One issue with being agender is that there are times when gender does need to be noted. I was having a conversation in the Discord I’m in about guys and their heights. For whatever reason, there are several guys who are very tall–like 6’4″ tall and taller. I wanted to say that as a non-male person of 5’6″, anything over 6′ tall is very tall to me. Except, that sounded weird, even to me.
I don’t mind if other people call me ‘she’, but I don’t want to apply it to myself–or woman. I thought that I was a weirdo in that, but I discovered that it’s not uncommon for someone who is agender to feel that way. Which makes sense, really. Oh, this is the post from yesterday, by the way.
I struggle to explain what agender means to me because it’s a lack of something rather than a pro-anything. It’s the same with areligious–the word focuses on what isn’t there rather than what is. With agender, it really is the right word, though, because I don’t feel gender strongly. Or even mediumly. I would say I don’t feel it hardly at all, but that isn’t possible in a highly gender-focused society as ours.
I still call myself she once in a while despite my best efforts, which I am not fond of or proud of. K mentioned that I was really good at pronouns–and I am. When someone has pronouns, that is. As I mentioned before, since gender is a loose construct to me, I don’t have a problem adapting to new pronouns. Or to put it another way, since I have very little clue what gender actually is/feels like, I can accept when people change their genders.
Every time I try to drill down what gender is, I come up empty. In the old days, there was a slew of characteristics that were designed male or female, and never the twain shall meet. I was called a tomboy because I ilked to climb trees, run around, and laugh too loudly. Until I was five or six. Then, a slew of things happened to crush that out of me until I was nothing but a depressed lump of flesh.
Though I did not know it then, that was the beginning of my dissatisfaction with my gender, even if I didn’t have the vocabulary to talk about it. Except. It wasn’t my gender I had an issue with–it was how I was treated because of it. When I learned about sexism in college (along with racism, oh, and that I was bi and didn’t want kids. Yes, this was all within a year or two. It was a very rough time), it was like a light bulb went off in my head. Well, kind of.
And I became furious. I had lived the first twenty years of my life believing I was lesser because I was a girl. I spent the next twenty years railing against it. Then, something changed within me. I still fiercely championed feminism and equality for all genders, but I also started feeling less an less like a woman.
I want to be clear. I did not feel like a man. I am not a man. I am very sure about that. The treatise on that, well, I’ve done it before, and I will probably do it again. But not today and not in this post.
If I was twenty years old, I would probably begrudgingly choose nonbinary as my label. I’ve said that genderfluid is not it because my gender or lack thereof is not fluid. It’s pretty stable, in fact. I like genderqueer because the word ‘queer’ really speaks to me, but as with queer meaning gay, basically, genderqueer means nonbinary.
In addition, I don’t actually feel my gender is queer, in the pure sense of the word, because I don’t feel gender at all. And that’s because I don’t get gender. I’m not saying that with any snark; I really don’t.
Growing up in a Taiwanese culture/society, I was given a long list of things that a girl should/shouldn’t do. Honestly the latter felt like it was much longer than the former. I will put it as bluntly as posisble–a girl was supposed to put herself in a very small box and stunt her growth. She was not supposed to take up much space, and she was supposed to endlessly defer to any male around her.
So, when I was young, being a girl meant being quiet, demure, sitting with your legs crossed, wearing dresses, shining up to any boy/man around you, playing with dolls, and just about any other stereotype you can think of. I hated it. I felt so constrained, even if I could not quite articulate why.
As I got into my teens, I realized that I didn’t like anything feminine. Not out of spite or contrariness, but because I just did not. I didn’t like to sew or cook, and I certainly did not like wearing dresses or skirts. I think some of that had to do with my sensory issues (I hate wearing clothes), but some of it was just deep inside me.
Side note: I really wish I had realized my sensory issues earlier as well. I would have been a lot happier if I knew that anything on my body was not pleasant. Makeup, clothing, jewelry, etc. Glasses are fine, but probably because I’m usued to them. I used to wear hard contacts, and they were the worst. I do have my hair down to my thighs, but I wear it up in a high pony which I then braid. I change that to a loose topknot for when I sleep.
I have a really deep voice, and I’m always mistaken for a man on the phone. I don’t have an issue with that because most of the phone calls I have are either with my family or with some kind of service provider. I don’t care if the latter call me ‘sir’, but I do struggle a bit with the former calling me ‘she’ (such as when my mother is telling my father that I called. She calls me ‘your daughter’ in Taiwanese, and I wince every time).
I am not having that argument, though. I just am not. I know how that would go with my mother, and I have learned my lesson well by now. Anything that is personal is not to be divulged. Also, being agender means that I would rather not focus on gender, thank you very much. That’s what the ‘a’ in agender stands for, and I stand by it.
Done for the day. May write one more post tomorrow.