Genderflora

You will be doing the explaining, every time. The word has no shared reference, so nobody arrives already knowing.

The hard bit to say out loud: you're asking someone to be with a person who is not the same shape in July as in January. Some people find that thrilling for six weeks and exhausting by month five.

The ones worth keeping don't need the metaphor. They need the practical version. Some weeks I want to be seen as nothing at all, and it isn't about you.

Apps will make you pick from a list. Pick whatever gets you to the conversation. The list is not a promise you signed.

This word says nothing about who you want. You can be genderflora and straight, gay, bi, ace, or entirely uninterested in the question.

In bed, the changes usually show up as what you can stand being called. Some months a name and a pronoun are fine. Some months any word at all puts a wall up, and touch is easier than language.

Say that in advance, in flat ordinary words, not halfway through. "Ask me first" works better than a system either of you has to remember.

For some people desire goes dormant along with everything else. That is not automatically a fault to fix — unless it's distressing you, in which case it's worth raising with someone medical.

Nothing in this term tells you what to do with your body. There's no protocol attached and no correct answer.

Some people who use words like this want hormones or surgery. Some want nothing. Some want their body to stop announcing a category to strangers, which is a different want from wanting a different body.

Here's the awkward part. Your gender changes on a timescale of weeks and your body doesn't. Some months your chest is fine and some months it's a problem, and it is the same chest.

Practical beats profound here. Clothes with range in them. A haircut that reads two ways. One item kept for the closed-up weeks. Small levers work better than big irreversible decisions when the thing you're tracking keeps moving.

Most people never take this word to work, and that isn't cowardice. It needs twenty minutes and a sympathetic listener, and work has neither.

If you want something at work, ask for the small usable thing: a name, a pronoun in the signature, or dropping the ladies-and-gents opener on group emails. All actionable. None of them require the theory.

"Sir", "ladies", "guys" will keep happening. On the open months you won't care. On the closed months you'll flinch and be the only person in the room who noticed.

If it isn't safe to be out where you work, don't be. The word doesn't stop being true because you never announced it.

Your family will not have heard of it. Depending on where you live and who they are, telling them could cost you the roof, the money, or the marriage they'd already half arranged. Do that arithmetic before you do anything else.

If you do tell them, they'll ask what it means and then argue with the plant. Have a line ready that isn't the definition: my sense of being a man or a woman isn't steady, and I'd like you to use they.

Often the conversation that helps isn't the identity one. It's the pronoun one, the name one, or the stop-buying-me-that one.

Someone in the family will quietly get it, and it is usually not who you expect. Frequently the one who never says much.

Split it in two. There's what you want people to do — a name, a pronoun, dropping a nickname. And there's the word, which explains why.

Most people only need the first half. Hand over the word to the ones who ask a second question.

Because the term is this thin, you will be its only source in every conversation. That is genuinely tiring and you're allowed to decline: it's a small word off the internet, and this is the part that affects you.

You don't have to come out to be this. Plenty of people carry a word like this privately for years and it does its job perfectly well in there.