Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: gender identity

Gender-defending, also known as gender shit (part five)

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Let’s talk more about gender. I want to lay it all on the table so we can finally figure it out together. By the time I’m done, I will have figured out, definitively, what gender is. Once and for all! Obviously, that is said very tongue-in-cheek. If I did not have to think about gender ever again (and people would be chill about it), that wouldbe my happy place. Here is my post from yesterday that about the difference between Asian sexism and Western sexism.

Alas, that is not to be. I still can’t get over the fact that one of the things the people on the right were obsessed with as a reason to hate Bad Bunny was the fact that he liked to wear dresses and skirts. I didn’t even realize it until it was pointed out. Then, I went back and looked at several pictures, and, yes, he does enjoy him a nice dress and/or skirt.

Better him than me! I don’t like dresses. Some skirts are fine (flowy, very loose, and thin), but in general, I am a pants kind of person. Or rather, I am a naked kind of person, but you have to wear clothing in public if you don’t want to get arrested.

In general, I don’t like tight clothing. It’s a sensory thing (another trait of autistic people I have found. Having sensory issues, I mean). I can’t stand anything touching my skin, really, so the less the better. That’s why I don’t wear underwear or a bra, either. I stopped wearing both completely during the pandemic. I was wearing them rarely before that–only when I went out–and then I went feral during the pandemic. And realized that I really preferred going free.

Oh, and I also talked about having anorexia and bulimia while I was in my twenties. That was also as a result of very harmful sexism, both Western and Eastern. Both demanded that girls/women be practically nonexistent, but for different reasons.

Side note: With my recent Kpop Demon Hunters obsession, I’m starting to notice how that sexism plays out. One big way is how painfully thin the female characters are in the movie. Hell, most of the guys are as well. But the women more so. Yesterday, I included the video clip from their song Golden. Today, I have included a video of them singing it live below. You w ill note  that EJAE (Rumi) and Rei Ami (Zoey) are both really skinny whereas Audrey Nuna (Mira) is heavier. She’s not heavy by any stretch of the imagination, but she’s not painfully thin, either.

Side note to the side note: Mira is my favorite character in the movie from the clips I’ve seen. She’s sarcastic, moody, an oddball, and defiant. Audrey Nuna is wise-cracking in a deadpan kind of way and calls herself emotionally constipated. And I love her striking hairstyles. Very non-traditional.

Why couldn’t Mira be heavier in the movie? Again. I’m not asking the impossible. I’m not asking that she be *gasp* plump. Just that she didn’t look like she could be blown over by a sharp wind. The funny thing is that the three women are constantly eating ridiculous amounts of food. It’s true that many Asian women are tiny and can eat a great deal, but still. Let one of them be more than a shadow.


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Talking a bit more about gender (part four)

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I’m back to talk about gender again. I want to make ‘gender-blender’ happen, but I doubt it’ll catch on. In my last post, I finished it by talking about EJAE, the singing voice for Rumi from Kpop Demon Hunters. She never made it as a Kpop star in Korea, and she has said it’s because her voice was deemed not feminine enough. I have watched a bunch of reactions to her singing the songs that she’s pprobably an alto with a really big range. Yes, everyone loves her high notes (and she nails them; they’re so pure!), but several singers/voice coaches have commented on how warm her low notes are. And how dark. Honestly, I like it when she’s hitting the low notes more so than when she goes way high.

I know that South Korea in general is obsessed with looks and rigid gender roles. When I watch Kpop singers, it’s very clear that so many of them have had work done, even though they’re in their twenties and thirties. When I was in Taiwan, I got made fun of by my Taiwanese cousins for being fat. When I was in Thailand, I was told I looked like a man, basically. This was thirty-plus years ago, but I’m not sure how much it’s changed now.

I used to say that I got hit with rampant sexism from both my cultures, just in different ways. It really did a number on my head to be told in so many ways that I was just so wrong. The weight was the first of many things that I was supposed to change. My mother put me on my first diet when I was seven. But, at the same time, I was supposed to eat everything on my plate because she was an Asian mom at heart.

I was seven. Seven! Being told that I was fat and gross. Maybe my mother didn’t say the second word, but she made it painfully clear that she felt that way. She did actually say, “Your face would be so beautiful if yonly you weren’t so fat.” I think I was a teen or in my early twenties then.

When I was eighteen and about to go to college, I decided to lose weight. I went hard and lost forty pounds in two months. And became anorexic. Not on purppose, obviously, but it happened. I almost feel ilke it was destined to happen given my mom’s nagging. Then, in college, I could not keep up my exercise regime (I exercised up to seven hours a day), so I started adding casual bulimia to the mix. What do I mean by that? I mean that I ‘only’ did it two or three times a week. I put only in quotes because I know how that sounds now, but at the time, it made perfect sense to me.

I didn’t have the strength to starve myself the way I had before. I would try, but–see. I only slept three hours a night. That left me with several hours in which I had to stay awake. And not eat. I would eat oyster crackers for breakfast and lunch. A cup of them. Then I would have maybe a bit of fish and rice for dinner. Then,  I would stave off the hunger until two or three in the morning. When I could not stand it any longer, I would buy several packets from the vending machine and scarf them down. Then, I would feel guilty about it and throw it back up.


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More musing on gender rigidity

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I have more to say about gender, imagine that. I am almost resigned at this point to have this be an outsized issue because of the way the world is.

Side note (and this may be the soonest I have included a side note in a post) : The Super Bowl happened last night. There was a big cacaphony on the right because the halftime performer was Bad Bunny. Man, did they let their racist freak flags fly high, proudly, and very loudly.

One of the things that they did was rush to have an alternative half-time show starring Kid Rock. There were other country singers, but some of them dropped out (most likely because of all the outrage they received, and rightly so), but there was one country guy who was still in it. Don’t know who he was because I only saw it through the outraged lens of Jon Stewart.

He was singing about how hard it was to be country in this country these days, which Jon Stewart immediately ripped into. The singer goes on to say that he wants to drive his truck, feed his dog, wear his boots–here, Jon played innocent and said that all seemed easy to do. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, which it of course did. The singer went on to say that in this (he called it earlier cancel-culture country, which, ugh. I have done that rant before, and I will probably do it again, but not right now) country, he can’t have a birthday party for his daughter and tell her that boys aren’t girls–or something close to that.

I knew it was coming (or something like it), and yet, I still winced. Jon was right when he said that for a gorup of people who spent so much time complaining about how the left were such snowflakes who were triggered by everything and needed safe spaces, they were just projecting. I mean, we all knew it, but wow did they make it so obvious with their Bad Bunny outrage.

Back to gender rigidity. I was writing yesterday about reading The Rules and how horrifying the book was. It did tickle my funny bone that the version I read noted that one of the authors divorced her husband between the first print of the book and that one. I left off the last post by saying that the last line of the book was something like, “And it doesn’t stop once you’re married”, which caused me to groan, roll my eyes, and toss the book in the trash. Well, probably not literally*, but I wanted to.

Ever since I was a  little child, I never got gender. I mean, I well understood how society viewed it (binary and restrictive, not to mention reductive), but I never understood it for myself. I just knew I was wrong and bad, and I needed to change my entire being. do you know how daunting that is? To change everything about yourself? And how dismaying?

Side note: I think this is why tradwives lose their shit at some point. You can’t suppress your entire personality all the time without completely losing it. You just cannot as I can attest. At some point, you’re going to let it out. That can be in a positive way or in a not-so-positive way. I’ve done both, and believe me, the former is better than the latter.


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Gender-blending and me

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Gender has been a big topic in my life–much against my will. If it were up to me, I’d not think about it at all. Sadly, that is not a choice, especially the way things are going in America right now. I have often thought that if I were just left alone, I would be fine with the label ‘woman’. Meaning, if no one ever talked about it, it would be fine by default.

However. Given that people are way too consumed by the gender of people they don’t even know, I reluctantly have to think about it. To recap: I am AFAB, and for the first fifty years of my life, I begrugdingly accepted that I was a woman (especially in the eyes of others). I didn’t feel a kinship to the word, but I was fine with it. Fine.

I was not elated. I was not even happy. I did not embrace the word or really consiber it mine. It was just shorthand for being physically coded as female whilst being inner coded as ‘who the fuck knows’?

I just left it as I was a woman even if I did not feel like one. That was, however, because I didn’t truly know what a woman was supposed to be like. I’m saying this with no snark. I did not fit within the traditional/stereotypical description/definition of a woman, and I haven’t since I was a kid. I don’t like cooking, cleaning, sewing, any kind of crafting, pink, makeup, fashion, clothes (both the styling thereof and actually wearing them), etc. I did not like dolls when I was a kid; I much preferred stuffed animals.

I did not dream of my wedding or play mother and baby with my (nonexistent) dolls. The dolls I did have, I just made them have sex with each other–regardless of gender. That should have been a sign that my sexuality was YES PLEASE, but I was too repressed to recognize it at the time.

I think the only traditional female markers I have are my boobs, my hip-length hair, and my love of sappy ballads. I mean, I guess plushies are still coded female, but not quite as strongly as it was when I was a kid.

My hobbies are considered more male as well. Video games and martial arts, both with a heavy emphasis on weapons. I used to watch sports (football, baseball, and basketball, specifically), but I stopped for political reasons. Plus, I just lost interest at some point.

when I crush out on someone, I don’t want to say I don’t see gender, but it’s just not that important to me. I have mentioned several times before that K has marveled at how easily I can switch someone’s gender, and I truly think it’s because I don’t see gender as rigid–and most definitely not as a binary. In addition, I only see it as a part of someone’s whole, so I don’t get hung up on how someone should be in accordance to their gender.

In fact, one of my biggest gripes is when people want to make the definition of woman and man so narrow and rigid. Why put people in boxes/cages that can’t be expanded? It’s also a part of another pet peeve–the idea that men and women can’t be friends. There is so much wrong with that statement, I almost don’t know where to begin.


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Labels have limited use, part two

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In yesterday’s post, I was listing all the labels I use that are close enough, but not quite. I acknowledge the need for labels, but I don’t like them. Not in the deceptive ‘no labels, but, really, labels, but no, we won’t call them labels’ way of certain billionaires in this country.

I pretty much listed all the labels that I have used reluctantly. I’m scanning to think if there are others. I will say that I call myself fat without reservation. I am not chubby, zaftig, plump, or fluffy. I am fat, and I have no issues with that. I don’t see it as a bad thing, and I have worked hard to reclaim it. I now see it as neutral, and it amuses me when people rush to assure me that I’m not fat. Yes, I am, and I am not upset about it.

I understand the need for labels, but I think that we have to remember that they are not still shots of a person. They are living, breathing things, and they can change over time. I think that’s another way people can get tripped up–in thinking that identity is static. Or that if one aspect of a person’s identity changes, the prior ones are null and void.

Now, of course, there are times when this is true. Or rather, when a person’s change in identity is permanent and complete. Like me and Christianity. Once I realized what a fraud it was (at least the version I was indoctrinated with), I wanted nothing more to do with it. I have not changed my mind at all about that, and I highly doubt I ever will.

When it comes to my gender identity, though, it’s squishier. I have always known that I’m not very womanly. Many of the things I prefer to do are coded male, as is the way I dress. However, my hair is down to my mid-thighs, and I would grow it longer if I could. I have huge boobs, and I definitely read as female. My voice, on the other hand, is masculine. Deep as fuck, and I constantly get called ‘sir’ on the phone.

In college, I used to cut my hair every four months or so. I would just go to my hair dresser and tell her to do whatever she wanted. She never steered me wrong, and she gave me some great haircuts. One time, I went for a super-short cut (think Rachel Maddow) and wore a long black trenchcoat when I walked around the campus. I got mistaken for a guy from the back, which never bothered me.


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The core of my identity is “fuck it! That’s close enough”

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Let’s talk gender identity. This is something I’ve thought a lot about in the last five years or so. I’ve never felt a burning need to identify with ‘woman’; it was just the easiest way to define myself. It’s the gender/sex I was born into, and it was…fine. At least, if I did not look too closely at it. Once I gave it more than two minutes of thought, though, it all fell apart.

I’m going to be completely frank here. When I think of gender as it relates to myself, I come up empty. I have heard/read people who identify deeply with their gender and how important it is to them. I can accept that it’s a vital core of their identity; I just wish others could accept that about me as well. Meaning, my lack of attachment to my birth gender. And I wish that it weren’t so threatening.

But that’s me in general. I think a lot about many issues. I go deep, research, get obsess, and then I throw up my hands and go, “Fuck! That’s close enough, I guess” because nothing fits exactly.

Let me quickly run down the list.

1. Bisexual. I tried on pansexual and omnisexual (hey, this was thirty years ago), but I did not like either of those. Honestly, my favorite is queer, but people invariably think gay (both gays and straights) when they hear queer. Nowadays, I use bi out of habit, and I think of it is ‘people like me and people not like me’ when it comes to gender, but it’s very much an “eh, it’ll do” label rather than one I embrace or one that fits.

2. Areligious. I used agnostic for awhile. I never liked atheist because that’s way too arrogant and confident for me. I did feel like there is something out there, but my medical crisis showed me that ultimately, it doesn’t matter what it is. My mother and I used to argue about free will versus predeterminism all the time, and I could never wrap my brain around the concept that an all-knowing god allowed us free will. I mean, if He (in her religion, it’s a He) knows what I’m going to do before I do it, then it’s not free will, is it?

I had a friend who was Jewish. She wrote an article about how she believed god was all-loving, but not all-knowing. It was a fascinating article, and while I couldn’t quite accept that, either, it made much more sense than my mother’s version of god.

At some point, I realized that I was tired. And I just did not care if there was a god or not because that god had no affect on my life. If pressed, I would say that I believed there was something that was bigger than all of us, but it’s not something that directs the day-to-day goings on so I just let it be.

I used ‘apathetic’ for some time to describe my religious belief before stumbling on areligious. Once I read up on the latter, I knew that was for me. I just don’t care about religion (for me), and that’s that.


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Let’s talk about gender, part three

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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.


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Let’s talk about gender

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In the last few posts, I’ve talked about how seemingly opposite ideas can be true at the same time. In the latest one, I wandered into the topic of gender, which is something I think about now and again. Why? Because it’s an anathema to me, yet it’s something many people take as a given. And, especially now, it’s being talked about, villified, and scrutinized under a very powerful lens.

I have checked in with myself from time to time to see how I feel about gender.

Oh! Before I get into that, I want to expand on something I mentioned in yesterday’s post–how identity is not static.

When I was in my twenties, I realized I was attracted to women as well as men (only two acknowledged gender identities thirty years ago). The emphasis back then was that sexual identity was not a lifestyle or a choice, but something you were born into. I didn’t agree with that entirely. I mean, I was born being attracted to people of various genders, but I could have chosen to go one way or the other.

Also, I didn’t like the narrative that we should be tolerated because we can’t help being non-straight. “It’s not a choice,” so the saying went. “I was born this way!” While I agree that this is true, I also hasten to add that I would have absolutely chosen to be this way. I love being bi because it means that I can romance/sex up anyone of any gender. Theoretically, that just opens up my possibilities, which I’m all for.

This leads me to my current tentative label of agender. I feel it’s the spiritual cousin to bisexual in that it’s about shedding gender labels or realizing they are just one of many different traits a person can have.

I want to be respectful of people whose genders are integral to who they are and who feel their gender in their very bones. I know that I have it easier than many others (trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer folk). It’s the same as being bi is easier than being gay, and being Asian is easier than being black.

But in both of the latter cases, there are ways in which it’s really hard precisely because of the lesser difficulty thing. What I mean is that racism against Asian is ignored, and biphobia is glossed over. Agender isn’t even a thing most people recognize. I would throw areligious in there, but that’s not a big deal at all. Mainly because I don’t ever have to mention it.

The few times I’ve talked about agender is mixed company, I’ve either gotten nothing in response (as in total silence) or a negative reaction. Like, a really outsized negative reaction. It shocked me, frankly, because to me, I was making a fairly tame comment and nothing to get upset about. But the reactions from these women (and, yes, it’s always been women) have been so over-the-top.


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It’s not easy being me

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I don’t want to be normal. I have gotten past that for the most part, and I know that I would be miserable trying to be a normie. I mean, I try to fit in as best as I can without making it uncomfortable for me, but at the heart of it and me, I would be so much happier if I could just let my freak flag fly.

But I know that I am too much for the gen pop. Even people who don’t consider themselves normies are, for the most part, more normal than I am. Except for the true freaks. I’m not enough on the  fringe for them. I’m a weirdo in so many ways, but I’m also straitlaced in that I don’t drink or do drugs. There are many reasons for that, but it makes it difficult for me to fit into the artistic scene.

Here’s the thing. Sometimes, when I’m really down,I wish I was normal. I wish I was not neurodivergent. I wish I was white, and one of the binary gender (cran’t go quite as far as to wish I were a man). I wish I wasn’t a night owl.

By the way, that is so hard to change. I remember being six or seven and stuffing a t-shirt or towel under my door so I could read until midnight. I taught myself to read around age four. I would read until around midnight and then fall asleep. It did not matter what time I went to bed–I just could not sleep until eleven or midnight.

I say this because I know that it’s hard on parents when their kids don’t want to go to bed at what is considered an appropriate time, but it’s no picnic for the kid, either. I will admit that I have shitty bedtime practices, but no matter what I do, I cannot go to bed before midnight. These days, it’s more like 4 or 5 a.m.

The only time I’ve been able to sleep on a normal schedule was after my medical crisis, and I was heavily drugged at the time. And recuperating from dying. When I went to bed a week after waking up, I was still extremely heavily drugged. And very tired. I had no problem going to bed at ten or so and getting up at six. This lasted until the drugs wore off and my parents went back to Taiwan.

Now, I’m back to an opposite-than-normal people sleep schedule, and I’m not happy about it. Mostly, though, because I’m very aware that it’s considered bad/deviant/lazy. Every time I manage to claw my sleep schedule to going to bed at one or so, I can’t keep it up.


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Even more about gender and martial arts

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Back again to talk more about gender and martial arts. I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I had to slow down the rate at which I was teaching myself because I was messing some things up. For example, I recently re-taught myself the Fan Form because I realized I had forgotten whole chunks of it. Now, I have found out there are a few places that I’m fudging things. In other words, I need to go watch the videos again.

There are two problems when it comes to me learning martial arts forms. One, my memory is shit since my medical crisis.so I forget that which I have already learn. Not all of it, obviously, but enough to make it disconcerting. Weirdly, though, I am not being hard on myself about it. In the old days, I would call myself names and silently (or not so silently) scold myself for being stupid. This is the pressure of being raised in a hypercritical family.

I feel free, light, and airy when I’m doing my weapon forms. Sometimes, though, I feel fierce, strong, and ready to beat the shit out of someone. Not in real life, but in my mind. I don’t want to get into a fight for real, but I want to be in fighting form.

Working on my weapon forms helps with my depression and anxiety. Both have spiked lately, in a large part because of the landscape of America right now. When I can focus my anixiety and anger on a specific target, even if it’s imaginary, it really helps.

I really groove with combining the karambit and the fan. They could not be more different as weapons.. The karambit is a fast, small dagger that is meant to be used in quick movements. It’s fast, and indeed, furious. It’s dangerous. It’s meant to kill quickly. Maximum damage in a minimal amount of time.

The fan, on the other hand, is languid, slow-moving, and stealthy. You’re not going to see it coming in part beacuse you’re not going to think to worry about a fan. That’s just something you use to cool yourself down when it’s too hot, isn’t it? It’s a weapon that will lower someone’s guard and then I can poke them in the throat with it while their attention is on the karambit.

It really is the yin and the yang of weapons. I picked them to go together because they were roughly the same size (very roughly), but that’s it. They just work well together. I can’t tell you why other than what I’ve already said and good vibes.


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