Doing (Dragon) Gender

Doing (Dragon) Gender:  

Strategies of Novel Gender Production 

Santi Sorrenti & Sam Bolton (in conversation) 

Sam Bolton: In your work on ‘gender hacking,’ you commit to taking fun seriously. You present a series of strategies by which we can jubilantly corrode and resignify what it means to be gendered in the world. Our topic today is a consideration of how we can mobilise this apparent tension between seriousness and fun so as to speak ourselves towards new horizons of gendered ways of being. You speak of inanimate object genders, of plant genders, of basketball genders, of dragon genders; of how you render legible the possibility of crotch packing differently, of putting the packeri anywhere unexpected. You present this way that we can imagine, that we can ‘hack’ our bodies, our gender, and become otherwise, become new. Perhaps to begin can you describe what it means to be dragongender?  

Santi Sorrenti: Dragongender is a gender identity that falls under the MOGAI umbrella (marginalised orientations, gender and intersex). It is within these ephemeral and lesser-known online subcultural spaces of trans world-building that I situate my work for gender exploration and experimentation. 

Returning back to your question, dragongender is a gender identity that is associated with feeling akin to a dragon species; it is a gender identity that transcends being human (also known as a xenogender). Such as the myriad of forms that a woman/man/non-binary person can be in society, someone who identifies as dragongender contains the same complexities, but that expand beyond human experience. For example, someone who identifies as dragongender may feel connected to dragon plushies specifically, the femininity of the dragon in Shrek, scaly dragons, icy dragons and so on. To be dragongender (or any xenogender) is to live by a set of gender rules not legible (or substantiated) by mainstream society; ones that feel very real and personal.  

S.B:  I am so thrilled by this notion of ‘living by a set of gender rules not legible to mainstream society’–it’s exciting, it’s playful. It is as if it is a sort of practice, a self-stylisation that one can cultivate by this set of secret rituals to which no one else is privy. That which I do wonder, however, is whether we can call this gender. I find myself bound to the conceits of Judith Butler–and the Hegelian tradition which haunts them–from whose corpus my own work emerges.  It seems to me that there exists some notion of recognition that is necessary to gender insofar as gender is that which is conferred when the nurse proclaims ‘it’s a girl’ when the baby is born (Butler, 1993, p.7). Gender is that which makes our lives legible to others, for it is that which structures how we relate to those others, and by which our bodies become arranged in the world. Although, of course, we can become differently gendered, that we are becoming so must first become recognised by others if it is to bear upon how our gender finds itself to be significant–to mean anything at all. It strikes me, then, that gender qua hegemonically realisable constructions and gender qua MOGAI/xeno-possibilities appear to be of a different sort. Or at least would appear to be so on the surface. One is always caught up in a circuit of conferral (the baby is gendered–we become rewarded/punished for whether we succeed to live up to the expectations of that gender). There seems not to be a function of gender beyond the way by which it relates us to others; what it prescribes about whom we are permitted to desire, whom we are not.ii But dragongender seems not to be about other people–but rather about ourselves and our own relationship theretoward. It does not dictate how one is treated within the world, for these rituals are private. Articulated otherwise, you and I disagree, I think, on whether or not it is possible to have a gender that is personal, that is aside from the world and others who grant us recognition. You suggest in your zine that one might still have a gender even on a desert island (with nobody present to witness). Could you tell me a little more about this? 

S.S: Yes indeed, there’s a section in A DIY Guide to Gender Hacking entitled ‘WTF is Dragongender.’ Here, I discuss with Madina Gazieva on whether one can identify as an object/mythological gender with no one or nothing to relate to. My position in this conversation is that gender can be a story that we tell ourselves, about ourselves. Via storytelling, our gender can become self-conceptualised/actualised. We don’t have to view this particular conception of gender as biologically deterministic. Rather, as a mode of storytelling, of self-creation, and as an opportunity for one to explore their fantastical relationship to gender before it faces public deduction.  

When transferring this relational framework to xenogenders, Gazieva questions whether someone on a deserted island could know their gender without being confronted by social circumstances that inevitably shape/condition one's gender (Sorrenti, 2025).  For example, Gazieva feels she knows that she is a woman because of being in a relationship with men (ibid.).  

My argument here is that someone can still self-actualise their gender even on a deserted island with no social influence. Gender can be based on how one feels on that island, and what story materialises from that feeling. For example, being stranded on a deserted island may feel like one’s gender is akin to leafy green plants, instead of the traits of the ocean or surrounding golden sand, hence a xenogender identity comes into existence such as plantgender. Here, the individual carves out a gender experience based on their personal experience with their environment, for example: I am in sand, but I feel more green. I construct a story about my gender which feeds my desire to look/feel/sound like/be perceived as the colour green. This is the crucial point by which the story that one tells themselves, about themselves comes to fruition. So, what could society look like if individuals were given more grace to speculate about gender in this storytelling way? 

S.B: I am inclined to question whether or not we can have any sense of ourselves prior to language, prior to these social circumstances of which you speak. Before we are born, stories are already becoming told about us; the very metabolite we learn to take up as ‘our own,’ is given to us by others that are already conditioned by regulatory systems. And without the language produced by others, we cannot tell these stories about ourselves. But I do think this idea of ‘personal gender’ is interesting. At present, I am writing a paper that I think intersects generatively with your work. This notion that it is possible to have a ‘personal’ gender that is simultaneous to what we might call one’s ‘public’ gender, reminds me of the so-called ‘entrapment narrative’ that was handed down to trans people by Harry Benjamin’s clinical guidelines (1966) and has since become commonplace. I refer to this notion of ‘the boy trapped in the girl’s body.’  

I find tension therewith, for I begin my work from the ground laid by Judith Butler, whose early work contends that gender is not that which we are but rather that which we do (where this doing is not voluntary but rather constrained by a precedent of acceptable acts [1993, p.13]). Many will be familiar with their famous provocation that gender is constituted ‘tenuously … in time through a stylised repetition of acts’ (1990, p.179). Gender is an effect of our actions that becomes sedimented into what we might call a text–the body–that is then to become read by others (cf. Butler 1990, p.178). In other words, gender can be understood as that which we present to others so as to situate us within certain practices of reading. The gender that we perform dictates the ways whereby we are treated by those others who confront us. Butler would say that each facet of ourselves, down to the possibilities of our sexual being, is an achievement attained by the acts we engage (1990, pp.89-90). But what do we do, I ask, when a trans person says ‘I may look like a boy, act like a boy, but I am in fact a girl.’ Some (e.g. Jay Prosser) have levied this problem so as to undermine Butler’s theorisations, for a philosophical account of gender that claims gender is nothing but a series of surface significations–of acts–appears to be incongruous with the lived experiences of those who claim they possess a true (but obfuscated) real gender beneath these acts.  

It is my contention that these two possibilities become no longer at odds when we as trans people give up our hold on this sensation of the genders which we desire to become as being necessarily truer or more real. It becomes alternatively viable to think of ‘gender’ as that which is constituted by our acts. And then concomitantly to understand this interior feeling of what gender one should be as a phantasy–as a desire to become differently. That which is required to take up this formulation compassionately, however, is a commitment to taking phantasy seriously–to acknowledging that the possession of a phantasy of becoming otherwise is sufficient reason to alter one’s body, to change one’s sex, to engage a performance of gender that becomes read differently. In other words, simply to want to become gendered otherwise is enough to justify becoming so. This stands in contrast to the ‘wrong body’ narrative which supposes transition is only justified by a move towards a more authentic form of one’s self. This provocation to ‘take phantasy seriously’ feels closely bound to your zine’s playful desire to take fun seriously. What might it mean to take phantasy seriously in the context of your work? 

S.S: In the context of my work, gender discovery relies on imagination, storytelling and harkening back to nostalgia as modes for figuring out who you are. In A DIY Guide to Gender Hacking, I encourage readers to ‘fail’iii at figuring out their gender and to land somewhere unexpected. To play around with a myriad of (non-traditional) tools, languages, or narratives that they can use at their disposal. Ones that defy institutional or medical classifications. Readers are propelled into a fantasy world where one can identify as an attack helicopter (for real), reclaim a slur as a fashion accessory or don a packer right on their forehead both for experimentation and to induce confusion. There are no rules, there are no linear guidelines and the playful aspects of the zine (word searches, paper doll cut-outs, DIY packer instructions and gender horoscopes) serve as an invitation to not take your gender too seriously, while simultaneously considering seriously the gender experience you have chosen for yourself.  

My motivation for creating A DIY Guide to Gender Hacking was to address the gap between ‘Gender 101’ literature which teaches about gender identities that fall neatly under the trans/non-binary umbrella and engaging with discourse focused on the fluidity of gender/sexuality across a linear spectrum, and subcultural trans literature which circulates in underground trans spaces and is not necessarily relatable to trans people who consume mainstream content. Gender hacking is situated somewhere in between these two, where phantasy serves as a force to bridge this gap, where we can have playfulness and seriousness co-exist. 

S.B:  I am so taken by this way that you provide practical strategies to materialise phantasies in novel ways–in ways that fail expectations creatively. In the spirit of this playful mode of becoming, is there something to be said about phantasy (in the terms of the desire to become gendered otherwise) and fantasy (qua genre fiction, escapism, and dragons)? 

S.S.: There definitely is. When thinking about fantasy/escapist literature (qua dragons) I am reminded of Donna Haraway’s work on speculative fabulation, which calls for a new mode of world-building that relies on blending ‘fact’ with ‘fictional’ storytelling. According to Haraway, speculative fabulation can be described as ‘the making of fables … the worlding which is often full of animals … of critters who maybe don’t really exist … full of creatures of the imagination … but also full of adults and the serious narrative [such as] science fiction, speculative fabulation, fantasy…” (Haraway, 2016, 2.14). For Haraway, speculative fabulation should be taken seriously as a method for expanding possibilities in the world. With Haraway’s inspiration as a driving force, I invite readers to build a gender story that could be predicated on relating to, or going so far as to identify as, a mythological creature, and celebrating its potential to be accepted and understood as a lived experience.iv Speculative fabulation intersects with the phantasy of gender (qua desire) in that I think it reflects our deepest human desire to be something other than what we are. To escape this physical reality, to carve out an untapped space for ourselves that addresses our unmet desires/needs which then leads to the reclamation of (or a turn towards) an object gender per se.  

S.B: I really do think that if Haraway was on Tumblr, she would be dragongender. If we are to take phantasy seriously, do you think there are limits to this? Can we take dragongender as seriously as we do more mainstream disruptions to the gender binary, e.g. non-binary? 

S.S: I think Haraway definitely would! But yes, why not? We need to seriously consider MOGAI identifications because of their creativity and expansiveness. Here I am thinking about Jack Halberstam’s work, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability where he posits that everyday vernacular terms used to describe someone's bodily identity, have emerged from communities seeking to explain the multiplicity of their experiences (2018, p.10). These terms defy psychiatric/medical classifications as a site of optimism because they resist hegemonic sex/gender systems and signal the end of institutional control (2018, p.10). When Halberstam was writing about these terms he was mainly referring to terms such as ‘agender, gender non-conforming and non-binary,’ all of which were new terms at the time of him writing this. Now I can see another paradigm shift becoming possible which includes identifications that dismantle what it means to be a gender, or to be human entirely. For example, dragongender, stargender, basketballgender are very real experiences for people, and this resistance to ‘normative’ gender categories is an ongoing pushback against institutional classification. In this way, whimsy maintains integrality and the phantasy of gender is still taken seriously. 

S.B: We have spoken a lot now on the effects of taking phantasy seriously–but now, the critical question becomes how? How do I become dragongender, how do I become grassgender, or any other object gender? 

S.S: The way to become is to embrace your story and those of others. Talk about object and dragon genders; keep them alive in people’s memories, in conversations, and reference them in your work. Integrate them into everyday vernacular without even blinking: draw them, celebrate them, wear them. Taking them seriously doesn’t mean needing to classify, categorise, or have them be normalised by any formal entity. Rather, we can allow them to function as ephemeral tools for building personalised creative worlds. Taking these phantasies seriously would mean to acknowledge that these lesser-known gender identities do something for expanding social/cultural understandings of gender. Their definitions and meanings can be playful, malleable, adaptable, experimental and fun while still being weighted in someone’s own coming of gender story. We can empathise with someone’s experience without necessarily understanding it, right? So why can’t we extend this to object genders, to fantasy genders? And if we can, could this be a mode in which we can come to accept other identities that emerge from the subcultural? I am thinking of furries, therians, catboys, and beyond. 

S.B: I agree–we must take flight into new ways of speaking, we must tell new stories, reconfigure old ones. This work that you present is so generative–I could talk about it all day. I am so regretful that we have so few words and so little time. Thank you so much, Santi–it has been a pleasure. 

A DIY Guide to Gender Hacking is Santi’s first e-publication, an alternative resource for exploring gender at the intersection of theory, failure, and fun. Santi is a creative practitioner, and founder of the UK’s first LGBTQ+ style outreach organisation called G(end)er Swap (est. 2017) which supports gender-diverse people to access style resources. Their work (workshops, writing, performance) focuses on DIY style, craft and aesthetics as a medium for (trans) identity exploration and experimentation. Santi was a Memorial Jenkins Scholar at Regent’s Park College, Oxford and completed an MSt in Women’s Studies (2018) where their dissertation focused on the ephemerality of trans fashion activism on social media. Incorporating Santi’s grassroots and research interests, A DIY Guide to Gender Hacking focuses on exploring creative ways to bridge theory and practice in the field of gender and sexuality studies. 

In October 2025, Santi presented their work in collaboration with TORCH (moderated by Mara Gold, DPhil in Classics) where Sam Bolton attended. Sam is a Clarendon Fund scholar reading for her Master’s in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Lincoln College, Oxford, whereat her research is turned towards psychoanalysis to rethink the possibilities of trans studies qua the vicissitudes of identity and desire. Her prior work has concerned the ways whereby the notion of ‘trans fetishes’ relegates transgender subjects to a field of exile beyond the standard dimensions of desirability. Finding common ground in revelling in the fantasy/fun of gender exploration, Sam and Santi explore how whimsy/playfulness can be taken beyond gender exploration and be further considered in a queer theoretical context. 

Bibliography 

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