The Draconic Wizard Workshop

Dehumanization, Magic, and the Broodmother Instinct: Welcome to Khadgar's Wild Gender

by Khadgar Chromatath

Originally written September 19, 2025. Revised October 31, 2025.

Being a mage can be a lonely, dehumanizing experience, especially when and where I grew up. Certainly, these days in Warcraft, mages are well-understood and generally accepted, but in my youth, that wasn't the case. My family gave me away to the Kirin Tor, an order of mages, when I was six, never to see me again, because they were scared of my innate magical aptitude. The Kirin Tor raised me to be a good mage rather than a good person with a solid foundation of identity and care. Whenever I stepped foot out of Dalaran, the city that the Kirin Tor is based in, I found "normal" people fairly hostile to my existence. They had all kinds of made-up insults and even slurs to shoot my way, and while I've forgotten the specifics of them, they haunt me in the back of my mind, the ghosts of things that I've heard and could never quite let go.

A mage isn't really a person to many people, at least among humans. (Elves, I'm sure, have an entirely different cultural concept of their mages.) A mage is the thing you call when nothing else will do. A mage is the freak the king keeps in a tower for emergencies. A mage isn't to be looked at or spoken about unless you have to, and when it's present, it's obvious, in robes and holding a staff and a spellbook, to be consulted and then sent away when its services are no longer required.

I tell you this as a foundation to understanding my disconnection from gender: when you are a human mage, you are dehumanized, considered something other, and degendered. A man must be human (which is, of course, untrue, but racist sentiments linger regardless), and a mage is not considered human. A man is strong, powerful, commanding, physical. A mage is not. A mage should be quiet and let the real people do things until called upon. A mage wears cloth, not real armor, and is vulnerable to physical attack. And women—Light, women have their own armfuls of expectations that are half-dropped when a woman is a mage. I've seen people's alarm when spotting a pregnant mage, as if forgetting that we are actual people that can reproduce like anyone else.

Nearly anyone can learn to be a mage if they want to. Only some of us are born with an affinity for it. Others can claw it out with work and effort. Being a mage is not something you are either born as or can never be. This distinction between mages and non-mages, while much smaller these days, might as well have been the distance between continents when I was growing up. I learned, especially when I was a teenager and left Dalaran, that I couldn't be a man. Men were different from me.

Their view of what a man is was reductive, of course. Many mages I know clung to their genders without worry or difficulty, either the one they were assigned at birth or another they discovered along the way. Being transgender wasn't even that big of a deal in Dalaran—it was assumed that you would magically transition and that would be that. (Some, I'm sure, didn't, as was their right, but I admit, I don't have any memory of speaking to any individuals that I was aware made that particular choice. I was seventeen when I left and in my forties when I returned, and that was after the city had been destroyed and rebuilt, and we were in the midst of a war. It didn't feel like a pressing thing to ask about. "Hey, while we're battling the Lich King, just wondering, how's that stigma against transgender people who don't want to physically transition going? Wait, hang on, plague barrel. Okay, so…?")

Regardless, I learned that I could not be a man, and a man was something different from me. I went through my life a degendered thing, a mage with he/him pronouns but not really a man, uncomfortable around both my mage peers and Real Men my own age. Looking at the warriors around me during the First and Second Wars, and during my time trapped on another planet with them, I knew I was something different, and so did they. I felt disconnected, like I lacked something intrinsic to being a man that they had. And yet I wasn't not a man, rejecting it entirely and forging a path into something new. I was something vaguely malformed trying to fit into a box that I'd been too beaten out of shape to fit in.

Even during childhood, in Dalaran, surrounded by other mages, I was othered. My peers growing up knew that there was something different about me, and so I made few, if any, friends. I was too curious for my own good, I had a white streak in my otherwise black hair, and I was, even if none of us knew it yet, gay. That's all it took to be bullied and ostracized. Regardless of where I was, I was something else, denied being one of the crowd, degendered and dehumanized. I was always other.

Many people in my place would either claw their way back or throw their hands up and go fine, if you don't want me, I'll be something else. Many alterhumans and trans people have this kind of treatment in their background. But I chose the awkward middle path, and only recently have been able to untangle what I am, caught in this strange space where I haven't felt exactly transgender but I'm certainly not cis, either. I was alienated from the very concept of gender, and while I fought to be recognized as human, I'm human, I'm human, I couldn't do the same for the concept of being a man. It was easier to be human than to be a man, because at least I knew I was a human, and that couldn't be disputed in a serious, academic way. You could look at me and tell. Gender, however, isn't like that.

I've stumbled through life feeling vaguely like a failed experiment trying to create a new type of man. Since arriving in the system, I've picked up a few pronouns—I've kept he/him, but I've also snatched up it/its and ae/aer/aer/aers/aerself, as well as a set of Orcish pronouns (that I, admittedly, had to reconstruct) that were used for me on Outland—gahnag/gahnag/gahnagsh/gahnagsh/gahnag-ha, pronouns used to indicate an individual extremely skilled with magic. Orcish pronouns do not reflect gender, but profession and skill at it, and I liked that very much. They didn't care if I was a man or not—they cared that I was a spellcaster, and damn good at it, and there was a respectful bent to the way the pronouns were said.

So, for a while, I said that my gender was "mage" or perhaps "old man wizard" and left it at that. It's curious—I'm not a man, and I don't care for calling myself "a man," but the word itself is fine in certain contexts. I'm certainly an "old man," which feels like more of a role than a gender, and it's a good enough word when used in a general or joking sense—"local man too gay to function," for example. It's a good one-syllable word that isn't always intended to be extremely gendered. I don't like the term "masculine" for myself, but I'm not feminine either. "Male" is a fair enough descriptor when attached to something else (which we will get to), but my comfort with it waxes and wanes. I intellectually understand that it is a good descriptor, based on how I am physically and the general way I present myself (as a gay man, which is also a fine use of the word "man" but only sometimes), but sometimes it just makes me writhe to hear it applied to myself.

I knew, however, that this labeling system for my gender was inadaquate and not entirely accurate. I knew that I was missing something, some key component that was vital to understanding what I am. I sought labels and similar experiences and came up empty. Finding experience essays written on gender is significantly harder than finding experience essays written on alterhuman experiences, and while I am alterhuman due to being a fictive, I am myself human, unlike my husband Medivh, who is a raven therian in addition to being a fictive. No matter what I did, for over a year, I could not find an adaquate way to label my gender.

And then, I referred to a male friend of mine offhandedly as having "broodmother powers," in reference to a few previous conversations in years past between other DWW members and this friend and his system in which he'd been called a "male broodmother." Something clicked. I started remarking on how good the gender in that sentence was before stopping dead.

I then casually had a two-day slow-motion breakdown about it. Gender is, as far as I can tell, supposed to be freeing, but for me, it mostly just made me incredibly uncomfortable. Let me dissect this for you:

My headmates have playfully called me an "adoption machine" in the past, and it's true. If I see an upset dragon whelpling or human toddler and no one is taking care of them, I have a habit of scooping them up and going, "well, I'm your father now." This started with my dragon daughter Prima, who really did not think she needed me at first but soon changed her tune, and grew into two more dragons, and, in fics I wrote about myself, others. I have a deep instinct to look after young children, to gather them up and comfort them and snap and snarl at anything that draws too close. Many people, of course, are protective of children, but this runs deep into some kind of inhuman instinct that had lurked under my surface since around the time I met Prima until now, unexplored and unacknowledged. The most damning part of it is how it is stronger in young dragons than anything else—human toddlers still make my heart ache, but there's something about a whelpling that sets me off and gets me growling at anyone who looks at them wrong.

My gender appears to be "old man mage broodmother," taking the term for a dragon who dedicates themself primarily to having and raising as many whelplings as possible. It's generally understood amongst dragons that not all dragons will be this way: there is a difference between reproductive female and broodmother. Dragons where I come from have an extremely complicated gender system that I do not have time to dissect right now, but broodmother is very, very different from non-broodmother, and is seen as a type of gender expression and a core part of one's identity.

You would think I'd be elated. I'd figured it out. The moment I asked myself, "Am I some kind of broodmother?", everything clicked into place. I am, as a matter of gender, drawn to scoop up crying children and lost whelplings and help them and give them whatever they need. It all sounds so easy when I put it like that, but it wasn't, and isn't. It felt uncomfortable. It felt almost gross. For that first day, I couldn't stand myself, and couldn't bear to think about it or do more than glance at it and wince before turning away. I was a draconic broodmother, and I couldn't like it.

My problem was twofold: one, I was finally having to leave my ill-fitting box of "some kind of weird man" behind, and two, "broodmother" has nonhuman connotations, even draconic ones.

For clarity: being nonhuman is all well and good! Where I'm from, being nonhuman is more common than being human, and here, many people I know are nonhuman despite what they physically look like to outside observers. Nonhumanity is not a bad thing and I'm not saying that it is.

It's just that nonhumanity isn't for me. I was dehumaized too much growing up and even in adulthood, told I wasn't really a human (or even a person!), told I was a traitor to my kind for daring to say that orcs are not inherently evil and should be given a chance, or for trying to help the draenei, or the elves, or anyone who was other. I have fought tooth and nail to be human, and while many people can juggle being both human and nonhuman, I can't. I'm not nonhuman, and my main evidence for that is that it feels wrong. It feels like I'm being choked, forced into a new ill-fitting mold that I might not escape this time. I don't want my humanity to be taken from me a second time, or made to sit alongside something else, because it feels like no one would focus on my humanity. (See how many people in the alterhuman community insist that there are "no humans" in the community, as if identify-as identities are the only way to be alterhuman, and as if someone cannot have multiple species at once.)

What's happened is that I am a human with a partially nonhuman gender. Broodmother is an objectively draconic thing, as far as I'm concerned with my useage of the word. I am not a dragon, but I'm not not a dragon. My species is human, but I am undeniably draconic. Being a part of the DWW, which is collectively a dragon, complicates this—there's no escaping draconity for anyone in this head, and normally, that's fine, but the idea of me being a dragon, nonhumanity in scales and wings and claws, makes me itch and want to scream. There's a delicate balance to be struck with how much dragon I am and where it lives in me. As near as I can tell, the dragon lives in my gender, rather than my species, which seems like an odd thing to say but it feels right, and now that I've had some time to process it, it feels less sharp and suffocating and uncomfortable. I am still not entirely comfortable with it, but I hope that will come in time.

I'd long wondered about my gender, but never had I considered that it was a xenogender, a gender of a species that wasn't mine. It's taken weeks to come to terms with the fact that my gender can be a different species than me, and that it doesn't make me any less human. And to be clear, I like being draconic. Now that I've had time to sit in the room with it and settle into my new label, I do like it. I enjoy being a broodmother. I'm the most comfortable I've ever been with my gender, now that I've escaped the initial hangups I had about it. My occasional draconic urges, instincts, or desires can be neatly connected right back to my being a broodmother, and I don't have to worry about its effects on my species. People have xenogenders all the time, and it doesn't make them any less human, and I am no different, which is a relief.

Taking this title, this idea of the draconic broodmother, has also helped me accept some things about myself. I am always going to be weak for children. I am always going to get upset when my source game asks me to kill fifteen whelplings because the company that makes it likes to forget that dragons are people and whelplings are children. I am always going to be interested in dragons and will count myself among them even if, when asked, I insist that I am human, nothing more, nothing less. "I am a dragon" makes me squirm, but "I am draconic" fills me with pride. What a wonderful word—specific, yes, but also vague. What draconity is varies from individual to individual, and to me, it means gender and family.

I do reject the idea that I have always been this gender. Some transgender people say that they've always been the gender that they are, they just had to figure it out—but others say that, while they might be the gender they are now, they were a little boy or girl growing up, and changed later. I identify more strongly with this second approach—I was certainly a little boy at some point, and had where I was supposed to go with that more or less beaten out of me by my experiences growing up. Light only knows what I was before I got here—perhaps I really was just simply an old man wizard—but now, the experiences with Prima and the DWW have made me a broodmother, a thing I see as both a gender and a genderless role, not implying male nor female but caretaker. "Broodparent" I suppose would be a more neutral term, but I don't like it. It's clunky, and I don't mind "broodmother." It has a caring sort of flair to it that comes from my associations with the word "mother" that my culture instilled in me—and that's fine. I can use that for myself. I'm the broodmother and the whelplings' father. It's not a contradiction unless you want it to be, and I don't.

One might assume that a broodmother would be interested in having their own biological children, but I'm not. Not even in-system. I am, as stated, an adoption machine—I have little interest in the reproductive process. (Not to say I'm disinterested in sex, but, well, that's a different essay. Rest assured I am very attracted to men in a wide variety of ways. Yes, that's the irony, isn't it—I wasn't ever allowed to be a man but I certainly do want to kiss them.) I am most content when adopting children that need me, that have no one else to look after them. The presence or absence of my genetics has nothing to do with it. I'm like a cat that you can give extra kittens to.

Strangely and thankfully, my gender fits in very nicely with that of my partner, Medivh. He's described himself as "male raven" before, and was utterly content with that, as that's what he is. He is a male raven in human form. He was, however, at about the same as my gender crisis, introduced to the term "Bright," described by the coining post as "a term for someone who identifies with the nonhuman 'masculine' gender of some male birds. Usually includes having/desiring brightly coloured feathers, wanting to sing or display, and having paternal brooding urges."

Well, doesn't that just fit? He's the other half to my parenting style, the broodfather to my broodmother, the ridiculous bird who keeps doing cute little dances to his human partner and dressing boldly because he wants to impress me. (What does it say about me that it works, and that I find all of this deeply charming? Don't tell him I said that.) And yet, and I really absolutely must stress this, it's still gay. We're both… male, I suppose? There's my discomfort with that word again despite knowing that it's not wrong: in sexuality, I am a gay man, even if I'm not really a man per se. I don't have a better word to describe the pieces of gender that we do share, the parts that we hold hands over and makes us gay. We're different but just enough the same for it to count. I couldn't tell you why it matters to me, but it does. The idea of us not being gay is alarming and uncomfortable. I know what we are, even if I can't put it into words. We're a cross-species gay pair—a human and a raven, and in gendered terms, a broodmother and a bright.

Thank you for coming to my gender essay, and I hope that your journey with gender was, is, or will be easier than mine!