Underneath my yellow skin

Category Archives: Gender Issues

Genderblender, not gender bender

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Talking more about gender. And about dating. Because that’s where I ended up in the last post. And why I am done with cishet white dudes.

I had an argument decades ago with a white dude about reading material. This was when I first realized that I was Taiwanese American and wanted to read literature by Asian American women. This was in college so over thirty years ago. I spent a year solely reading literature by non-white non-men people, so not even just Asian American woman. The white dude I was talking to sniffed and said that I was just practicing reverse discrimination, which really set me off. First of all, that’s not a thing. It just isn’t. Secondly, discrimination in the purest sense of the word is not positive or negative–it just is. And we all discriminate on the regular. When someone chooses to eat burgers for dinner, for example, that’s discrimination (in that they aren’t eating anything else).

We all make choices. No one notices when the choices align with the norms. It’s only when the choices are outliers do they raise an eyebrow. What I said to that obnoxious white dude was that I would bet any amount of money he wanted to bet that even with my then-current year of reading non-white dudes, I had read way more dead white dudes than he had people of color. I was 100% sure of that. Thatt shut him up, much to my smug pleasure.

It’s gotten better. In the year of our whatever, 2024, people are aware that there are more than white dudes out there. And yet. Still. Look for a list of ‘best of’ any kind of pop culture, and still, the preponderance of the people on the list are white men. Music, especially. And video games? There is literally a website that tracks how woke a game is, and something as minor as having a Pride flag in the game gets it labeled woke.

When I heard of this, I thought it was some kind of joke. It was not. When I looked at the list, I just had to shake my head and  feel both pity and disgust for the people who are so threatened by these kinds of things. I mean, seriously. A Pride flag?? Also, these are the same people who told us to make our own games if we were such special snowflakes that we could not handle mainstream games. And when we did that? Or developers realized that they could get good money out of us? (Or, less cynically, developers share those progressive viewpoints and want to include these things in their games! No way. That can’t be true, can it??)

You can bet that most of the people whining about diversity in games are white straight dudes. Again, I will bet any amount of money on this. All the monies.

I have heard it all. It’s pandering. It’s giving into the minority. They don’t want pronouns in their game. They don’t want to play as a black woman or anything other than a white straight man. Hell, they don’t want it to exist in their games (probably their real lives, too). Awwww can the poor widdle baby not handle the mere existence of a trans person in their game? Or having to actively choose ‘he/him’ as their pronouns when he starts the game?

Who’s the fucking snowflake now?


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Let’s talk about gender…again

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Let’s talk about gender, shall we? We shall because it’s my blog and I can do what I want. Also because gender is important–and yet, I wish it weren’t. Let me hastily add that I don’t want to take gender away from anyone for whom it’s important. My BFF, K, and I have discussed whether or not ‘they’ will take over gender proclamations in our lifetime (instead of he and/or she). This was before the election, by the way. All bets are off now.

We were both hopeful that we were moving towrds a society in which gender was not as emphasized as it is now. Or rather,, that the toxic, sexist ideas of gender would subside.

I can’t help but laugh bitterly at that idea now after said election. Never in my lifetime has equality seemed more like a dream. I have read about queers hastily marrying before the exchange of power because they fear that marriage equality would be repealed.

This should not even be on the menu. Civil rights should never be able to be voted away/legislated. And yet, here we are. Marriage equality became law in 2015. Almost a decade later, we are fearing that it will be whisked away again. Before it became the law of the land, I was talking about it with K. I did not think it would happen in our lifetime (I was the doubting Thom in our friendship) while she was convinced it would. I begrudgingly said maybe, but only when we were in our seventies or eighties. It was less than five years later when it became a reality. I was stunned, in a good way. It honestly happened faster than I could comprehend, but I willingly accepted it as a positive thing.

I did not care about marriage equality persosnally because I don’t believe in marriage (for me), but I cared about it from a social justice perspective because I firmly believe in equality. If straight people get to be miserably yoked together, then so should queers! I kid, but not exactly.

I honestly do not understand why straights are so against marriage equality when it has nothing to do with them. But wait. This post was not going to be about that–but it’s related. Those who have rigid ideas about gender are more likely to be anti-queer, too.

See how I tied it back to the point of this post?

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More about labels because I can, part two

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I’m still on the label trip because that’s the way my hyperfocus works, and by the way, can I say that for all the bashing hyperfocus gets, it can be really useful, too. I have over 10,000 words on my NaNoWriMo project, and we’re barely into day four. I give all credit to hyperfocus. When I first started learning Taiji weapons, I fell in love with the sword. Once my Taiji teacher placed it in my hand, I knew it was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I pushed her to teach me the Sword Form as quickly as possible as I was obsessed with it. Once again, hyperfocus did me a solid.

What? I’m not supposed to be appreciative of hyperfocus? I’m supposed to say it’s bad and makes me lose time when I should be doing something else? That’s not wrong, of course. There are times when I’ve put hours into something I shouldn’t have. Such as FromSoft games. I have made a rule that I can’t start playing one after midnight because there is no way in hell that I will only play for an hour.

On the other hand, it’s a good thing when I use the pressure of something exterior to me to get shit done, such as NaNoWriMo. I have not been able to write (except here) for several months. Many months. So many months. NaNoWriMo was coming up, and a few weeks ago, I thought, “What if I use it to jumpstart my flagging writing?” I decided that was a good thing and started planning what I wanted to do in NaNoWriMo. In the past several years, I had been doing NaNoRebel because that was more my style and I was bored with NaNoWriMo.

Interjection: In yesterday’s post, I wrote about why I don’t date and what labels I could affix to that. It made sense when I wrote it. That’s all I can say in my defense. Back to my musings.

This year, I decided to go back to my roots precisely because I had not written in months. As the old saying goes, writing at all is better than not writing. It was time to go for the basic ‘write 50,000 words in a month’ and call it a day. I had all these ideas of what I wanted to write about with my NaNoWriMo project, but I wasn’t sure how to do it gracefully.

I had planned on doing two simultaneous projects, but now I’ve smashed it into one. A quick description of it would be mystical/surreal, murder mystery, autofiction (memoir because I like alliteration). To put it in friendly vernacular, I threw everything including the kitchen sink. Why? Because I wanted to. Also because I can. Also because why not? Wthi a healthy dose of ‘you can’t tell me what not to do’.


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Let’s talk about labels, shall we?

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I was reading an advice column for queer people, and I have to admit, I rolled my eyes a bit at all the labels the person applied to themself. Yes, I know we need heuristics in order to talk with each other (and, yes, heuristics is the word for the week. I’m seeing how many times I can cram it into my posts this week. Deal), but at least for me, there’s a limit as to how useful they are. Also, the more granular we get, the less useful the labels/groupings become.

What do I mean by that? I’ll use myself as an example as related to sexual identity. Let’s say that I identify as queer. That’s pretty broad and, sadly, has come to mean gay. I’ve fought against it for twenty years, but now, I’ve just accepted it. I don’t make the rules, but I have to follow them, begrudgingly, to a certain extent. I still call myself queer, but I have to clarify that I don’t mean gay.

Thirty years ago, I discovered that I was attracted to men and women. Yes, those two categories was what we talked about back in the day. I went through all the different available labels of the day (bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual) and decided with great reluctance that bisexual would do. I wasn’t happy about it, mind, but it was the best of the worst. Which is pretty much how I feel about most labels. The least worst rather than the best.

Then, we have to talk about sex v. love. I can sex with just about anyone I’m attracted to (or not, as it turns out. I would not suggest it, but it is possible). Sex is easy. I’m really good at that. When it comes to sex, I would say that I’m aro in that I can easily hook up without romantic feelings. In fact, I prefer that because sex is much less messy than romance. And because I have enough mental health issues that I don’t want to have a romantic relationship. Romance brings out the worst in me, and I don’t want it enough to fight that particular battle.

I explained it to my friends is this fashion. I love being alone. It’s my preferred state of being. Well, I wish Shadow was still with me, but beyond that, I don’t want a human being in my space 24/7. I have my issues; don’t we all? But I’m happy with myself overall. I like what I like, and I don’t like what I don’t like. I wear what I wear, and I eat what I eat. I mention that because there was a thread an Ask A Manager about clothing. A teacher wrote in and said that after she got home from work, she liked to change into her pajamas. Her husband, a CEO-type, came home later and while he would change into comfier clothes, he did not like that she wore her pajamas.


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Gender on my mind redux

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Still thinking about gender. I wish I could quit it, but I just can’t. In the last post, I ended by saying that I didn’t know what feeling like a woman meant. I wasn’t being snarky because I really don’t know. I probed my insides quite thoroughly and came up with nothing. Again, I am not railing against being a woman because I don’t feel my body is wrong–at least not for the so-called lady bits. Yes, I hated it for other reasnos, but nothing to do with the perceived gender of it.

Or rather, not for the reason of gender itself. What I mean is that I got flack for being a woman. A lot of it. Very different from men than from women, but it was definitely based on me being perceived as a woman.

In tandem with this, I struggle with the ‘cool girl’ syndrome and if it’s always as toxic as people say it is. If the woman who is  saying, “I’m not like other women.” and “I just don’t get along with any women.” is also saying, “Women are so full of drama!” and “Women are the worst”, then, yes, it’s ‘cool girl’ syndrome.

However. There are women or AFAB (like me) who aren’t very feminine at all. Bull dykes are a thing (even if they no longer go by that. That’s what they called themselves in my heyday), which is not what I am. I just read up on stone butches and stone femmes, and I don’t fit into those categories, either.

Here’s the thing. I n general, I don’t care about categories. I do have a type when it comes to physical looks that I find attractive (kd lang, Alan Rickman (first as Snape and then as himself), and my new favorite, Erika Ishii). Dark hair, androgynous, and wicked smart/into social justice. I have not dated many people with that look, though.

I know how this is going to sound, but I’m going to say it, anyway. I really don’t understand…hm. I don’t know exactly how to say this. Let me muse it out. As I mentioned, I do have a type, but it’s not hard and fast. I am attracted to someone for many different reasons, some of them more healthy than the others. Looks are but one, though, and probably low on the list of traits that I really care about.

That’s not the controversial thing. That comes when we’re talking about sex. I know we weren’t, but I’m going to, anyway. When I was looking up stone butch, I was shocked to read that the definition definitely meant that they did not receive sexual pleasure on their genitalia from their partners. Ever. And a stone femme (which I didn’t know even was a term) does not give sexual pleasure.


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More about gender just because I can

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I want to muse more about gender because I can. In the last post, I was all over the place as usual, but I mostly talked about how I view gender and how others view me (and my gender).

The reason I started questioning my gender was not because of all the ‘you’re not a real woman’ comments I got. I didn’t love those, of course, but I pretty much just shrugged them off. It’s because when nonbinary became more into the collective consciousness, I started thinking seriously about my gender. Before, I was default woman and, as I’ve said several times before, it’s like an ill-fitting raincoat. Yes, it keeps the rain out, more or less, but not completely. And it’s uncomfortable. I can’t wait to get home and take it off.

Just before my medical crisis, I decided that agender was the best term for me. Why? There are several reasons. One, I was reading several posts from women who were deep in their feels about being women. How important it was to them as people and a major part of their identities.Then, there were other AFAB people who said it wasn’t important to them at all. Of course, there were people everywhere in between as well.

Agender is hard to explain in part because it’s not any one meaning. It’s similar to nonbinary in that way. I think that’s another reason cis binary people are so threatened by it–it’s amorphous in a way that is disconcerting and perhaps even threatening.

Anything that fucks with the status quo is going to get pushback. I’ve known this since I was young and a weirdo in almost every way. I’ve learned to keep my opinions to myself for the most part because I…am just tired. And I’ve leaned to mask so well. That’s why when I inadvertently trip the ‘wtf’ wires, it’s doubly hard on me.

You see, I’m going into every interaction with my guard up. I know about a hundred things to keep to myself and how to do small talk. I’m so good at masking, I didn’t even know I was doing it until I was well into my forties. I just thought I was a weirdo and had to hide it.

Anyway, these women were talking about how core to their identities being a woman was. I reached deep down inside myself to visualize how I felt about being a woman and came up with–nothing. I felt nothing about being a woman.

I have feelings about my experience whilst being viewed as a woman, yes. I feel solidarity with women for the shared experiences. But, I also feel impatience and frustration at cis het white women who think their experiences as women are the official definition of womanhood. And for standing by their cis white het male counterparts with all their fucking white supremacy bullshit.

You know what? I’m going to immediately add something to this. I have already decided that I’m not going to date cis het white men when I start dating again, and I think I might add cis white women to that. I’m tired, y’all. The fact that this election is as close as it is has led me to a very dark place about my fellow Americans.


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My (not) final thoughts on gender

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Let me state my point up front this time. In my ideal world in which there were no prescriptive gender roles, I would be fine with being called a woman.  I have no animosity towards the label itself, and I have no issue with my body parts being what they are. I like my boobs, and my pussy is fine. Hips good, shoulders wide, and I finally have half an ass because of Taiji. I have never felt body dysmorphia or gender dysphoria. I have hated my body for most of my life, yes, but that was because of my mother’s fat loathing/phobia and not anything to do with my gender.

Here is my post from yesterday. Now, let’s get back to the subject.

As I’ve said many times before, yes, I prayed to a god I didn’t believe in when I was a kid to turn me into a boy. I was eight or nine, and I figured if God was all-powerful, then He* could make me a boy. I didn’t think I was a boy or feel like a boy, but I felt so restrained and restricted as a girl. Why? because I had rampant sexism around me. I grew up in the ’70s in America. That’s one vector. My parents were immigrants from Taiwan, a very sexist culture. That’s vector two. The church to which my parents belong was/is SUPER sexist as well.

I was what was considered a tomboy when I was little. I liked to run around, climb trees, etc. I got chastised for it constantly and by the time I was seven, I was severely depressed and hated myself with an intensity that should have scared people.

I thought being a boy would make everything better. I thought it would be better to be a boy because there was no freedom as a girl. Yes, there were rigid gender roles for boys, too, but they were more positive than the ones for girls. They at least allowed boys to do shit other than sit around and be decorative.

When I was in my early twenties, I realized that I was attracted to women as well as men (still in the binary back thirty years ago). I went to a conference for queer Asian women and it was amazing. I mention it because I have a point to make about it. We were playing the ‘place everyone on the butch/femme spectrum’ game which was a thing back in the day. There were roughly thirty of us, and the women were shouting where they thought everyone was on the spectrum. When they got to me, the woman who had been doing most of the guessing paused for a length of time. She finally admitted that she didn’t know where to put me on the spectrum.

Several years later, I got something similar from a big bull dyke (self -description). She said I confused her because I had long hair and didn’t hide my breasts, but I also liked sports and didn’t wear make-up (or care about fashion). She sounded both amused and bewildered by it.


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My final (hah) thoughts on gender

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I think about gender a lot. I have written about it quite often as well. A few decades ago, I was big on discourse re: sexism. I wrote for a political blog, and my beat turned out to be abortion. Not because I was assigned it, but because that was where my passions lay. I wrote so much about it and so often, I burned out. I must add that being in an even worse place now than we were then really makes me mad. I came back from the dead (twice) for this?

I do believe that in the long run, this whole anti-abortion bullshit will backfire on the right (probably after I’m terminally dead), but it’s going to hurt so many people in the meantime. In fact, it has. And it makes me so fucking angry. Like, incandescent with rage. I cannot believe we have taken this huge a step backwards. Well, yes, I can, but it still pisses me off.

Anyway. That is not the topic of this post. It’s gender. Back in the day, there were men and there were girls. Gad. I do not want to get into that, either. I’m trying to stay on topic today. Men and women. Two genders. There were trans people, of course, but it was much more on the downlow. I had a difficult time because I got so much shit from women about how I was womanning wrong.

Side note: There is a thing called being a cool girl. It’s when a woman declares she’s not like other women and doens’t get along with other women. All her best friends are men because she just likes guy things. I was like that when I was in college until I realized that I was there on sufferance. I was ‘one of the guys’ until I slipped and did anything even slightly girly. Plus, I met many wonderful women and got over the idea that I was not like other women.

Except.

(Here I go derailing myself again.)

When I was in my twenties, I had many women tell me that I was not a real woman (as I mentioned above). It wasn’t me rejecting womanhood, but womanhood rejecting me. When I started learing Taiji weapons, I would tweet about it (I was on Twitter then). The responses from men were, uh, shall we say, lustful. They would send me clips of movies that had women with swords and whimper about how hot it was.


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Gender is a social construct, part three

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Here’s the thing about gender. In an ideal world, I would not have to think about it at all because I don’t care about it (to an extent). Just as I don’t think about religion or children unless someone else brings it up. In that ideal world, I would just be a woman and people would accept that without question. I would not have people telling me that I was womanning incorrectly or pointing out all the ways in which I was not really a woman. I ended the last post by talking about the sexism of my father. His attitude is one big reason I’m a feminist now. He definitely believed that I was a fuckup as a woman, but he wasn’t the only one.

Here are many ways I have been dismissed as a woman:

1. Not having children (always at the top).
2. Not getting married.
3. Not caring about fashion and/or makeup.
4. Not liking dolls (as a girl).
5. Not caring about cooking, cleaning, or sewing.
6. Liking sex.
7. Imaging having sex with strangers.
8. Liking sex a lot. As in every day a lot.
9. I don’t shave anything (I’m also Asian).
10. I don’t do anything to improve my appearance.
11. I treat men, women, nonbinary, genderqueer, agender people as equally as I possibly can.

Just a note on that last one. I’m not saying that women are worse about this, but that women can be as bad about it. Because of how patriarchy works, women oftentimes do the major lifting of keeping other women in check. Patriarchy wouldn’t work if there weren’t women who were willing and/or eager to hold up the status quo. This is just an unspoken truth about sexism. Women are just as capable (if not more) of being sexist against other women.

Side note to the side note: This is part of the insidiousness of sexism. Women learn early on that in order to move up in America, you have to appease the men at the top. One way of doing this was to be more ruthless than men, claw your way up the ladder, and then kick it down below you so no other women can climb up it.

Side note to the side note to the side note: This is why I’m deeply suspicious when people say that the world would be a better place if women were in charge. I say it depends more on the system than the gender of the people in charge. If the system is sick, then it doesn’t matter the genders of the people in charge.

Back to my list.


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Gender is a social construct, part two

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I don’t like thinking about gender because I genuinely get fucked up when I think about it too hard. My mother has been an unrpentant sexist all her life. But in a very weird way. Why weird? Because she did everything she did to cater to my father, and one of his firm ideas was that she had to work outside the house. Not because he was a feminist, but because he was obsessed with money. Or rather, obsessed with the fear of not having enough. Here was my last post about it.

Quick background: My father was from a poor farm family. His father (and I’m hearing this third hand from a heavily biased point of view) got mad because my father’s mother wouldn’t do something or the other, can’t quite remember what, and refused to work on the farm for a decade or so. According to my father, my grandmother had to take over the day-to-day running of the farm.

My father was my grandmother’s favorite (out of five children). He was the youngest boy. He was excused from helping out, apparently, and he was the only one sent to America to get his graduate degree. He was a Fulbright Scholar, full, I think, which is probably the only way he was able to come to the States to study.

The reason I mention that is because it shows how my father’s narcissism was indulged throughout his life. His mother worshiped the ground he walked on and made it quite clear that he was the golden child. Then he married my mother who treated him the same way. When he was the president at the company where he worked, he had a secretary who also did everything for him, including printing out his emails and putting them on his desk for him to read. He would read them, answer in writing, and then give to her to type up and send out for him.

I’m saying all this to point out how reliant my father was on the women in his life. Or rather, how much they catered to him.

In tandem with this, my father has spouted noxious (and toxic) sexist beliefs all his life. When I was fifteen or so and didn’t have a boyfriend yet, he told me unprompted that in order to get a boyfriend, I needed to raise my voice a few octaves (I have a very low voice), ask a boy to teach me something, and let him beat me in a game (pool, ping-pong, whatever). I looked at him and said, “If that’s what it takes to get a boyfriend, I’d rather be single for the rest of my life. I still stand by that.

He’s also said things like this: After seeing a castle in Banff that did weddings, “I would pay for your wedding to be in a castle.” After one of my cousin’s weddings: “I don’t know if I could give you away.” While talking about doing chores at home: “I know Minna will not like this, but I worked full-time.” (As an excuse for not doing chores at home.) “Women like gifts.” (Holding out a wrapped gift he was given to me, in response to me asking what that was for.)


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