mackerelgray

Written by Max Biscuit-Machina on November 4th, 2024.

This is a somewhat rambling journal post, because I realized that not everything needs to be a polished essay to contain noteworthy thoughts, I can just jot things down to have a record of it!

so I have Thoughts about how gender is a social construct in relation to my theriotype

because I know that my raptorself is a female velociraptor, but it doesn't care about human gender because raptor gender is mostly about feather patterns and comparison with other raptors - but it doesn't have that here. it's never lived with other raptors to compare itself with!

so for me, as a raptor, I'm effectively a genderless creature because my raptorself doesn't have a social niche to slot a gender into. which is very interesting!

versus, my human self is constantly engaging with human society with human genders and gender expectations, which means I'm transgender as a human! but I'm completely separate from gender as a raptor, because raptor brain doesn't live in a raptor society.

i think this is an interesting note, because this is not because raptors in general lack a sense of gender! as you can tell whenever you look at birds outside, birds are often very separated between their sexes, and they often have differing roles in their avian relationships - but as a raptor who doesn't have any of those avian relationships, i never developed that sense of having a raptorial gender role.

it's funny, I think it would go both ways? if I were a raptor in body millions of years ago, living with other raptors, I would have a raptor gender - I would be female in the ways so many other birds are female. and I would not be a trans man, as a raptor, because being a trans man relies on the concept of human masculinity. I wouldn't know about human concepts of gender, so I wouldn't have a human gender.

basically, right now, I'm a trans man and a genderless raptor, and it's a very cool intersection of species and gender that I'm going to chew on for a while

Written by Max Biscuit-Machina on August 12th, 2024.

So I was at Othercon 2024 this past weekend - and like many who attended, I came out the other side with a new piece of my identity to chew over. This essay is me chewing over my thoughts on archaeosapience, as it connects to my velociraptor paleotheriotype, and why I genuinely don’t feel like I fit the label.