too, isn't it? when i decided that was the gender for me, i accepted that was going to result in me being stereotyped, and i feel like i had to make a choice to lean into or subvert or reject those tropes in the exact same way as the archetropal identities i've experimented with, and often in conjunction with those identities. but normal people - cis and trans - are doing this with gender too! you might see goth girls, bimbos, clean girls, tradwives and girlfailures out in the wild. i think these are ostensibly archetropes! and like archetropes, these signifiers are only effective insofar as other people actually recognize them and respect them. how much meaningful difference is there between trying to pass as a woman and trying to pass as a wizard, really?it can be said that we don't so much identify as a gender as we make our choices, and those are gendered by other people, and we live with the consequences. people will react to me differently as a trans woman based on what they already believe about women and trans people. and if someone were to somehow clock me as a horsegirl, its possible they'd immediately form some impressions of me that were totally wrong! but that's what it means to be a thinking being in the world with other thinking beings. we are not actually the exclusive architects of our selves - far from it. we all have to make reference to generalized, abstract concepts, and usually, those were invented by other people first.i think the kind of identity plays we perform, multigender and genderfluid people, archetropers and other archetypal alterhumans, acknowledge that implicitly. but i also think many might not be conscious that they're doing that. so it merits talking about more. way back when mord wrote about archetypal identities, before the word 'archetrope' was even coined, he talked about how it was gender-like as well as species-like. but i don't think we've collectively explored that half of it much, especially not in the actual broader sociopolitical sense. archetropy has helped me build a better, more fulfilling gender expression within the necessary restrictions of the human social world. what would happen if we kept widening the magic circle?[/READ-MORE]