Hi! Honestly, I think it's a little different for everyone. I'm fluid between xenos but I've identified as pupgender for a while before, which is obviously not the same but maybe similar to catgender (which I briefly identified as). I would also like to point out that I am autistic so this is coming from a neurodivergent perspective! /lh/info

Xenogenders in general in my experience: I don't feel xenic at the moment so it may be a little off, but with any xenogender for me it's just,,, intrinsically connected to my gender. It's kind of like how people assign colors to school subjects, saying math is red or science is green. It's just like an association in that sense. People often say that their gender "feels" nonbinary or "feels" demigender (for example) but for me gender "feels" just,,, differently. It "feels" like the feeling of sitting outside at night with no lights but the moon and listening to ethereal music and feeling the cold air on your face and a sense of peace, with a small part inside you being a little bit scared of both life in general and the present moment. It "feels" intrinsically connected to puppies, especially golden retriever pups, in the way that they are cute, caring, and blissfully ignorant. Also, to be frank, one of my comfort characters I kinned really liked golden retrievers and had a pretty similar personality to a typical golden retriever. I liked him a lot and he was such a a part of me that him and his interests felt woven into my own identity. It's really hard to explain how these can feel connected to gender, but again it's similar to the color-to-school-subject-assigning maybe for me.

As for catgender specifically: I have identified as catgender before, albeit briefly. As you said, it is not inherently identifying as a cat. For me personally, it felt closely related to black cats and "silly" cats specifically. Black cats in the way that they are sleek and sinister on the outside, but they're usually just cute fluffballs. They also remind me of nighttime and superstitions, and also, they're cats and everything a cat stands for and looks like. As for silly cats, they're just so,,, silly, lol. They're cute and bumbling and not the most intelligent./lh And I guess my gender just felt like that. Not only feeling like the traits I described, but also just at the end of the day, intrinsically connected to and defined by cats.

These are all just my experiences. Again, every experience is wildly different and I would encourage you to seek other's experiences. Xenogenders are confusing even to a lot of people that identify as them; as for me personally, they're really hard to explain. I hope you find comfort in your gender identity c:

The way I see it (which is probably pretty inaccurate) is using adjectives or words that aren't adjectives as adjectives to describe your gender? Does that make any sense?

(time for a mostly unrelated rant yippee) For me I know I have a gender but it doesn't "feel" like anything, at least when I'm focusing on it. Every time I see a label there's that thought of "you did this thing when you were 5, what if you're this?" but that's also how it is with a lot of other things so idk. Like one time I saw a post about a terrifying disease and texted my mom in a panic thinking I could have it (there was absolutely no way I could have it). The school subject thing makes sense. I kinda see stuff like ocd as a bunch of rats running around my brain causing chaos, but for gender it's more like a wall of rats covering up the test answers. Or looking into a mirror and seeing nothing.

Thank you for this, this helps me understand it a bit better :3 at this point I'm mostly certain I'm novigender but I'm still trying to find a label that fits best

Also uzi pfp !!! I love md

why is that image so large fsjhsjd

ou i didn't see the second reply until now woops

@/Tryingtounderstand that's actually a really good description

The reason one may identify as a xenogender is because they understand their gender identity, but gendered words can't describe their experience. In a situation like this, it's easy to turn to metaphors and say for example, that your gender is influenced by cats, or that your gender is like the sun and the moon, or that your gender shares the quality of a sponge. These are all diverse examples of what a xenogender could be.

The way I see it, people who may not relate to masculinity and femininity in any way tend to be more creative in thinking about their gender, since the two "main" categories don't fit them well enough or at all. So they identify more with other aspects of their personality, interests and such. After all gender is just a way to categorize yourself that gets very arbitrary the more we think about it.