What Does It Mean to Be Fae as a Gender?
By: Christina Gleason
Tags: Identity, LGBTQ, Gender, Faes, Gender Identity

When I woke up one Thursday a couple of months ago, gender wasn’t on my mind. I’d been cis all my life, and that was never going to change. That’s just the way it was, and that’s the way it was always going to be.

At least, that’s what I thought.

I’d had no idea I would be genderfae by the time I went to bed that night. I’ve since decided to drop the gender prefix to just say fae to uncomplicate matters. But how did I get here?

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

It started with a tweet a friend of mine sent. It chastised cis people who listed their pronouns in their Twitter bios but also specified that they are cis. My bio at the time read, in part, that I was a cis woman who used she/her. I replied to the tweet to clarify that I’d added cis to my bio because my somewhat androgynous appearance had led people to assume I was non-binary, and I didn’t want the appearance of appropriating a non-binary identity.

Someone else responded to me, and we began a conversation. The upshot was that they suggested that I might be afraid of appropriating an identity that was rightfully mine, but I just didn’t realize it yet. They told me that “nonbinary woman” was a gender. I liked the idea, so I decided to do some research on people who claim nonbinary woman as a gender.

I decided to “try on” the label of nonbinary woman, even putting it in my Twitter bio to see how it felt as I continued down the gender rabbit hole. There are fascinating resources out there! What ended up leading me somewhere I never thought I’d go was Gender Wiki, specifically the genderfae page.

I read the description, which boils down to sometimes feminine, but never masculine, and I felt gender euphoria for the first time.

I didn’t need to “try on” a gender anymore. I knew I was fae.

When I explain what fae means to people, I usually point out that it’s a nonbinary identity. The word I forget to use is genderfluid, although the “sometimes” part of the description does imply it.

To spoof on an old candy bar commercial: Sometimes I feel like a woman; sometimes I don’t. (But I also never feel like a man.)

So I am fae.

I did use “fae woman” as a transitional phrase that I thought would work for me, but then I was misgendered by people who dropped the fae and only referred to me as a woman, then doubled down on misgendering me because of it even after I explained that the fae part was the most important. So I’m still fine being referred to as a fae woman, but none of my social media profiles will use the word woman to avoid confusion. My first taste of gender dysphoria was really hurtful, and I don’t want to deal with that again.

I don’t know how other people of different genders deal with this day after day.

But I’ve found that claiming fae as my own isn’t just about gender. I never really understood how or why some of my fellow autistic people claimed they were autgender or autigender, with autism specifically informing their personal gender identities — I suppose I still don’t, even though fae encompasses some of that for me. Fae as a descriptor embodies a whole lot more than gender, and I’ll explain why the rest of it is relevant to me and not just a complicating factor in people understanding that I’m fae.

The fae are beings of legend, specifically in European folklore. They are also called fairies, the fair folk, etc., and for some people who would otherwise be genderfae, alternate terms like genderdoe and genderthil were created out of respect for people who believe in them. But it’s all part of why fae resonates with me so much.

In centuries past, folklore referred to certain types of disabled children as changelings. I have multiple disabilities ranging from mental to physical to neurological and otherwise, but autism is specifically related to changeling lore. People believed that changelings were fairy babies that were left in place of their “healthy” human babies when it became apart that a child was disabled. After all, it was not uncommon for babies who were visibly disabled at birth to be killed or left for dead when they were born. Infanticide was all too common. And so it was a shock to parents when their “healthy” baby suddenly appeared “sickly” or otherwise “wrong.” Clearly, this was not their child. It must be a fairy child instead. Their real baby was stolen by the fae.

I will not get into how this ableism is still entrenched today when parents of autistic children say that autism “stole” their children from them, except to mention that it exists. That is a topic for another time.

But…it’s also me. I’ve always been “different.” I wasn’t diagnosed as autistic until I was married and had a child of my own. I’ve lived the life of a changeling without ever being called one. If only I had some of the supernatural powers ascribed to the fae! Alas, I must settle with the gender descriptor and the aesthetic I plan to adopt to fully recognize my true nature.

While some people who are fae use fae/faer as their pronouns, I prefer to keep the she/her pronouns I’ve gone by my whole life. It gives me the joke that my pronouns are sidhe/her, where sidhe (pronounced she) is the Irish word for the fairy folk. As genealogy is one of my special interests, I know I have Irish heritage, so I’m not appropriating lore that isn’t a part of my family history.

I can’t speak for anyone else who is genderfae. They may use different pronouns and shun terms like mother, wife and girlfriend that I still accept as belonging to me. The thing that ties us together, though, is that our gender is never masculine.

I know so very few others who are fae. If you are genderfae, or any of its related genders, I’d love to hear from you in the comments about what being fae means to you.

And as an aside…