Bigender Culture

(originally posted to Pillowfort)

I've been thinking recently about the first ever trans space I was ever actually a part of, Bigender.net. My experience was primarily with these forums in ~2009, but I came back to peek in later years, and am trying to regain access now. There's a lot of bigender cultural things there that would probably never be known about or archived somewhere easily accessible unless someone talked about what they saw there, and I wanted to share some things.

+ A Lot of people used two or more names that they switch up, use in different contexts, and that often align with specific genders. Names are essentially changed like pronouns are for many people.

+ Most bigender people seemed to experience some kind of fluidity or flux of gender, and it was rarer for people to feel like 100% both at all times. This seems to be more often where people label themselves androgynes.

+ The language of "en femme" and "en homme" was used to describe both how one was presenting (similar to the modern boymoding/girlmoding) and to how one felt their gender on a specific day, which is what makes it different from girlmode/boymode. It wasn't just about presentation regardless of gender, but presentation as related to gender.

+ Plurality became so common over the years as a framework of bigender expression that a whole subforum for plurality emerged on these forums. Lots of plural bigender folks would experience having a "girl side" and a "boy side" in a dual system.

+ There were just as many bigender folks who experienced a neutral/other/middle gender experience besides just being male/female. It really wasn't limited to 2 genders, even if at the time it was very male/female bigender focused.

I see a lot of young people ask "does this count? Can I call myself bigender if...?" and it's almost always a thing that's been accepted under "bigender" the whole time. I just want more people to know what bigender culture and experience is like, a little bit. So more people can figure it out and learn about people like them.