Dharmagender

Dharmagender is a karmagender when an individual goes through an imposition of gender or gendered expectations, but they do not feel victimized by them; instead, they feel like they were necessary experiences to give them a grander perspective or allow them to take up the role in the world they were meant to. May have conservative, conformist, or heteronormative implications, but not necessarily so, as it applies also to taking up labels inside the LGBT community that allow them to better communicate who they are and thus have more ground and opportunity (e.g. when they feel like revealing to others that they are non-binary is enough, even though deep inside they know they could affirm themself with many more specific terms).

Similar to rahugender and ketugender, it's a form of karmagender.

History

Dharmagender was coined by Tumblr user mogai-ringo on June 1, 2021, with the help of arco-pluris, forestcoric-mogai-fox, and gender-resource.

Explanation

“	Tl;dr dharmagender the niceness that motivates a desire to be socially harmonious in your gender adharmagender the antisociality in your gender ketugender your gender when you're alone and perfectly well that way rahugender your gender when you have all the spotlights pointing at you and you want to live up to the hype (or the gender that makes you fantasize with that) @arco-pluris asked if I wanted to define an antigender for dharmagender. Well, yes... But it's not something most people will want to aim at identifying themselves with. Dharma in Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism is similar to our concepts of ethics and morality, so an adharmic being is one currently at a state characterized by immorality, wickedness, unrighteousness, disorder. Personally, I'd rather define adharmagender as a gender that makes you seek or perpetuate conflict, injustice, oppression. An obvious case is the association between toxic masculinity and a disregard for things that seem to most of us as completely unrelated to gender as recycling, healthier food or doing one's part for public health, but I'd consider the Lunarian agenderness a lot of TERFs claim to be another good example. With that said, dharmagender is essentially about understanding how much you can do to be harmonious with others in the way that they are while not being disrespectful to yourself — like in the middle path advocated by Buddhism — and being grateful to how your life experiences shaped who you are now and made you grow. Being fully honest, and this is a hot take, my personal opinion is that in Western cultures, and I am including urban Brazilians (like me and ap) in that, is that most feminist women, pro-feminist men and nonbinary people are quite close to zerodharmagender, due to the way people who profess leftism and liberalism here are often extreme individualists due to feeling a disconnect with their own communities, and I say that it's absolutely understandable to feel alienated from most people around you due to all sorts of reasons. The zerodharmagenderness in this case is that many of us don't really strongly attempt to foster a middle ground with average people who you can assume a lack of malice from, due to being extremely concerned with our personal objectives and viewpoints. It is one thing to avoid one's stress from attrition, but we gotta concede that there's a lot of unnecessary infighting, toxicity or pettiness in all camps of our vague political coalition caused merely by people being unable to distance themselves from fleeting negative emotions or a lack of desire towards offering others good faith. This is also an oversimplification, there are multiple ways one can be wise and bring about positive change without necessarily trying to be stereotypically chill, collected, stoic. The dharma is generally defined in a way that includes challenging its absence as you find it along the way. I am also not trying to virtue-signal by saying this. I have the forumlord debatebro 'thick skin' typical of people deemed male at birth who come from impoverished backgrounds and who were always 'nerdy' but weren't victimized from an early age for coming across as feminine. (This is very distinct from fake dark humor and "both sides" people who are just reactionaries testing the waters on how much they can expose their true nature without others confronting them, and the conflation of the two annoys me.) My behavior when around people who I need to walk on eggshells with is often that of subtle concern trolling and sealioning around where I believe they should show more flexibility, until they decide to completely cut contact, which has hurt me in the past as I have auDHD and to me being playful is different from being mean. I have tried to adjust to such people, but I keep failing because there's always a new layer of me people may not be prepared for, and unless people have fully embraced shitposter anarchy, they often decide it has crossed their limit. I am thus also far from dharmagender since I like to shock and to be a clown far more than I like to be deemed as unproblematic and thus to be a harmonious agent. Another thing, I'd say Lady Gaga and Jo Calderone both fall under rahugender. Say, a ketugender is very non-performative. Like a babushka living in a cabin in the forest. She's a terrific grandmother and embodies womanhood very well, but she's far from an external consumerist culture perception of what is desirable about women — and she is completely detached from these standards anyway. Babushkas impose respect, it has nothing to do with accepting problematic conservative norms or hierarchies. It simply conveys the concept of "touching grass". Meanwhile, rahugender would be an influencer whose identity is in constant flux with the hyperreal form they're building by their engagement with the public. An artsy persona is also a subset of that. I am not being judgmental here, I am very eternally online and have reflexes of both ketugender and rahugender in myself. Since we spoke about TERFs, much of their discourse seems to be about trying to define this universal ketugender that patriarchy is inhibiting people from living... While displaying very obvious adharmic rahugender behaviors. If you're at peace with yourself, you don't try to frame particularly marginalized individuals as examples of what's wrong with society, as society already shuns their existence, because you're completely blinded by a narrow viewpoint that you try to project onto the world due to ego. Indeed, a common aspect of transphobia is to believe that transness is universally a form of rahugender. That transness could never be ketugender and dharmagender i.e. that trans people are defined about not being in peace with themselves and not wanting to see the good faith in others or try to help foster social harmony. This often coming from people who are themselves pure ideology.	”
–mogai-ringo, 2025