daifu-orchid (imported) wrote: Mon Dec 15, 2014 4:11 pm
No, I suspect Sub/Dom might be something different. It was more a notification that one's gender is not viewed as it was, but the person still valued.
Dom/sub is its own thing, but gender certainly intersects with it, as it intersects with all things. My relationship with Sir was already sitting squarely on the D/s spectrum before he came out to me as a eunuch (8 months into our interactions), and when he told me that he was not male, my whole world suddenly made so much more sense.
I'd been asked before by a friend, if I had to choose someone whose masculinity I wanted to emulate, who would it be? I picked the person I would later call Sir. I looked to him as a model human being and mentor, and I feel like the way he moves through the world just really beautifully represents what I aspire toward for myself. I already had some pretty strong feelings, perceiving him as superior to the men around him. There is practically unanimous public consensus that when he walks in the room, the power he holds and the attention he draws is undeniable. He commands a presence. At that point, we were only just friends and still functioning squarely as equals. Conflicted about the question I'd been asked, seeing as I feel like my true gender identity is non-binary, and "male" is merely a crude approximation, I told my friend that if I had to pick one man I wanted to be like, it was him.
Of course, two months later, he tells me he's not a man and doesn't see himself as having "masculinity" at all. And I was like, "Oh! No wonder you're the one I picked! I hate feeling like I'm constantly performing this masculinity thing people keep pushing on me! I thought the whole idea that I would mimic someone else's masculinity was a stupid question anyway!"
Like your wife, @daifu-orchid, I actually see my Sir's gender identity as closer to my own than anyone else I've ever met. But unlike your wife, I'm not female, so it's not quite as much of a stretch that I see him this way.
I already valued him highly to begin with, so that didn't change on account of his gender. But when he told me he was a eunuch, I thought, "OMG that makes so much more sense. Like, you transcended masculinity entirely, and you're this other thing altogether -- which completely explains your superiority to all the other men in the room, who seem to me like mostly gross, undignified apes, if we're being honest." That's what happened in my head when he came out to me. As a person, he was/is still valued the same, but my understanding and ideas about why I've always valued him in this way completely changed.
daifu-orchid (imported) wrote: Mon Dec 15, 2014 4:11 pm
The way the world sees the eunuch may not be so accepting yet. Do we need to change this?
I have an intense love affair with language. It disappoints me that the words we have for describing eunuchs are as limited as they are, and I have asked Sir about the potential for creating new language that suits him better. I realize that there are people for whom the current existing language works great, but there are also people for whom it seems not to.
I was looking for a word to describe his overall eunuch-ness and coming up short. "Eunuchinity?" I asked him, trying to figure out the eunuch equivalent of masculinity or femininity. We settled on "emasculinity". But I pointed out to him that I thought it odd to define an identity by what one isn't rather than what one is. I feel like he's so many wonderful things, all a part of his eunuchliness, that it seems unfitting to me to identify him foremost by his lack of masculinity, which he clearly doesn't even need in the first place. Femininity is its own word and isn't defined by one's relationship to masculinity, so I think there deserves to be a word like that for eunuchs to choose, too, if they so desire -- a word that doesn't carry negative connotations or inherently reduce the social status, legitimacy, or value of the person it applies to.
