[Image description: The first image is a flag with three vertical stripes, slanted diagonally. The first and third stripes are dark green (or “dark greyish harlequin”), the middle stripe is purple (or “moderate violet”), and dividing each stripe is a thin pale gold (or “very light amber”) stripe. In the middle of the flag is an o with a horizontal line on the top right side. Inside the circle are two wavy lines, similar to an almost equal sign (≈) or the Aquarius (♒︎) symbol. The second image is the salmacian symbol by itself, in black. End ID]
Green represents aspiration towards having mixed genitals, and the normalization of genital non-conformity; yellow represents euphoria from having mixed genitals, and raising awareness of salmacians’ existence; purple represents the fusion of different sexes, and individualistic personal autonomy. The flag’s central emblem, the “Sign of Salmacis”, consists of a lowercase sigma for “salmacian”, with waves to represent the sex-transforming Salmacis Spring of mythology.
“A Guide to Salmacians, and Redesigning Our Pride Flag
Erika Cartwell, September 23, 2021, 49 Minutes Read Time
Preface:
This is meant to be the most comprehensive guide to the community of salmacians, a niche section of the LGBT+ community consisting of those who want mixed genitals. This post is not 100% serious all the time, but I still hope you find it somewhat educational. This post has links peppered throughout to places where you can learn more about salmacians and other mentioned topics, as well as a handful of sillier links (including exactly one rickroll).
This post is currently divided into the following sections, feel free to skip around:
PART 1: LABELS
The Angel’s Dictionary: Raphael Carter’s creation of the label “salmacian”
Salmacian Spoils: Pre-’96 usage of the word “salmacian”, and the Carian pillagers
Etymology: What it says on the tin
Hermaphroditus: The legend of what happened to that dude
Synonyms, Semantics, & Such: Post-’96 synonyms and semantic shift; related terms
Popularization: Popularization of the word “salmacian”
PART 2: MEDICINE
Salmacian Surgeries Overview: It says on the tin
Vaginoplasty: Says on the tin
Metoidio/Phalloplasty: On the tin
Miscellaneous: Other surgeries, non-salmacian surgeries, HRT
PART 3: COMMUNITY
Origins of Salmacians: Early salmacians; third genders; mythology
Rallions-nous: Online spaces and goals for advocacy
Demographics: Who the salmacians are
Whys & Wherefores: Common reasons why people are salmacian
Dual Form: Futanari, i.e. mixed-genital fetishization and porn
PART 4: SYMBOLS
Salmacian Symbolism: Symbols, particularly pride flag proposals
The 2016 Flag: The current most popular flag proposal
The Sign of Salmacis: My proposal for a salmacian emblem
Layout & Colors: Settling on the final design for my flag proposal
To Summarize: A summary of my flag proposal, and some flag wavers
If there’s anything you’d like me to add or correct, then go ahead and tell me. I’d especially like corrections in the “Medicine” part, and extra information regarding the salmacian community.
I most likely got some things wrong, and my knowledge or ability to google about certain topics is very limited. I’m not a professional historian by any means — I’m just a random salmacian who felt like writing about us.
These are some particular questions I still have after writing this post, if anybody can and would care to help:
Is Raphael Carter a salmacian zemself?
Are there any better theories about the etymology of the name “Salmacis”?
Seriously, though, who was the “first salmacian”? Either the earliest person known to have wanted mixed genitals in history, or the first to identify as a salmacian.
Who was the first to get a salmacian surgery? Who was the first to offer such surgery? When did surgery become developed enough to do this?
How do intersex salmacians medically transition compared to endosex salmacians?
If not outright answers here and now, I’d be glad to get some pointers from you readers as to where I might find answers to some of these questions.
But even with so many questions remaining unanswered, this half-hour post is still probably the longest thing anybody’s ever written about salmacians to date (not counting, like, medical publications about genital surgeries). And that ain’t nothin’.
Also, content warnings: this post contains mentions of r#pe, inc#st, and adultery when writing about mythology; sporadically contains slurs for intersex and trans people, in context; and describes sexuality, reproduction, and sexual anatomy, including genital surgeries. If any of these topics are triggering or make you uncomfortable, e.g. if you’re trans and the medical terms for your anatomy bring you dysphoria, then I’d recommend you either turn back now or proceed with caution.
While Raphael Carter has many different interests (I’m assuming zie is still alive), including birds and flowers and robots and soforth, zie has also naturally done a good deal of intersex and non-binary/trans activism (trans people are activists by default, no?). Much of Raphael Carter’s activism has been through lots and lots of writing. Good writing. Writing that makes me chef’s kiss due to its irreverent, near-Adamsian wit, and rattle an invisible piece of paper while saying “r’ear” like a British MP whenever zie writes something that really vibes with me. Carter’s writings are glorious, seriously!
In 1995 Carter had written a humorous dictionary called “The Murk Manual: How to Understand Medical Writing on Intersex”, and so the logical next step was to, well, publish “The Angel’s Dictionary” on that good day in 1996. “The Angel’s Dictionary” occupied a page under the section “Androgyny RAQ (Rarely Asked Questions)” on Carter’s personal web site, Chaparraltree.com (note: the domain name is an anagram of “Raphael Carter”, in case you’re curious). Chaparraltree.com was in fact one of the earliest personal web sites on the internet, apparently. Respect. The website seems to have shut down circa 2006, and can only be accessed via the Wayback Machine now.
Anyways, you may be wondering, “When are you going to get to salmacians instead of gushing about this random rabbithole you’ve fallen down?”. The answer to that is, “Now. Good Lord, learn some patience!”.
Among all the mostly straight-laced but occasionally comedic definitions on “The Angel’s Dictionary”, lied the nifty little word “salmacian”:
n. 1. Suggested by the author as a term for male-to-intersex and female-to-intersex transsexuals; see Hermaphroditus.
This is the earliest known use of the word “salmacian” with more or less its modern queer definition, though the creator had likely had that term in zir head for quite some time by then. I’ll get back to the further semantic shift of “salmacian” since the publication of “The Angel’s Dictionary” in a bit (under “Synonyms, Semantics, & Such”).
Salmacian Spoils
Did you know that “salmacian” is a word that goes back centuries? The earliest example of the word I could find in English was in Richard Brathwaite’s The English Gentleman from 1630.
The Salmacian Spoiles relliſh better to their palate: for they are ſo full of noble compaſſion, as the death of their enemy enforceth in them teares of pitty.
The page this quote is on calls for English men to serve their country in war, not for booty (heheh, booty) or even for conquest; but to defend the safety and peace of the land that gave them life… I mean, I might’ve just gotten bad sex ed (well, I definitely did, but that’s an aside), but I’m pretty sure that the thing that gives you life is an ovum and spermatozoon, not the soil contained within some lines in the sand. But very well.
The English word “Salmacian” is the equivalent of the Latin word “Salmacida”, in turn the equivalent of Greek “Salmakides” meaning “Sons of Salmacis”.
Either way, the word “salmacian” has historically by far most commonly been used in the phrase “Salmacian spoils”, meaning things taken or achieved using peace rather than war, or alternatively, things taken without blood or sweat. “Salmacian”, aside from its literal meaning “of or related to Salmacis”, could be said to have meant “pacified” or “peaceful”, or “decadent” or “lazy”, or beyond that referring to a man who’d “lost his masculinity”. Evidently, less commonly “salmacian” referred to a woman who’d “lost her femininity”, or simply to someone androgynous (or sexually mixed/transformed).
Itaque in probris maxime in promptu est, si quid tale dici potest: “Vos enim, iuvenes, animum geritis muliebrem, illa virgo, viri“
et si quid eiusmodi: Salmacida, spolia sine sudore et sanguine.De Officiis, Cicero, 44 BC
These senses of the word “salmacian” come from one of the legends surrounding a particular spring of water called Salmacis, located near the Ancient Greek city of Halicarnassus, whose site is now Bodrum in Turkey. See, this spring was said to feminize (and in some accounts sterilize or outright sexually transform) all men who bathed or drank in it.
Yeah, who needs the Jusenkyou when you can have the Salmacis Spring, amirite ladies?
Point is, Dorian Greeks were building the city of Halicarnassus, but their town kept getting pillaged by members of the indigenous Carian people (who spoke an Anatolian language, a since-extinct branch of Indo-European). The Dorians called the Carians all savages and barbarians. The Carians… didn’t like their land being stolen. Yeesh, settler colonialism is a tale as old as time, isn’t it?
So a Dorian opened a tavern near the Salmacis Spring, and both Dorians and Carians became regular patrons. And wouldn’t you know it, the Carians ended up drinking the waters of Salmacis there, which made them submissive and breedable (uwu); the Carians ended up adopting the ways of the Dorians and everything was hunky dory… You can’t make this shit up. I mean, you can, it’s a legend, that’s the whole point, I’m just saying. It seems like kind of a silly story to me.
Etymology
The origin of the English suffix “-ian” is frankly a bit boring: from Latin “-iánus”, where it came about by reanalyzing suffixes and reanalyzing vowels in stems and combining them to form longer suffixes and yadda yadda. Ultimately from Proto-Indo-European “-yós” (nominal/verbal adjective suffix) and “-nós” (verbal adjective suffix).
The origin of the name “Salmacis”, though, is considerably more murky. The literal only proposed etymology I could find online claims that “Salmacis” is of Latin origin and means “of the same body”, which is a bit odd considering that “cis” is a Latin preposition, not postposition; the word “salma” is Italian, not Latin; and “Salmacis” is a Greek name, so I’d expect the name to be of Greek origin (there were Latin loans into Greek, but Greek loans into Latin were far more common).
So I guess we’ll never know. It would be funny if “Salmacis” was a name adapted from the Carian language, which is an enigmatic tongue that went extinct around the beginning of our Common Era. Or if not that, it may even be a name from the hypothetical and far more mysterious Pre-Greek language.
In any case, etymologists struggle to trace the origin of the name “Salmacis”.
Hermaphroditus
But we don’t have much trouble tracking the origin of the queer meaning of “salmacian”:
The last legend I recounted isn’t the only one relating to Salmacis and body transformation. Nay, a more famous legend about the spring, concerns the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, the former being the Herald of the Gods (and not the bureaucrat from Futurama) and the latter being the goddess of fucking (and unsurprisingly, the origin of the word “aphrodisiacs”). Also, they were siblings. Just felt like pointing that out. Their son was named Hermaphroditus, which I deadass just love — instead of an interesting, symbolic, unique name, they just bestowed upon him their ship name. Frigging brilliant.
Either way, you can probably see where this is going.
The Roman poet Ovid in the fourth book of Metamorphoses says that Hermaphroditus was nursed by the naiads (freshwater nymphs) of the caves of Mount Ida, this being a holy site in Phrygia in Anatolia. As a fifteen year old, Hermaphroditus, like the fifteen year old he was, grew kinda bored of his surroundings, so he decided to go on a bit of a tour around Greek Anatolia. One of the regions he went to was Caria, and there, in the woods near Halicarnassus, he encountered the Salmacis Spring — exhausted, sweaty, and dirty from travel, he could use a bath and some water to drink. Hermaphroditus was a strapping lad, and upon seeing him, the lazy, vain, and horny-on-main naiad of the spring, also named Salmacis, really put the “nymph” in “nymphomania”: She kept saying to Hermaphroditus, “u wan sum fuk? pls lemme smash. les get married”, trying to kiss him and stuff, but Hermaphroditus declined and said, “I’m going to leave if you don’t stop. Please respect my boundaries.”.
So Salmacis said, “Alright, I’ll leave.”. But really she just hid in some tall grass and waited for Hermaphroditus to get naked. Once he did, in a hypersexual fervor Salmacis leapt out and started groping and kissing Hermaphroditus, and called out to the gods that she wanted to be one and never apart from Hermaphroditus… Which the gods, for some reason, decided to answer by fusing their bodies together. Like, I kinda thought the gods would’ve disliked Salmacis for rejecting the ways of Artemis in favor of vanity or somesuch, or wouldn’t have approved of her, you know, sexually assaulting a 15-year-old god… I guess the gods had it out for Hermaphroditus for being a rebellious teenager???
Anyways, after being cursed with being both male and female, Hermaphroditus asked his parents to make the waters of Salmacis transform anyone who bathed or evidently drank therefrom — and I guess that’s the setup for that other legend about the Carian pillagers. More specifically, it seems like men were supposed to be transformed, with no mention of women.
quisquis in hos fontes vir venerit, exeat inde semivir et tactis subito mollescat in undis.
But who knows, maybe men weren’t the only ones to be transformed.
So, uhh, yeah. That story’s the origin of the word “hermaphrodite” for a creature of two sexes, though the word in reference to humans is considered a bit offensive now, so “intersex” is used instead for those born between the sexes (people with ambiguous genitals, hypospadias, rare chromosome patterns, and soforth). Some intersex people are trying to reclaim the word “hermaphrodite”, but opinions seem mixed about the topic.
I will use the word “hermaphrodite” throughout the rest of this post, but only in things like quotes, paraphrases, and historical definitions.
And that story is also the origin of the word “salmacian” in its queer sense, since it’s what Carter referred to in “The Angel’s Dictionary”.
Synonyms, Semantics, & Such
As you can imagine, some people aren’t comfortable with our word referring to the literal rapist of a fifteen year old, so Tumblr users Plurgai and Princetbleach coined “aphrodisian” as a synonym on May 15th, 2020 (we’ll get back to them). It’s named after Aphroditus, who I rather stupidly thought was the same as Aphrodite, but in fact is just another name for Hermaphroditus. Either way, this term “aphrodisian” hasn’t really caught on, since “salmacian” has a quarter-century head start… Besides, a word like “aphrodisian”, due to its similarity to “aphrodisiac”, sounds a bit overly lewd to me.
Also, pro tip: if you’re trying to change a word based on a figure of Greek mythology, because that figure did something absolutely despicable… Don’t change the word to honor a different figure of Greek mythology. They were basically all terrible in their own unique ways. I don’t know what Aphroditus did, but boy oh boy did Aphrodite do some stuff.
So others have coined terms such as “bisex”, “biadic”, “ambissex”, “ambiadic”, “bigenital”, or “bigonadal”, the latter two technically just being more specific forms of salmacian. These terms, too, see less use, although I do see “bigenital” at least a bit.
Just as well, one could ignore The Angel’s Dictionary’s etymology, and instead consider “salmacian” in its queer sense to be a semantic shift from its earlier meaning of “someone who bathed in or drank from the Salmacis Spring; an effeminate man; an impotent man; an androgyne; a hermaphrodite; (rarely) a masculine woman”. Shifting it from a word intended to shame the gender non-conforming, to a word meant to celebrate an emerging kind of non-conformity.
Not just the etymology of the word “salmacian” has come under scrutiny, but the definition as well: on September 11th, 2016, Pride-Flags on DeviantArt issued a new definition of the word “salmacian” to supersede Carter’s definition:
[…] people who wish to have a mixed genital set […]
Some say that salmacians are more specifically endosex people who want such a set, but I personally dislike this addition to the definition, considering that the vast majority of intersex people don’t have mixed genitals, and being intersex doesn’t stop anybody from wanting mixed genitals. In fact, I’ve seen an intersex person online whose mixed genitals were mutilated as a child; they describe themself as a salmacian because they want the genitals they were born with back. I can only imagine that they aren’t the only one who’s experienced that.
Other alternative definitions say that salmacians want “mixed sex characteristics”… To me, this implies that e.g. non-op trans women who want or have breasts are salmacians, which doesn’t seem right to me. It’s better, then, to say “mixed primary sex characteristics”.
Another interesting thing to note is that some specify in their definitions how salmacians don’t need to desire a combination of human parts, but may also include xenogenitals. Xenogenital salmacians are immensely rare, that’s something you can be, and that something is what I call based as Hell.
Regardless, words will always have different meanings to different people, and people are free to choose whether or not they identify with the “salmacian” label regardless of whether they do or don’t match the majority’s definition of the word.
If you look back to the definition in “The Angel’s Dictionary”: the terms “male-to-X” and “female-to-X” have fallen a bit out of favor because they imply that you were born as one thing and then became another; and since “intersex” is congenital, saying that one is “transitioning to intersex” is considered dismissive of the actual struggles of properly intersex people. “Transsexual” has also fallen out of favor as a term, mainly due to its rather “medical” sound.
So, really, the word “salmacian” is the perfect example of the clash between the “rough-and-tumble” LGBT+ community of the 1990s, and the modern community, which is often very focused on being courteous and precise. I dunno, I just think it’s hilarious how an intersex trans advocate coined a word in 1996, only for that selfsame word two decades later to be scrutinized for being problematic towards intersex and trans people. Not to imply that the criticisms are unjust — the new definition is way better — I’m just sayin’, it’s just kinda funny how much standards have shifted in the past 20 years.
I should also make a quick mention of some other related terms to salmacians, courtesy of the LGBTA Wikia. These don’t necessarily describe all salmacians; most salmacians may or most likely may not personally identify with any of these labels:
Transsexual: one whose current or desired sex characteristics don’t match with their original characteristics.
Altersex: when this is non-endosex in a way that wasn’t congenital.
Xenogenital: genitals in particular, in a way that isn’t normally possible.
Floragenital,faunagenital, astrogenital, cyberex, machinex: themed variants.Morphisex: Capable of transformation.Also refer to relevant terms under “diffxeno”.
Diffprodu: reproductive organs in particular, aside from the penis and vagina/vulva.
Diffut: organs derived from the Müllerian ducts in particular.
Diff-ut: uterus.Diff-pro: prostate, more technically prostatic utricle, but whatever.
Diffxeno: diffprodu in forms not currently biologically possible.
Difflora, diffauna, diffastro, difftech: themed variants.Diffmorphi: capable of transformation.Diffcombo: mixed.
AFAB-P & AMAB-V:AFABs who want penises and AMABs who want vaginas/vulvas respectively, but no other traits of the opposite sex.
Sinealt: one who only wants a partial transition.
Miscesex: the mixed-genital alternate, inner-world personality of some people with dissociative identity disorder.
Now, you can question how useful it really is to have so many hyper-specific terms that very few people actually identify with. After all, they may make discussions of our bodies needlessly inaccessible and confusing to anybody who isn’t in the know — essentially turning our own bodies and minds into heraldic achievements with queer blazonry, and our pride flags into said blazons’ colored stripe based logographic writing system… OK, that only made these terms seem cooler.
Point is, if you want to use any of these terms for yourself, go ahead, but be aware that these terms are niche, very precise, and you might often be better off using “plain English”, as it were.
Popularization
The word “salmacian” to mean “someone who wants mixed genitals” was used really rarely from its inception to 2016. It was used, but you could count its uses on one hand. There are two pages of google results for “salmacian” from 1996-2015, and, like, only three of the results (not counting an anachronistic Pinterest result) refer to the queer sense of the word. And all of them are just lists of queer words, without definitions. So if the word “salmacian” saw any use in the LGBT+ community prior to 2015, it just wasn’t online. Either that or the relevant websites have all shut down by now (75% of websites today are things like parked domains), or the results just don’t show up on Google for some other reason. When “The Angel’s Dictionary” was published, only ~20% of U.S. households had internet, and over the course of the 2000s that percentage rose from ~42% to ~71% — but LGBT+ people are notable for being early adopters of any technology that allows us to connect with the likeminded anyways.
It really seems like that 2016 Pride-Flags post was what it took to bring the word “salmacian” into the consciousness of the LGBT+ community to some extent, with usage growing somewhat more and more common after then, exponentially.
Google results in 2016: 1 page
2017: 2 pages
2018: 2 pages
2019: 1 page
2020: 2 pages
2021: 3 pages
2016-2021 total: 6 pages
And while not all the results relate to our section of the LGBT+ community, the majority of results post-2016 do, rather than only a small minority like before then.
If you’re curious about plurals: there are 8 comments with “salmacians”, one with “bisexes” (again, referring to bisexuality), and none with any of the other labels. So, evidently “salmacian” is by far the most used word, and sees a good amount of use.
I think it’s safe to say that our meaning has overtaken the original meaning of this niche word, “salmacian”… Which isn’t necessarily to say that “salmacian” is a widely used and understood word today, but it’s an increasingly common word nonetheless, and that trend will only continue as more and more people tell each other about salmacians, or as our visibility generally grows. I’ve always enjoyed telling others about salmacians: seeing people’s reactions when they discover that there are thousands of others who feel the same way as them, and that there’s nothing wrong with them.
PART 2: MEDICINE
Salmacian Surgeries Overview
For most of salmacian history, you were just kinda boned if you wanted mixed genitals. While people have requested sex reassignment surgery (albeit not of a salmacian type) since at latest the third century, sex reassignment surgery only really became a thing during the 20th century. But partly because of the hardcore exorsexism of the times, and transphobia more broadly, and simply the technologies and techniques not being advanced enough, the first examples of people intentionally undergoing surgery to have both a penis and vagina have seemingly mostly-to-only been this century, particularly from the 2010s onward.
Now more than ever before, due to lots of activism, non-binary and gender non-conforming people are recognized and somewhat respected (but still not very much so), and genitals and gender are seen as increasingly separate. These factors have increased demand for alternative forms of gender-affirming surgery, which have partly caused more places to offer transitional healthcare based on informed consent, and have promoted innovations in transitional surgery.
Well, increased demand is one part to it — increased activism for transitional healthcare to not be locked behind gates and fees is another.
Either way, in many countries and regions it’s now considerably easier to get penis-preserving vaginoplasty(PPV) orvagina-preserving phalloplasty/metoidioplasty (is there an abbreviation? VPP? VPM?) than it’s historically been, among other surgeries; and a number of surgeons have years of experience with these surgeries, having done them hundreds of times. The fact that it’s possible to surgically have mixed genitals now has probably played a big role in growing the number of self-identified salmacians.
It seems the most popular surgeons for salmacians of any sex are Drs. Heidi Wittenberg and Curtis Crane.
If you can find any others, please tell me. I think there are probably a number of bottom surgeons who could do salmacian surgeries, but just don’t really “advertise” this fact at all since they do it so rarely.
It seems PPV is most commonly done using a newer, rarer form of vaginoplasty called the peritoneal pull-through, which sounds like the strangest hit dance of the 1960s. I should clarify that the peritoneum is a different body part from the perineum: the peritoneum is the lining of the abdominal cavity, whereas the perineum is what one might casually call the taint. So in a peritoneal pull-through vaginoplasty, a bunch of fancy tools are used to make a bit of space between the urethra and arsehole, as it were, and then peritoneal flaps are pulled down to make the vaginal lining; the peritoneal lining is closed off circa 15 cm above.
The peritoneal pull-through seems like it was created in the 1960s by the Soviet mad scientist S.N. Davydov, for the treatment of vaginal agenesis. Its usage on trans people seems to date to the 2000s, but has mainly picked up steam in the past decade. Of these, the peritoneal pull-through’s salmacian usage is even rarer, and is set apart from its nushiumlass equivalent because of how clitoroplasty just evidently isn’t really possible for a salmacian, and salmacian labiaplasty may require some more creativity on the part of the surgeon if the salmacian in question doesn’t want circumcision or scrotectomy.
Scrotectomy. What a scrumptious word.
Anyways, it seems like bowel vaginoplasty (or “intestinal vaginoplasty” or “sigmoid colon vaginoplasty”) can also be used salmacianly. I can’t confirm if it ever has been or not, though. In this form of vaginoplasty, a 3-4 inch piece of the sigmoid colon (the S-looking bit of the large intestine closest to one’s bunghole) is detached and rotated down to become the vaginal lining, attached to the taint non-salmacianly using genital skin flaps, and presumably salmacianly using whatever works. Hopefully you can tell that I’m not a doctor.
Then the colon is stitched back up and that’s that. Evidently this technique for salmacians has the same issues regarding the president and lips as the peritoneal pull-through.
Bowel vaginoplasty is the second most common form of vaginoplasty, after the inherently non-salmacian penile inversion technique (which I do believe is Ranma Saotome’s signature martial arts move). Using the sigmoid colon for vaginoplasty appears to date to at earliest 1955 in a proposal by the German A. Zängl, but was evidently first actually performed circa 1974. Although other, less successful forms of bowel vaginoplasty using things like the rectum and ileum had been performed as early as 1892. Like the peritoneal pull-through, bowel vaginoplasty was also originally meant to treat vaginal agenesis, but just happened to work fairly well on trans women too.
This is kind of a recurring theme in trans medicine, you’ll find: that 90% of it is just repurposing something for cis people. Considering how there are some 99x more cis people than trans people, this shouldn’t be too surprising.
There are other forms of vaginoplasty, too, namely the McIndoe technique (a skin graft; dilation is a pain in the behind with that one), and buccal mucosa vaginoplasty (using the lining of the mouth, seriously). Both these forms are exceptionally rare, so I’m not going to talk about them.
Peritoneal pull-throughs are generally considered to be safer and better than than bowel vaginoplasties, but being a newer and rarer technique, much isn’t known about the long-term outcomes of the peritoneal pull-through. Still, the peritoneal pull-through has less risk of vaginal prolapse than bowel vaginoplasty, which I think we can all agree is a good thing; and some people complain that their bowel vaginas are kinda stimky, which is evidently not an issue with the peritoneal pull-through.
Otherwise, serious complications are rare, smaller issues are a bit more common, and the requirements seem more or less the same: no nicotine or other inhalants in your system for about three months before and after the snip-snips; no history of radiation in that general area of the body; no history of inflammatory bowel disease; and no obesity. For the peritoneal pull-through, evidently you also need to have never had abdominal mesh surgery or exploratory laparotomy, and need to be in “overall good health”, according to Dr. Wittenberg.
Some of the advantages of either of these forms of vaginoplasty among nushiumlasses is that they can produce a deeper vagina, that’s a bit more stretchy, with self-lubrication. And also that they require some less dilation than other forms of vaginoplasty.
Once again: If you can find any others, please tell me — I don’t think every surgeon who’s able to do salmacian surgery goes out of their way to say that they do.
And significantly more surgeons, it seems, offer VPP/VPM without urethral lengthening – in fact, some surgeons apparently only offer such VPP/VPM as transmasculine bottom surgery, saying that yeeting the gadzooker adds extra risks of complications.
On the contrary, other surgeons mandate vaginectomy when lengthening someone’s urethra.
So basically, urethral lengthening is the main thing that makes things tough for AFAB salmacians: urethral lengthening without vaginectomy tends to get some complications such as fistulas or narrowing in up to as many as half of those who undergo it, with the rates being I think closer to 3% for those who get UL with vaginectomy, and N/A% for those who get VPP without UL.
And evidently only a few surgeons know how to mitigate these risks when doing VPP with UL: if I’m understanding Dr. Crane right, the deal is that in VPP, you basically just have one thin layer of mucosa to block the old pee-hole with, but with vaginectomy you have a much thicker block o’ flesh that’s naturally less prone to a fistula. I’m not gonna lie, I don’t really understand how surgeons lengthen and redirect the urethra, and I’m not gonna pretend I understand.
Either way, in practice, all this means that if you’re an AFAB salmacian fine with peeing while sitting, it shouldn’t be super hard to find a surgeon willying to give you VPP/VPM… I mean, willing to give you.
But I’m using this frightening word “risk” – these complications of VPP with UL are generally fairly minor and easy to fix, but still a bit of a pain to have to deal with.
But how do metoidioplasty and phalloplasty work?
Let’s start with metoidioplasty, or “meta”, if you’re hip with the youths. This form of bottom surgery was developed in the late 1990s by various people. Basically, if a fellow with a Zimbabwe betwixt their legs has been on testosteroné for a while, their clit will generally grow quite a bit. Metoidioplasty, literally meaning “genital-changing surgical construction” (which you’d think would be the term for all forms of bottom surgery, but vsyo ravno), is essentially used in conjunction with this T-caused lengthening, to give one a dingus between 4 and 10 cm depending on factors, with the girth of an adult’s thumb.
Basically, there’s some snip-snips around the peen-to-be that free it from the pubic bone, and then that peen-to-be is just straightened out and lengthened. It’s like the D is already inside of you! Non-salmacianly, this metoidioplasty neodingus is given skin from the labia, that skin also being used to make the (optional) nutsack. But skin from elsewhere can evidently also be used to these ends if you wish to keep your labia.
Side note, metoidioplasty without scrotoplasty is sometimes called “clitoral release”, which sounds like a really weird finishing attack in a fighting game.
Do note that I’m simplifying things a bit, like I have for everything in this part. Either way, metoidioplasty is simpler, cheaper, and less time-consuming than phalloplasty. Severe complications are rare and basically the same as for any other surgery: infection, bleeding, damage to surrounding tissue, pain. But these surgeons are highly-trained professionals, so don’t stress it, yo.
According to a citationless bit on the Wikipedia article for phalloplasty, that form of peen-making has a 1 in 4 chance of serious complications. These include bruises, infection, blood shortage (ischemia), blood clot, and fucking necrosis of all things. Yeesh. This probably won’t kill you or anything, but you may have to kiss your cock goodbye if you get one of these serious complications — according to phallo.net, circa 8% of those who undergo anterolateral thigh phalloplasty end up losing all or part of their dongs; and circa 3.5% of those who undergo radial forearm phalloplasty.
So, all in all, phalloplasty is high risk and high reward. But what am phalloplasty???
First performed in 1946 by Sir Harold Delf Gillies, there are now three main types of phalloplasty: anterolateral thigh (ALT; i.e. leg), radial forearm (RFFF; i.e. arm), and musculocutaneous latissimus dorsi (MLD; i.e. side).
Man, these Harry Potter spells just keep getting weirder.
These forms are mostly the same, only really differing in terms of which body part is used to make the dongle. Phalloplasty tends to be more expensive and time-consuming than metoidioplasty, often involving a series of several surgeries to make the pingle-pongle-wingle-wongle bit by bit. Expect at least two extra surgeries within the first year, to make the urethra, scrote, and nuts, and to add a mechanical penile implant so that the neopenis can get hard (a “cyboner”, if you will).
Miscellaneous
On the other hand, if you want a salmacian surgery that falls outside of any of these procedures, then… Good luck, I guess. You might find a surgeon willing and able to do it, or might not. While surgeons are capable of a lot of different things with enough skill… Imagination has no limits but reality unfortunately still does.
Though I feel like I should also mention how if you want to be genital non-conforming, salmacianism isn’t the only form of that. Literally any set of genitals – even no genitals at all – can be had by members of any gender. So, for instance, if you’re cismasculine and want a vagina, then don’t feel pressured to keep your ping-pong-ding-dong if you don’t want it.
Oh, and one more thing: if you’re interested in taking hormones, but live somewhere where hormones are a bit inaccessible, I was recently introduced to a website called hrt.cafe. This site may help you acquire HRT. Feminizing HRT won’t help you salmacianly as an AMAB, but may otherwise aid in the pursuit of euphoria; masculinizing HRT for AFABs, on the other hand, often results in significant clitoral growth. Basically growing your own dong, much like what happens in AMAB puberty. This “bottom growth” is an unreliable method whose success comes down to genes and doses and whatnot, but the record length through this method seems to be roughly 3 inches. Just shy of the average flaccid penis length for cis men.
Unfortunately, though, testosterone is a controlled substance in many countries, due to the fact that it’s an anabolic steroid. I’m not necessarily recommending you break the law if you live somewhere where testosterone is controlled, “Crime bad!” quoth the state, but if you’re going to do it… Ki wo tsukete, my friend. Regardless, you have a starting point for where to look.
PART 3: COMMUNITY
Origins of Salmacians
There isn’t really much I can say here. As long as sexes, genders, and sexuality have existed, there have been queer people of all sorts of types. The status of such people in society, how they’re conceived of and said to come about, and the terms they’re referred to with, have gone through a lot of change around the world and over the millennia — but other people have covered all that in a lot more detail, a lot better than I ever could. The long story short is that, like most things in life, none of these things have ever really been binary. You’d be forgiven for thinking that binary conceptions of sex and gender have always been the norm, but that would be ignoring centuries of intentional repression of indigenous peoples’ gender variance, perhaps most notably of Native Americans.
Androgynous or two-sexed beings have also been found in art and mythology from around the world since the dawn of civilization. Like, even some reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European mythology have a two-sexed figure, and Enkidu from the Epic of Gilgamesh was an androgynous man (but not two-sexed… presumably). Speaking of Gilgamesh, Sumerian mythology had a deity called Inanna/Ishtar who could change your sex, and who was worshipped by ancient gender variant people. Which I think is based as all Hell.
These sorts of mythological characters challenge perceptions in a society dominated by and divided along the lines of conforming cis men and women, and also play into ideas about cosmic unity versus duality and whatnot.
As for real-world properly salmacian people, though, the earliest results I could find of people online or in print wishing to have mixed genitals dates to around the turn of the millennium, but I can only assume that Carter included “salmacian” in zir dictionary for a reason. The earliest thing I can vaguely call an expression of salmacianism was an interview with Cherríe Moraga from 1997:
Rosemary Weatherston (interviewer): You refer to having the wrong gender several times in your work. You wrote of dreaming that you were a hermaphrodite, of having hybrid experiences yourself, and not feeling like the right kind of woman because you felt like a butch. […]
But calling Moraga a salmacian feels like putting words in her mouth. Either way, “in your work” means that Moraga said “I dream/dreamed of being a hermaphrodite” possibly years earlier than this interview… And I aaaain’t going through all her work to find that.
It’s just straight-up difficult to track down the first example of such a thing, because there was and to an extent still is no common label for it. What am I supposed to google? “would like to have both a penis and vagina”? “wish I were a futanari“? “want to be a hermaphrodite”?
Note: Salmacians may call themselves “would-be futanari” when they don’t know about the label “salmacian”, or they see their desire to have mixed genitals as fetishistic. “Futanari” outside Japan is a porn term; DO NOT refer to other people as “futanari”.
And tracking this stuff down becomes even more difficult when you consider the fact that the first written example of someone wishing to have mixed genitals, might not be in English, or might use historical spelling, or might be outright misspelled. And also the fact that so much queer history has been erased, or was simply never noted down — honestly, how many people who’ve dreamed or fantasized or wished to have mixed genitals, would’ve taken the time to write that down? How many of those people were literate in the first place?
Either way, I can say with certainty that salmacians are not a new thing, even though this term for them is only a quarter-century old. Salmacians probably go as far back as there have been people and mythological figures with mixed genitals, or as far back as there have been cultures with third genders. Which is to say, salmacians have probably been around since the beginning of the Holocene circa 10K years ago, if not earlier.
Rallions-nous
These are the goals I’d consider part of “the Salmacian Struggle”: awareness, normalization, and autonomy.
Teach those who want mixed genitals that it’s OK, not inherently fetishistic, and surgically possible; that we salmacians are normal and more common than you’d think; have salmacians under a common flag and label for activism.
Work against both stigmas against and fetishization of those who have or want mixed/ambiguous genitals, and men/women with vaginas/penises respectively.
Fight for the bodily integrity of intersex and trans people, and the right of all to modify their bodies with informed consent; this includes the universalization and decentralization of transitional healthcare, the abolition of gatekeeping, and making salmacian surgeries available in more places.
Salmacians may be cis or trans, binary or non-binary, endosex or intersex, and of any sexuality, nationality, et cetera. However, our biggest demographic by far is endosex non-binary people. I’ve seen binary salmacians and intersex salmacians, but I’m yet to see any cis people who identify as salmacians (I’m certain cis salmacians exist, but they simply don’t identify as “salmacian”).
On May 3rd, 2020, the subreddit /r/salmacian was created by /u/Optional_Joystick. This subreddit currently has 1,127 members, with nearly 200 members having joined in the past month. It’s a rather cozy place, with a nice mix of serious discussions and silly memes. Feel free to look through that sub or post any questions there, for more info on salmacian things.
On Facebook, a group called Non-Binary Surgery was created on September 6th, 2018 by Seraphir Celestia; with a mere 116 members, it appears to be a dead community.
These appear to be the main online spaces for salmacians, notwithstanding simply tagging things as “#salmacian” on sites like Tumblr.
Although that Facebook group is obviously only really open for AFAB salmacians.
For AMABs in particular, the closest you’ll get is the subreddit /r/AMABwGD, whose earliest post dates to December 19th, 2020. This subreddit hit 500 members on August 7th, 2021, and as of October 8th, 2021, has 622 members. /r/AMABwGD isn’t a salmacian subreddit per se, but rather a subreddit for AMABs with genital dysphoria who “don’t want a binary transition”. Some of the members are salmacian; most, however, evidently just want to trade one for the other, as it were.
Curiously, while a pretty strong majority of that subreddit is non-binary, about 30% of the respondents in a subreddit survey described themselves as “exclusively male” – proving that there is actually a pretty significant number of cis people who want non-conforming genitals.
And then venturing outside of /r/AMABwGD, you’ll get to places like /r/Transgender_Surgeries, and then to more general trans net-communities. At that point you aren’t really in salmacian country anymore.
Actually, I just realized – since this blog post has a comments section, this is technically also a salmacian space. Heh heh.
I did ask other salmacians if they knew of other online spaces for us, but judging from the zero replies to that post, it appears that I’ve basically covered what there is to cover.
Unless you, o reader, know of somewhere else.
Demographics
Salmacians, as said a few paragraphs ago, are mostly endosex and non-binary, with small minorities of binary trans people (circa a quarter of salmacians) and intersex people. There is at least one salmacian who I’d classify as “xenogenital”, wanting “dolphin-inspired genitals”, although I don’t know if he personally identifies as “xenogenital”.
I’ve seen a few people questioning their genders wonder if they’re salmacian, but I’m yet to see anyone confident in their cisness call themself salmacian. A handful of non-salmacians in fact seem to be confused about what salmacianism is, seeing it as a gender rather than a form of gender expression… But honestly, if anybody wishes to treat salmacian as their own gender identity, then more power to them, though it seems nobody does this yet.
Salmacians who want to mix primary sex characteristics in a way other than simultaneously having a dingus and zooker are exceptionally rare (but not unheard of).
Salmacian demographics naturally tend to closely correspond to those of the non-binary community, as confirmed by a quick “survey” I did with about a dozen responses. Though it’s worth noting that because I did it over Reddit with a small sample size, the statistics will likely be significantly biased towards the types of people who would join a Reddit community for salmacians.
Salmacians tend to skew AFAB to the near-exact degree as in the non-binary community: between two thirds and three fifths of salmacians are AFAB. The reasons for this skew in the salmacian community I’d say are probably because of pressures placed on trans women to have conforming genitals, pressures placed on AMAB enbies to casually not exist, and the fact that salmacian vaginoplasty seems to lag a bit behind salmacian phalloplasty (as the “best” and most common form of vaginoplasty, penile inversion, is fundamentally not salmacian).
Salmacians do, however, seem to be older as a whole than non-binary people. On the official /r/nonbinary demographic survey of 2021, 30% of members reported being minors; but every salmacian I know of, or who replied to my survey post, is an adult. The youngest salmacians were 19, while the oldest salmacian I know of is nearly 40 years old. It seems like the majority of salmacians are in their 20s, skewing towards their earlier 20s; and significant minorities of salmacians are in their 30s or older, or younger than 20, with salmacians younger than 18 being effectively nonexistent.
The reason for these age demographics I’d say is just because people under 18 can’t get salmacian surgeries, so they presumably wouldn’t be on a page primarily focused on that. It could very well be that the under-18 salmacians are simply all vibing elsewhere, not in any dedicated salmacian communities. People over 18 are also presumably far more sexually active than those under 18, which might make genital dysphoria/euphoria a more pressing matter as it can affect relationships. Not like I’d know anything about that.
Most salmacians live in the United States, with a notable minority in Europe. As such, it’s unsurprising that most salmacians are monolingual Anglophones, and a strong-to-vast majority are white. The reasons for these skews are complex and contentious and not something I feel like writing about at 4:00 AM on a Thursday. The skews were of course also exacerbated by sampling bias, like every other statistic in this section.
Most salmacians seem to be in fairly good physical condition, although at least one struggles with some sort of unspecified disability.
One thing that sort of surprised me was how a majority of roughly three fifths of the non-binary salmacians had sort of a “lean” in their identities either towards male, or less commonly female. One might expect that those who wish to combine sexes would identify as simultaneously male and female, or neither as male and female, but this is evidently not the case for the majority – more commonly it’s people who rightly don’t see a vagina as negating their masculinity, or a penis their femininity; or it’s people who lean towards a gender but wish to express queerness or androgyny through their anatomy, regardless of identity.
Sexuoromantically, a majority of salmacians seem to be androphiles in some form: of those in relationships, it seems like more are in relationships with men than with women or with… What are adult enbies called? Ceteren?
Anyways, it seems like two-fifths of salmacians are monosexuals in some form, most of them gay; most of the remainder are bisexual, and a few are asexual. Presumably of these, most have corresponding romantic orientations, but at least one respondent reported being romantically interested in all genders but sexually only in men.
I can’t really say anything about this fact. Boys gud.
Riveting analysis, Erika…
An unfortunate number of salmacians struggle with mental illnesses such as depression, and many have strong genital dysphoria if not gender dysphoria in general. Seemingly about a third of salmacians are neurodivergent, which seems to be about the same proportion as in the non-binary community. Some neurodivergent salmacians have ADHD, some – autism, and presumably some both. Autists like me are overrepresented in the non-binary community, supposedly because we’re already well-acquainted with how societal expectations are BS and we’ll never be able to live up to them. Presumably this same reason explains autistic salmacians.
The online salmacian community as a whole seems kind of “nerdy”: studying complex topics like psychology or climate science in higher education, a number work in IT or somesuch, many are interested in things like world history and languages, with hobbies like art and writing. Many like tabletop games and video games, animanga, books for normal people (imagine reading lmao), and many listen to music- wait, doesn’t everybody do that?
Media preferences seem quite variable. Horror and fantasy are particularly popular genres among salmacians, and musically some like metal music and some like jazz and some like pop and so on and soforth. Presumably I’m the only salmacian iyashikei connoisseur who listens to Russian doomer music and Oromo folk pop.
One final thing I should note in this section is that it seems like a surprisingly large number of those who one could describe as “salmacian”, don’t describe themselves with that label, often even after they’ve had their operation. The reason for this I assume is because many people don’t see it as worthwhile to apply a label onto what they want from their intimate anatomy – it’s their own private business, and maybe not something they invest that much time into.
Whys & Wherefores
If you’ve just heard of salmacians from this post (if that’s the case, wack), you may be wondering, “Why would people want mixed genitals”? To you, it may seem strange.
So let me explain. We can view genitals as serving four main purposes:
As a source of gender affirmation
As a means of reproduction
As a means of sexual pleasure
As a means to just, you know, piss
And the reasons people are salmacian, as far as I’m aware, always involve one or more of these.
Gender affirmation
A set of genitals may bring gender euphoria, meaning it affirms one’s gender identity in a way that improves one’s mood; gender dysphoria, meaning it causes distress due to a perceived incongruity with one’s gender identity; or may have no effect… Is there a fancy term for this? Gender aphoria? Whatever.
So, for some salmacians, it may be a source of dysphoria to not have mixed genitals, or it may bring euphoria to have mixed genitals, which seems particularly common among non-binary salmacians.
Or, it may bring euphoria to have a penis or vagina, but one’s genitals from birth don’t bring dysphoria and one has personal reasons to keep them.
Reproduction
Some salmacians wish to eventually procreate, and hence want to keep the tools they were born with for specifically this purpose, while also having new genitals.
Hormone replacement therapy tends to negatively affect one’s fertility, often permanently. For this reason, it’s common practice for trans people to freeze eggs/sperm; it’s still not surgically possible to implant wombs or ovaries into trans women or testicles into trans men.
Still, in many cases AFABs on testosterone may become pregnant or AMABs on estrogen may impregnate. The latter, I’ve heard, particularly if they take non-steroidal antiandrogens.
Once ovarian and testicular implants are possible, I’ll have to wonder if there’ll be salmacians who just want to be able to both impregnate and be pregnant.
Pleasure
AMABs who enjoy sexually penetrating and AFABs who enjoy being sexually penetrated may wish to preserve their original parts; or wish to keep them as erogenous zones. Alternatively, AMABs who enjoy being penetrated may want a hole other than the one they already have, with its erogeny in this case coming from the prostate (as opposed to the old dong nerves in penile inversion vaginoplasty).
AFABs who enjoy penetrating may want a neopenis as opposed to a strap-on, e.g. if they wish to experience physical sensation. In this case they may go for metoidioplasty: although this may result in a neopenis too short for sexual penetration, it results in one that’s considerably more sensitive to stimulation (phalloplasty per se only has erogeny at the base of the dong).
Other salmacians still enjoy the thought of e.g. their, err, xren flopping around during sex. More power to them. And many salmacians, evidently, enjoy both penetration and being penetrated.
Urination
Some people just like peeing standing up. Either they’ve done it their whole lives, or they want to do it now. Speaking as a stand-peër myself, aye, it do be kinda convenient ngl.
Especially for golden sho—
Other reasons
Some are just scared of regret if they get rid of their original genitals, or don’t feel like it’s worth the hassle to get rid of them, or something along those lines.
Some may want mixed genitals as some sort of power move or act of non-conformity.
And I’m sure there are other people with other reasons still. Maybe somebody just really wanted to helicopter or something, I dunno.
Dual Form
An accusation that salmacians may sometimes get is that their desire to have mixed genitals is “fetishistic”. The people who make this accusation… Are dumb, and salmacians will point this out. Firstly, such accusers are dumb because salmacians, from my experience and informal survey, tend to actually be less libidinous than the average person; and they often have a number of different reasons for being salmacian, the explicitly sexual reasons not really involving a “fetish for mixing” so much as simply having the right tools for their own needs.
But even ignoring this fact… I reckon there’s at least one salmacian for whom having mixed genitals is because, somehow, that gets them off. To me that feels akin to getting off on medical diagrams of the human reproductive system, but suum cuique. Either way, this hypothetical fetishistic salmacian wishes to have sex organs… That bring them sexual gratification.
Sorry, what’s the issue with this?
I was initially planning on including a rant about informed consent here, but since that can be summarized with this handy graphic, I’ve decided instead to write a bit about the actual fetishization of people with mixed genitals. This fetishization does not come from salmacians but rather from… Whatever non-salmacians are called. Nushiumlasses?
Perhaps the most, err, bountiful example of this mixed-genital fetishism is futanari – literally meaning “dualform” in Japanese. At strictest “futanari” means “one with an overall feminine body but a combination of male and female primary sex characteristics” and at broadest means “hermaphrodite”, “androgyne”, or “woman with a penis”. The word “futanari” may be used as a very yikes slang term for trans and intersex peoples… Which is a shame, because “dual form” as a term for salmacians sounds badass out of context.
Outside of Japan the word “futanari” has undergone the semantic narrowing common in loanwords, coming to mean in English “a particular genre of pornography or the characters therein” – particularly of drawn (“eromanga”), animated (“eroanime”), or game (“eroge”) forms, which are together known as “hentai”. Outside of this main usage, “futanari” (often clipped as “futa”) may in English also be used as a slur for trans and intersex people.
Futanari hentai is a pretty popular pornographic genre, and is the closest a salmacian will usually get to “representation” in media… Considering how few real mixed-genital people there are; and how in media one usually only sees genitals in porn, sex-ed documentaries, and Danish kids’ cartoons; it doesn’t surprise me that most salmacian “representation” comes from drawn pornography. But this doesn’t mean that this “futanari” genre shouldn’t be scrutinized (and God knows hentai, Hell, porn in general should be scrutinized!)
Because I am an incessant jerkoff in several ways myself, I’ll write my own thoughts and experiences with futanari, which seem to mirror those of much of the broader salmacian community:
Only about a fifth to a quarter at most of futanari porn appeals to me. Firstly because of obnoxious and useless Japanese obscenity laws… But at least these laws don’t censor women’s oppai, which is based; and these laws also indirectly resulted in the plot of Ongezellig, so they’re not all bad. But censorship aside, here’s my issue with futanari: Porn is often based on the ability to self-insert, right? In your typical cishet male-aimed cishet porn, the man is “played down” to become easier to self-insert as. The real focus is on the woman – the object – with the man essentially just being her appendage. And I personally turn to futanari porn because I want porn that I can self-insert into as a salmacian femby; but ultimately futanari is generally aimed at a cishet male audience, and it shows.
Which makes sense: two-thirds to three-quarters of porn viewers are male, so if you’re chasing money or fame as an eromangaka, you target your drawings towards men, with enjoyment by others merely being flukes.
Futanari porn makes good use of the potentials of its medium, for better and more often for worse: futa phalluses are often non-human, or if they are human they’re bigger than a forearm, with emissions white as snow and near-diluvial in volume. Common themes in futa porn include exhibitionism and BDSM (even CBT), which tends not to appeal to me… Like, you’d think it wouldn’t be so hard to find an uncensored, well-drawn futa with a normal-sized, human phallus, with testicles (this is just personal preference), behaving as one would expect of a real mixed genital person or woman with a penis. Porn that portrays mixed-genital people as just as capable and worthy of meaningful intimacy as anyone else… And doesn’t instead objectify women with penises as a novelty for the fantasies of cishet men.
Somebody should make a subreddit or something for “wholesome” futanari porn, actually… Call it “cuteanari”.
Futas seem to rarely use their meeshkas, too. For as much as I enjoy penetration, that’s still a shame. If I were sexually active and had my ideal body, I’d probably use both my dongus and meeshka to comparable degrees. Futa porn’s penetrative ubiquity reminds me of “phallocentrism”: the idea that pleasing the phallus, particularly of the cis man, is prioritized in sex; even that phallic sexual dominance is equivalent to manhood. This “phallocentrism” often manifests in cishet male-aimed queer porn: naprimér, cissapphic porn depicts penetration with sex toys far more than in real-world lesbian sex, and transfeminine porn is ubiquitous for this same reason.
So, essentially, with a cis woman, the futa is a prettier stand-in for the cishet man; or with a cis man, the futa is a spicy “challenge” to his masculinity and authority (cf. pegging, femdom). On the discussion thread for futanari on /r/salmacian, one person suggested that “futanari is a way for a man to receive anal sex without it being seen as gay”, but a quick google of “futas are gay” proves this idea wrong. Things are in a “holy trinity” for cishet men: whichever benign things they perceive as “threatening” their heterosexuality, their masculinity, or their personal value, threatens everything else in the trinity. It’s sad.
So to a large extent the futa is essentially just the hentai equivalent of transfeminine porn, with a nominal vagina that is rarely used for anything (and when it is – hallelujah, I say). Indeed, the futanari genre was according to Wikipedia largely inspired by imported American transfeminine porn to Japan in the 1980s.
Insofar as one just doesn’t have much else to choose from, those wishing to see salmacian porn will basically have to turn to futanari, or even to nushiumlass live action trans or intersex porn.
There is, however, a little live-action salmacian porn, all evidently by the same person. Amateur porn, no less, which I tend to prefer when it comes to queer porn because it’s usually more catered to us and not based in fetishistic objectification. Queer porn can be quite a powerful thing, I think. Not all bad.
PART 4: SYMBOLS
Salmacian Symbolism
There have been a small handful of proposals for salmacian flags/emblems over the years: five as far as I know. Of these, two proposed symbols reference conjunction or fusion of some sort, either in general or specifically of sexes; one has unknown symbolism; and two reference the Salmacis Spring, one of these further referencing the altersex umbrella.
So, let’s take a look-see at these proposals.
This is the currently-established salmacian symbol. It was proposed by Tumblr user Symbi, and posted to ask-pride-color-schemes on February 17th, 2017. It’s the astronomical symbol for conjunction, meaning that two objects are in the same location… It’s kind of a boring design, but I like the symbolism. And it does fit in with many other LGBT+ symbols, which are primarily derived from astronomical or alchemical symbols by due to the long history of the Venus symbol representing women and Mars symbol representing men. Though I’m personally a bit iffy about whether this sort of symbol makes sense for salmacians, because these sorts of symbols generally refer to genders, and salmacian ain’t one o’ those: salmacian is rather a form of gender expression.
Before I get to the main salmacian pride flag, I’d like to go through the other proposals.
This is the bisex pride flag, designed by Tumblr’s imoga-pride on December 14th, 2018. This flag has no symbolism whatsoever, and it frankly looks like a tacky party decoration. It’s not the worst flag I’ve seen, it has a good amount of contrast… But I’m not surprised that this flag sees next to no use. The colors feel very random and chaotic.
This is the aphrodisian pride flag, designed by Plurgai on May 15th, 2020. You may remember Plurgai from earlier — it was one of the co-coiners of the word “aphrodisian”, alongside princetbleach. This flag just looks kinda gross to me, not gonna lie. Like, the proportions of the stripes are inconsistent, but not in a visually appealing way; more importantly, the colors are super saturated and it’s all just kinda blech. But at least this flag shows some sense of color coordination.
As for symbolism: the upper two stripes represent AMAB sex characteristics, and the bottom two represent AFAB sex characteristics; the white in the middle represents the convergence of these characteristics, and the green stripe in the middle represents the state of being between.
As we say here in Norway: Tjaaaaaa. I like the symbolism to an extent, but I still have some issues with it.
First off, I feel like the green stripe is a bit redundant, and the flag would also be aesthetically better without it (in fact, there is a variant [broken link] without it). Second of all, using blue to represent AMAB-ness and pink to represent AFAB-ness is kinda cringe. These colors are entirely based in social conceptions of gender, and not scientific conceptions of sex, which means that this flag low-key equates AFAB-ness to femininity/womanhood and AMAB-ness to masculinity/manhood. Which isn’t very bodacious, litfam.
And I’m not sure how well that “convergence” symbolism even works. It might’ve been clearer to convey that through, say, a bend dexter in one color, a bend sinister in another, with their intersection being a blend of those two colors.
For that matter, this flag isn’t inclusive to xenogenital salmacians… A tiny minority of our little salmacian community, sure, but not one that should be excluded from representation.
But I’ve spent more than enough time rambling about this rarely-used flag anyways.
This is a salmacian flag proposed by ghast505 on November 3rd, 2020. It’s based on combining the more established salmacian flag (that we’ll get to in a bit) with the altersex pride flag, altersex being a broader umbrella that salmacian is a part of. And that sort of “nods to other flags in your flag” is something I dig, and I do kinda appreciate how it was done in this flag by including the triangle and line from the altersex flag. It gives the flag something that sets it apart, and indicates a bit about the meaning of the flag by hinting at something related. It’s like the radical of a kanji, or the canton in a Russian municipal coat of arms, or somesuch.
Though peculiarly, the triangle shape doesn’t seem to have any symbolism in the altersex flag… It evokes upward movement to me, though. I dig it. The color white on the altersex flag, funny enough, represents those who desire no genitals, which makes that color on this salmacian flag a bit of an oxymoron. Well, it doesn’t represent anything on this flag other than an allusion to the altersex flag, so I guess “oxymoron” is a stretch.
The order of these stripes actually makes more sense symbolically than the order of the stripes on the established salmacian flag, but the main issue with this flag is just that the colors are too, well, pastel. The flag looks faded before it’s even touched sunlight!
Another potential issue with this flag is just that it’s perhaps a bit too similar to the altersex flag it alludes to.
But without further ado.
The 2016 Flag
This is the most established salmacian pride flag, and to be honest, I kinda like it. At first I didn’t like the colors, but they’ve grown on me. I think they work well together, with good contrast. Indeed, it’s the only salmacian flag to have been printed, and it looks even sicker in real life!
The flag was first published to DeviantArt by Pride-Flags on September 11th, 2016. The same place that the word “salmacian” got its current definition. The actual designer of the flag is anonymous.
The upper two stripes represent the sky, the lower two stripes represent the ground, and the purple stripe represents the Salmacis Spring. And this symbolism is where my main issue with this flag lies. I wouldn’t have guessed that purple represented the Salmacis Spring in a million years — the spring was known for being incredibly pristine! Who’d drink purple water? I wouldn’t! Purple water looks like goddang toxic sludge!
And if you’re representing the spring, then what do you need to represent the sky and ground for? It’s such vague, universal symbolism that you might as well say that those colors represent nothing.
And yeah, this salmacian flag is an attractive flag, but it just isn’t very striking. It has the colors of a nature painting you’d hang in your cabin in Northern Minnesota. That can work for some flags, but I personally think that the salmacian flag should be more eye-catching.
So this is what I’ve done.
The Sign of Salmacis
When I started this project to redesign the salmacian flag, my first ideas were either an equal vertical tricolor charged with a heraldic fountain, or a Spanish fess charged with three cups being toasted with. The latter idea was loosely inspired by my flag proposal for Newark, Ohio, and by the music video for Laibach’s cover of “Sympathy for the Devil”. I like cups on flags, and think toasts look cool. The idea was basically that salmacians of all types were drinking the spring’s water together.
Flag Proposal for Newark, Ohio:
But I gave up on that idea, because the symbolism was too abstract. Likewise, the idea of simply a heraldic fountain seemed too broad — like anybody could have a flag like that.
So I started looking into any landmarks or peculiarities of the Salmacis Spring, because I wanted to represent that spring if at all possible. I wanted a unique symbol to represent that spring and that spring alone.
Quickly into my search, I came across the Salmacis Inscription located near the historical site of the spring. It’s a poem sixty lines long, all-caps Greek etched in stone in a beautiful style. It begins:
So I thought, “Should the flag have those three words on it?”. Nah. That would be too long. Too many details for an effective flag, too difficult to make legible when the flag’s in reverse, at rest, crinkled up, or at a distance. So, maybe just one letter would make a good charge for the flag… The inscription’s first letter is epsilon, but that just looks out of place. It should be a sigma for “Salmacis”.
But I didn’t want to use an uppercase sigma (Σ), because in online culture that’s associated with these dude-bros called “sigma males”, and in the world of vexillology, the capital sigma is often found in flags related to Brazilian fascism (integralismo). So, a lowercase sigma (σ) it would have to be. I thought it was kinda fun how, just like the already established salmacian symbol, the lowercase sigma is a circle with a single line coming out of it. But the design was still a bit plain if it was just a lowercase sigma.
And then it hit me: I could combine the lowercase sigma with the heraldic fountain from the idea I’d thrown out, to create a unique symbol representing both the initial and the spring. So I tried that, and played around with different numbers of waves. I ended up settling for two waves. There are some things you can read into this:
Two waves enumerating “two” (二), as in being of or aspiring to be of two sexes;
Two waves form a stylized equals sign (=), representing equality of all people in the salmacian community, and the fight for equality of LGBT+ peoples;
Three waves formed by negative space represent three goals: awareness, normalization, and autonomy
I’m not sure how good these symbolisms are. I’m as open to criticism of the meanings as I am to criticisms of the design itself; feel free to reinterpret my flag, too.
Layout & Colors
So, once I’d designed this “Sign of Salmacis”, I plopped it onto the middle of a flag. I did consider simply having the emblem on a solid-color field, à la the intersex flag, but this looked a bit like the flag of a Japanese prefecture — that is to say, it looked a bit plain and corporate. So I’d have to divide the field.
My favorite division of the field to use in flag design is the Canadian pale, particularly with either fimbriation or cottices, and naturally with a charge in the middle. But there was no way to incorporate the Sign of Salmacis onto such a flag in a way that felt natural. So, I quite simply slanted the Canadian pale to match the angle used in the Sign of Salmacis — now the symbol fits on the flag like a glove. This sort of bend sinister based design was inspired by the flag of the Republic of the Congo, which I’ve always found quite pretty and striking. As far as I know, there aren’t really any pride flags that utilize bends in this manner, which does make this flag a bit of a “black sheep” among pride flags — absolutely going against the Rainbow Flag Family — but all this means is that the flag stands out among the flock. Especially since it also uses only a few colors, following the rule of tincture, with a simple but interesting and unique emblem in the center.
The bend sinister layout is one that to me evokes dynamism, progress, and non-conformity, too. This isn’t necessarily symbolism, but it was thought that I put into the design.
And then came the issue of the colors. I wanted to include blue at first, and I was considering just ripping off the colors of the trans flag. But I decided “nah”, because I want the flag to both be inclusive and unique, and copying another flag’s colors went against both of those goals. I also considered using the colors of the current salmacian flag, for continuity’s sake, but that wouldn’t have any symbolism to it. It would be redundant, and it wouldn’t work well with the design anyways.
So I pondered and pondered some more. I decided that rather than having blue for boys, pink for girls, and white for enbies, that representing the diversity of the salmacian community would be best achieved by taking the route that the intersex flag took: intentionally choosing popular gender neutral colors. Ones that can already be found on other pride flags. This color palette hence represents how salmacians may be of any gender. The colors are also exceptionally rare in flags around the world, making my salmacian flag neutral and one of a kind… Well, at present, green-yellow-purple’s most common use in vexillology is for various Mardi Gras flags, but I doubt that this will be a point of confusion.
If you want more meanings for the colors, then sure:
Green represents aspiration towards having mixed genitals, and the normalization of genital non-conformity; yellow represents euphoria from having mixed genitals, and raising awareness of salmacians’ existence; purple represents the fusion of different sexes, and individualistic personal autonomy. The flag’s central emblem, the “Sign of Salmacis”, consists of a lowercase sigma for “salmacian”, with waves to represent the sex-transforming Salmacis Spring of mythology.
If you’d like to see the flag waving, you may do so here; if that’s too much for your computer, you may try here instead.
The Flag Mentioned:
And, of course, I do already like the salmacian flag as-is. It’s pretty and it works. This was mostly just a creative exercise, “throwing my hat in the ring” as it were.
I may write more about salmacian or trans/non-binary topics another time, but for now:
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