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.
I think I confuse people becau;se I don’t care about gender. Again, it’s similar to when women used to get on my case for not wanting children. I carefully stated that I did not have them and did not want them only when they asked about the status of my children having and whether or not I wanted them. I can’t emphasize enough that I never brought it up. Why would I when I did not want kids in the first place.
There’s an argument over childfree versus childless, but I’m with the camp that says they don’t care for either. It’s “I don’t have children” because the other two are still centering having childrien as the main state of being. I prefer childfree over childless, but overall, I just say I don’t have kids.
Right before my medical crisis, I decided on agender. I cycled through genderfluid, nonbinary, and genderqueer before discarding each. Of the three, genderqueer was the one I preferred because I like queer in general*. When I read up on agender, I thought that was closest to how I felt about gender.
It’s similar to how I feel about religion. I was raised as a fundie Christian. I tried so hard to be a good Christian, even though I never really believed in that particular god. Then, I had sex for the first time when I was twenty, which made me see what utter bullshit I had been fed all my life (in the church). I became a very angry atheist who railed at God for all the damage Christianity had heaped upon me.
After a few years of that, I mellowed out and decided I was spiritual. I dabbled with calling god ‘goddess’ and ‘she’. That didn’t do anything for me, either, but neither did calling myself an atheiast. I wasn’t arrogant enough to assume I knew there wasn’t a god. Especially as it made sense to me that there was something bigger than us puny humans.
Agnostic is what I settled on for several years. I’m fine with it, but I still think it gives too much creedence to the idea of god at all. I finally realized that the question of god just doesn’t interest me in general. Areligious resonated with me because at the end of the day, whether there is a god or not and what kind of god it is does not affect me on the daily.
Agender is similar in that with all the thinking I’ve done about gender, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. There isn’t anything about being a woman that actually means anything on the daily for me. I enjoy the ladybits I have, but they don’t drive my car or anything like that.
Also, and I’m saying this sincerely, but I just don’t understand what feeling like a woman means. So many people are definitive about their gender, and I have no clue how that feels. That’s another post for another day, though. I think I’ll end this one here.
*Until it came to mean gay. Sigh.