I have a thought running in my mind that I have revisited from time to time. It’s about how I would like things to be in my ideal world which is very different from how things are actually happening in this world. In the RKG Discord, there are two other people who identify as agender, much to my surprise and delight. There was a discussion happening about gender, and I said I could write a 5,000-word treatise on how I realized I was agender. One of them stated interest in reading said treatise if I ever wrote it, and that’s what cemented this series of posts in my mind.
Even stating the paragraph above, I feel an immediate impulse to explain myself. I didn’t realize I was agender so much as I realized that I didn’t care about gender. That the more I thought about it, the more I got confused about it. How if I had thouught about it thirty years ago, I probably would have called myself nonbinary and been done with it.
Now, however, it doesn’t fit any better than any other gender does. And I would love to explain why that is and how it’s not so much that I chose agender as much as I rejected all the other labels. Which is how I work in general. Nothing fits, so I choose the label that least doesn’t fit. Or to put it another way, I choose the label that fits the least worst.
I’ve had this issue with many different aspects of my being, and I would love to delve more deeply and thoroughly in each of them. Those would be religion (areligious), sexuality (bisexual), and gender (agender). I have thought about each of them quite a bit, and in the end, I threw up my hands and said, “That’s good enough.”
I get frustrated because I think so hard about each of these issues. With religioun, it was pretty easy for me to say that I wasn’t religious, but to which degree? I’m not arrogant enough to believe that I can say for sure there’s nothing out there. Plus, it’s hard to believe there’s absolutely nothing when the fact that humans exist speak to the contrary.
I believe there’s some kind of greater being/entity/collective, but–and I’m going to leave that there because this post is about the structure of the series, not delving into the isuses themselves. Consider that a teaser of things to come.
With gender, I spent much of my twenties and thirties feeling weird about calling myself a woman. I did not feel like a woman, but I didn’t feel like a man, either. In the last five years or so in which gender has become ever more of a hot topic, I ran through all the possibilities. I immediately tossed ‘male’, even though I used to pray to a god I didn’t believe in as a child to make me a boy. It wasn’t because I thought I was a boy or wanted to be a boy, but I hated being a girl because it was so restrictive. I am a part of two cultures that hate women (American and Taiwanese), and I felt it deeply in my bones.
I also thought that if God with a capital G was all-powerful, he (and it was definitely a he) could easily make me a boy. This was actually one of the reasons I stopped believing in God, but not a big reason.
In addition (in terms of gender), I had so many people telling me that I wasn’t a real woman. I will be honest that it was mostly women. Or rather, they’re the ones who told me I wasn’t acting like a woman. Men were just threatened by the fact that I was better than them at so many things.
Side note: One thing my father told me when I was a teenager has stuck in my craw ever since. It shows how sexist he was at the time (and still is), and it wounded me deeply. Not because he said it, exactly, but because I already felt it on some level. This was when I was fifteen or so and had not dated yet. I was feeling worthless and desperate to date (because I thought it would validate me), but I was also a hot mess and not really datable material. Or rather, I shouldn’t have been dating because I was a hot mess.
Anyway, out of the blue, my father decided to impart wisdom on me. He said with a serious face, “This is how you get a boyfriend.” Mind, I had never indicated to him that I wanted his words of wisdom, but he felt the need to tell me, anyway. That’s him to a T. He thinks his words are always worth saying, and it doesn’t matter how much he actually knows about the topic at hand. In fact, dating hadn’t been the topic at hand–he just brought it up out of nowhere. Actually, I’m not going to get into it now; I’ll save it for when I do the post.
Let’s talk about sexual identity for a hot second. This is the one that I am most comfortable with, but also most dissatisfied with the label. I realized I was attracted to women as well as men when I was in my early twenties. This was over thirty years ago, back when the binary was assumed. I reluctantly called myself bi, meaning I was attracted to men and women.
Over the years, my attraction grew as did the number of genders. At some point, I realized that I could be attracted to anyone (except Republicans) and that I would love to be able to just say I was sexual rather than slap on another label, but that gives out an unfortunate connotation that I don’t feel like defending on the regular.
My vision for this series is to take one of these and delve deeper into it in three-to-five posts. I don’t know how long it’ll take me to put my feelings into words for each topic, and it’s going to be winding. That’s how I do. I can’t get from Point A to Point B without detouring at Point C.
I’m done. I may write more about my thinking or just start the series in the next post. We’ll see.