Here we are in post three about what I want to do with my life in 2026.I have several goals, but there are three that I consider my priority. In yesterday’s post, I mostly wrote about Taiji and Bagua forms, of which there are several I want to teach myself. The goal for the year is to teach myself the Bagua Knives Form (with the deer horn knives), but in order to do that, I first have to teach myself the left side of the Swimming Dragon Form. Well, I don’t have to, but my teacher highly recommended it.
She told me there really wasn’t a Swimming Dragon Form with the deer horn knives, which made me sad. That’s really my ultimate goal in Bagua, and she said that basically, I would have to cerate my own. I’m up for it, but just not yet. Frist step is to teach myself the left side of the Swimming Dragon Form. I’m halfway done with that, and I should be able to finish it in a month or so. Or two. I want to be generous to myself so let’s say two.
My third goal is perhaps the hardest one of all. Well, that’s not true, but it’ll be difficult for different reasons.
3. I will find a queer/genderqueer Asian group, probably online.
I feel a lack of Asian people in my life. Asian American, to be more specific. And queer people. And genderqueer people. Ideally, I would like it to be all at the same time because it’s combining race, gender, and sexuality is a tricky triple combo. As with everything else in my life, I have to pare down what I’m looking for. If I was going to be unrealistic, I would add areligious to the mix, along with body positive, into martial arts, and black cats. In other words, people a lot like me. Oh! And autism and/or ADHD. Again, asking for all of that is a tall order, so I’m trimming it to gender, race, and sexual identity.
This will be hard because of my specific wants. It’s not just queer–it’s bisexual/polysexual/whatever you want to call it. In other words, not gay. I know that everyone thinks queer means gay, but it doesn’t. Bi erasure is real (or whatever you want to call it these days–bi, I mean. I’m not sold on it and never have been, but I can’t think of anything I like better. So for now, bi means people like me and people not like me. Said with a grumpy sigh), and it’s so fucking tired.
It’s the same with gender identity. I don’t mean nonbinary–I mean agender. They are different things, or at least they are to me. I don’t fluctuate in my gender like some people do. This is something that I have such a hard time explaining because I can’t make it make total sense in my own bran.
Here’s the thing. I say this with zero snark. I don’t know what gender is or what I’m supposed to feel. You know how you can’t describe, say, the color blue to someone who was born blind? I feel the same with gender. All the outwardly markers of gender are an anathema to me. Ever since I was little and my mother tried her hardest to create the perfect little girl doll in me, I was lost and adrift and scared.
I could not understand why I was supposed to do and be all the things she wanted me to do and be. She put me in dresses that she sewed herself, which I hated. She told me I should sit down and be qouiet when I wanted to run around and laugh at the top of my lungs. She put me on my first diet when I was seven and nagged me constantly about being fat and how I would never land a man by being so grotesque. No, not in those exact words, but that was what I heard on a daily basis from her constant criticism.
The ironic thing was that she had many stereotypically masculine qualities herself. She hated cooking, cleaning, and sewing, but she dutifully did it all as part of being a good wife. She loved playing sports and actually did that–and made me and my brother play them as well. She kept her hair short once my (older) brother was born because he was constantly grabbing her hain, and she kept it that way to this very day. And I mean very short.
Her mother was very sexist, too, being an old school Taiwanese woman, but also a hypocrite. She was the first woman to graduate from the Japanese college she went to and the first female senator (quivalent of) in her prefecture. She always worked outside the home, even though she preached that a woman’s place was in the kitchen. She preferred my aunt over my mother because the former was vry pretty in a stereotypically feminine way.
I’m saying all that to give background to the fact that I really don’t feel gender, except in a negative way. What I mean is that I am not a guy. Even though I have many sterotypically-masculine traits, I do not identify with being a man at all.
On the other hand, while I am AFAB and raised aggressively as female, I have no emotionally attachment to that label. Nor to nonbinary, but that’s because I’m old. I think if I was in my twenties, I would reluctantly choose nonbinary just as I reluctantly chose bi in my twenties when no other word really appealed to me.
Here we are yet again, and I’m frustrated. I don’t like labels because they don’t fit. I know they’re not meant to be perfect, but most of the labels don’t come even close to what I want them to say.
Agender is the closest when it comes to gender identity, though it doesn’t exactly fit. I’m aware that gender is important to most people, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why. I also don’t understand how people can say that you (general you) can be anything you want, but then act as if you’re being outrageous for not performing your birth gender.
I get it intellectually because it’s like any other identity issue, but this is the one that feels the most unfathomable to me. I just don’t get gender no matter how hard I try. For now, given the way this country is going, I begrudgingly answer to woman and she and ma’am because it’s just easier. Whether i like it or not. And I most emphatically don’t.