So what significance does being radeviant carry for me?
Radeviance is an attempt to explore the meaning and the potential of deviance - deviant identities (orientations, including gender-based and para ones, genders, neurodivergences, and more) and deviant presentation, which is very likely but not inherently a means of expressing an identity.
The idea to tie together and explore together all orientations, gender, mental health, and other persecuted facets of self dates back to at least 2019, when a minority rights activist Kamil Beylant coined the concept of "non normative identities alliance". Two years later a Tumblr user foucault-divine-mephisto had a similar thought and coined "radqueer". Both these terms have their flaws. "Alliance" implies a better degree of coordination and mutual support than we have right now, it's hard to call the queer community, the transid community, the neurodivergent community allied yet (and it's not a coincidence that almost everyone who calls for such an alliance is in the overlapping zone of these communities). "Radqueer" gives way to an exhausting conversation about who is or isn't "really queer", as a large percentage of the queer community uses this word to describe a narrowly defined zone of identities and experiences and treats it as a token of moral virtue. I like "deviant" for how much more angry and unapologetic it is than "non normative" and how it's impossible for anyone to say "you're not good enough to call yourself a deviant" the way they do with "queer".
So, radeviant is an NNI-aligned term and a radqueer-aligned term. What do I want to do with it?
- I want to let deviant individuals explore their identities both separately and in interconnected manner. Nobody should be forced to choose whether they participate in a community for one part of their life or for another, nobody should be harassed for finding parallels or causation between their identities, e.g. drawing some links between being otherkin and being transgender.
- I want to de-purify those deviant identities that were given a "protected status" by exclusionist communities and are considered above being compared or mixed with something else.
- To disconnect being disordered, perceiving one's experience as hurtful, from the concepts of treatment and elimination. Those with identities caused by illnesses and trauma are equally allowed to celebrate and be proud.
- Similar to the above, to lift the stigma around identities, understood through sex or pornography.
- To stop the process of fragmenting and exclusionism, to prevent groups that may gain more social acceptance in the future from aligning with the majority and using their increased visibility for hurting the less lucky ones.
If this works, in the future we may actually end up with a radeviant/nonnormative alliance, and then we can work together to reshape the society itself.