As good as I am at reading social cues, there are a few areas in which I falter. One, it’s harder to do it online than in person. That makes sense because you can’t read tone online as easily as you can in the real world.Two, I have such a hard time with dry senses of humor, and that does not always come across online. The driest of dry senses of humor, I mean.
I will be honest. I went to bed after writing the first few sentences above, so I’m not entirely sure what I was leading to with that intro. I have things to say, though, so we might as well dive into it.
I’ve noticed that when I’m tired, my ability to read a room drops considerably. That’s not strange, of course, because sleep is so important. I’ve been having a hard time with it lately (more so than usual, I mean), which is impacting my ability to think. It also makes me more irritable than usual.
I realized some time ago that it’s so tiring to have to mask all the time. I didn’t realize it was masking at the time, but I knew I couldn’t show my real face. I am so finely calibrated to reading a room, it upsets me greatly when I get it wrong. It’s like, “I put in all that effort, and it’s still not enough.” There’s this idea of the double empathy problem, which I’ve only heard about in the last few years. In a nutshell, it points out that just as autistic people have an ’empathy problem’ for allistic people, so do allistic people have an empathy problem for autistic people. In other words, it’s a two-way street. The article I linked above mentions that if autistic people have an empathy problem for allistic people (which is debatable*), then the same can be said about allistic and their lack of empathy for autistic people.
I will admit that I get salty when people in the majority admonish people in the minority to realize something about the majority world that is incredibly obvious, as if we would not be excruciatingly aware of it. For example, I was in a post about gender, and I mentioned something about being agender. It was just an aside and nothing wild–just that I was agender and I did not use gendered pronouns or something to that extent. A cis het woman I had previously noted as being a bit weird about agender (but not about trans people) before went on this long rant about agender and trans people that was truly unhinged.
This was in a post about a trangender customer support rep being misgendered, by the way. The woman who responded to me (though not directly, interestingly enough), let’s call her Lucille just because, went on a long screed about how being a woman was deeply important to her. Fine. I’m not out here trying to dictate how others feel about their gender. If she had left it at that, I would have noted that it wasn’t relative to the topic, but whatever.
Then she went on to say that if she met someone with the standard hallmarks of a gender, then she would address them as that gender. Uh. I knew from previous comments by her that she wasn’t stereotypically feminine herself. In this rant, she went on to say that, but then insisted that she would use hallmarks like long hair to label a person a certain gender. What? She went on to say that she would be upset by being misgendered when she just said she would do the same thing to someone else for the opposite reason (the hair thing specifically).
That wasn’t all , though. She went on to say that she could not understand agender people at all. Which, again, fine. I don’t get it completely myself so I can’t be mad about other people not getting it, either. However, she ended by saying agendered people needed to understand that being a woman was deeply important to her.
Lady. Lady. Look. We know that! Excruciatingly well. I live in same patriarchial world as everyone else (though she does not live in America, so it’s a different flavor of patriarchy for her), and I know painfully well how gender is looked at in my country at least. You don’t need to tell us that gender is important to you–we fucking know!
In fact, for me personally, other people being so attached to their gender was one reason that I eventually chose agender as my label. I don’t have that affinity for the label ‘woman’. When I think about it, I don’t feel anything for it. I do feel an affinity towards women because I’ve experienced similar things as they have, but the label itself? No. I just can’t wrap my mind around what it’s actually supposed to convey.
This post is not about that, though. So we’ll move on from that. I will say that the new content creator whom I really like (queer, trans, Asian American, autistic, and ADHD) has one thing that irritates me–it’s that they insist everyone has pronouns so people should announce theirs when they first meet someone.
BIG sigh. I do not use gendered pronouns because I’m agender. I don’t want to be the ‘only use my name’ person because that usually signifies a transphobe, but in my case, well, only use my name, please. Also, I relate to other agender people who say that while they don’t mind other people calling them by their at-birth assumed gender, they really don’t like having to do it themselves.
I feel the same way. Other people call me ‘she/her’, eh, whatever. I don’t love it, but it is, as the kids say, what it is. Make me do it, and I’m going to bristle. I don’t expect this content creator to talk about agender issues, obviously, but they’re big on intersectionality, so it’s a bit disheartening to be ignored/overlooked once again.
Bedtime. More tomorrow.
*Minorities always need to know more about the majority culture than vice-versa. As a Taiwanese person living in Minnesota, I know so much about the white (as it were) Midwest culture, I could write a dissertation about it. Also, as a queer person, I know so much about the straight world that I would rather not know. Now, as someone who identifies as agender and is AFAB, I can tell you I know waaaaay more about gender roles and the patriarchy than I want to think about. Therefore, it makes sense that I know an abundance about allistic people, especially since it was drilled into my head at a young age that I had to care more about other people’s emotions than my own.
Also,