actually, now that I'm thinking abt it, any tips on reworking a -gender suffix term into a better one? I've avoided so many terms bc of that specific issue, but can't find any good substitutes. so why not make one, yknow?
this is a good question and tbh probably deserves its own post, so im gonna visit it in more detail as part of my series on Coining Words Good, but so i dont leave u hanging, the number one piece of advice i have here is honestly just, try just chopping the -gender off and seeing how that feels? it’s what i do half the time
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
instead of saying, eg ‘i am rahugender’ you can say ‘i am (a) rahu’. ‘sylvegender’ can be ‘sylve’, ‘reusgender’ can be ‘reus’, etc. even ones with the ‘gender’ part in the middle or at the start can be treated like this! how about calling urself ‘panfae’ or ‘panfaun’? or just saying that your gender is ‘vast’ or ‘bruised’? things don’t always have to be nouns!
but, if that sounds a bit clunky, you can always play around with the sounds a bit? since a lot of the prefixes people like to use for genders are latin, a nice way to find an alternative is to look up the word on something like wiktionary and see what other forms it conjugates to. eg if you want to describe yourself as being firmagender but ‘firma’ on its own sounds a little lacking, look at all these other choices!
maybe calling urself a firmus or a firme or even a firmarum feels better?
and honestly, if ur gender is xeno or vide in nature, you can just directly insert the thing it’s inspired by / related to? there’s no shame in saying ‘my gender is the sun’ or ‘my gender is the cheshire cat’ or ‘my gender is blue’ or whatever. people have done this pretty much since gender variance has been a thing! i even reblogged a post abt it once!
