I’m loving Bagua, and it’s making me want to fight some fools. Not for real because that’s silly, but in a sparring situation. I’m feeling my oats in Bagua, and it’s making me more energetic. It’s very interesting because Taiji chills me out. Even doing the weapons forms gets me in a flow state that makes me want to relax and be Zen about everything.
Bagua, on the other hand, makes me aggressive. That is scary to say because as an AFAB person from a Taiwanese background, I have had two cultures telling me I need to be feminine and demure. I have worked for decades to reject that premise, but it’s still in my brain–and in my culture. It’s the year 2023, and we still have to argue that women don’t need to wear bras or makeup in order to be considered feminine and/or professional. I honestly thought that by this time, we would have laid that bullshit to rest. And I also thought that it would be acceptable for a woman not to want kids. But, here we are in the very-much-not-that-world, much to my dismay.
It’s one reason that decidhed I did not want to be a woman. It felt like such a limiting label. I wrote this in a post on Ask A Manager, paraphrased: The word ‘woman’ is like an ill-fitting coat. It’ll cover my body, but it’s not comfortable. My Taiji teacher went in the opposite direction of grabbing the label woman and declaring fiercely that it was hers. We’ve talked about how we’re very similar in our beliefs about our gender, but our choices were very different.
It’s one thing I appreciate about her as a Taiji teacher. I fele most comfortable with people who are not extreme on the gender continuum. In the old days, I rpobably would have called myself androgynous. I don’t vibe with nonbinary. Don’t know why, but it just doesn’t feel right for me. The best of the lot so far is agender. Because gender doesn’t matter to me. There is very little I do that is affected by my gender. Not just because I don’t have kids, but because I don’t care about fashion, clothes, or makeup. I have my hair to almost my knees, but that’s it as far as ‘feminine’ features. Oh, and my boobs. They’re huge, but that’s nothing to do with me, of course. I was born with the genetics that ‘blessed’ me with gigantic knockers, and that’s the end of that. There is nothing about my birth-gender that dictates what I can do in my daily life. I got confused by all the restrictions put on me because I did not understand why me having a vagina meant I couldn’t climb a tree, play sports, laugh loudly, or enjoy sex.
The two that really got to me were not wanting children and loving weapons. The former I understood was a societal thing that was needed to be repeated to keep the species going. If all women decided not to have children, then we would be screwed as a species (deservedly so). But it didn’t stand to reason that every woman needed to have children in order to keep us going as a species, so why was being pushed so hard to procreate?