(I could call this ‘reclaiming’ as the coiners themselves often do, but I’m not going to because ‘reclaim’ implies taking back something that was used against you or that you already had in the beginning. As much as most people believe these terms are attacks on certain groups, I’m taking a neutral stance and I still think it’s impractical to ‘take back’ online micro-identities as if they’re slurs. These are recoins - coinings of the same word only with a different name, definition, or with no change)
Ah recoins, my behated. There’s nothing more confusing than taking an identity somebody else made and remaking it instead of creating a new label. In my personal opinion (oh no) it’s just an odd way of approaching identities we don’t like and works to override the foundation of the community around the term by replacing it with a ‘good’ community. In the end, all it really does is make it impossible to know who’s using which definition and the recoin almost always has no chance, and any originality it may have gets abandoned too. It’s identity erasure executed horribly just because we hate a term so much we decided it shouldn’t exist, or we hate the people who made a term so much that we decided to take it from them
Transautistic’s recoining in April 2022 basically redefined it to mean what everyone expected it to mean - trans and autistic together in one term, though this one emphasised an experience of the two being heavily connected, which I find super interesting. I’d love to have looked into it if only it had its own term and community. But it doesn’t. Great concept, but the recoin didn’t overpower the original, making it basically unusable unless you want to be wrongfully considered radqueer - and nobody seems to want that
Thus began a recoin revolution, only the most targeted identities for recoins were getting more and more niche as people started to realise that trying to recoin one of the core identities of a community on said community’s main platform is never going to work. Here’s some recoins for your viewing pleasure:
Some radqueers have also recoined anti-radqueer terms (though they usually at least go for generally unused terms), my favourite being this one because it’s an iconic way of recoining this (which is a call for the eradication of just radqueer ideology by the looks of it, not the people in the community, but you can’t act like it doesn’t come off that way-)
There’s also a pattern with anti-radqueers where as they get more inclusive and understanding of concepts like atypical dysphoria, they have to find ways they deem appropriate to describe the experiences that come with it. This usually comes in the form of ‘rebranded’ coinings or terms that are clearly inspired by transids, but are in some way ‘detached’ from transids (and by extension, radqueer). It works a little better than straight-up recoins and sometimes creates a community, but it does involve mass-recoining terms to fit with the new word for essentially the same experience, this time with specific wording that tries to avoid certain issues the coiner has with transids.
It’s definitely a huge step from the early days where most of the arguments against radqueer denied the existence of atypical dysphoria, went against the labelling of atypical dysphoria, and/or called those with atypical dysphoria ableist, racist, and so on. The issues that people still have with transids are usually just that they have a ‘bad community surrounding them’, ‘are associated with radqueer’, or ‘support harmful transitioning’, so there’s been a need for anti-radqueer alternatives.
Now that we’ve established that the vast majority of those are ineffective for the vast majority of atypical dysphorics who don’t want to use transids, let’s get on with some more functional transid alternatives:
The coiners may or may not agree that their term is a transid alternative, but functionally they exist to describe the same area of experiences, so your term is going here, sorry. An alternative name for this section would be ‘terms to describe atypical dysphoria and misaligned internal/external self-perceptions’ but we know who the OG is here okay