Metalline – Word Proposal
(Also, there’s a small note for anyone tired of all the new words at the end of this post)
The experience of having a different gender identity than what is assigned to you is the transgender experience. (As I understand it, the prefix “trans-” in transgender means “across”– as though your gender crosses the “line” between your gender identity and the gender identity assigned to you.)
The experience of having a different allinity identity than what is assigned to you… doesn’t yet have a name.
I’m proposing one: “Metalline”
A metalline person is one whose allinity identity is different than the one assigned to their gender.
Examples (not necessarily exhaustive): Intramasc women, intrafem men, people whose allinity identity is fluid in some way, people with an androgynous allinity identity. Also, I’d imagine intrafem AND intramasc nonbinary people, since androgyny is expected of nonbinrary people?
In other words: Gender Identity is to Transgender, as Allinity Identity is to Metalline.
The prefix “meta-” in metalline means “across or beyond”– as though your allinity crosses the “line” between your allinity identity and the allinity identity assigned to you.
(I decided against reusing the “across” prefix “trans-” in order to prevent this experience from being misunderstood as related to gender, or conflated with being transgender.)
Why it Matters
I think it would be helpful for many of the same reasons it’s helpful to have the word “transgender”: Metalline serves as a convenient umbrella term (which we don’t have yet) for intramasc women/intrafem men/etc., when they’re being referred to collectively. It also makes it easier to have conversations about the experience in general of having an allinity identity that is different from what we were assigned.
If nothing else, it will be helpful for tagging, and to help people find the content they’re looking for (like how the broader term “trans” is used by all trans people to find content for them and to find similar people/experiences that aren’t exactly their own, rather than having to search every specific tag like “ftm and mtf and nonbinary and genderfluid and etc etc etc.”) I think unifying intramasc women and intrafem men (and any other metalline identity) will prove to be worth the hassle of creating a word to do so.
Also, since not all intramasculine people are metalline (i.e., cishet mainstraight men) and not all intrafeminine people are metalline (i.e., cishet mainstraight women), it would be nice to have a word that specifies between intramasc/intrafem people who ARE metalline versus those who are not– if only to make it easier linguistically to have conversations about that experience. The alternative to this is just having to say “intramasc women and intrafem men” every time, which makes it harder to also include every other metalline identity in one string of thought, like those with a fluid allinity, metalline nonbinary people, etc etc.
Idk, if you’re still not convinced, imagine if we didn’t have the word “transgender.” Yeah, it would be possible to survive without it, but it would leave a very inconvenient linguistic gap that could be a big roadblock to important conversations about the concept it represents.
But I’m just one person in this community! So I need everyone’s input:
Do you like the way “Metalline” sounds? Does anyone have any critiques/tweaks they’d like to suggest? Or should we keep looking for a completely different word to attach to this concept?
If no one says anything, I’m just going to start using Metalline haha. So speak now!! I need a word for this in order to answer a few asks and also I just need it in my life, it will relieve a HUGE linguistic burden, at least for me idk.
(Note: I’m sorry if the amount of new terminology feels overwhelming to anyone! 😅 I promise I only suggest new words be created when I feel there’s a real need for them– and I’m willing to bet that need will dwindle as the conversations in our community increase and once we’ve already established the basic language we need to do so. In the case of “metalline”, I keep having to linguistically circle around this concept without having a word for it and it’s getting annoying and clunky, and I feel like other people have probably run into this issue too.)