Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: gender

Let’s talk about gender

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In the last few posts, I’ve talked about how seemingly opposite ideas can be true at the same time. In the latest one, I wandered into the topic of gender, which is something I think about now and again. Why? Because it’s an anathema to me, yet it’s something many people take as a given. And, especially now, it’s being talked about, villified, and scrutinized under a very powerful lens.

I have checked in with myself from time to time to see how I feel about gender.

Oh! Before I get into that, I want to expand on something I mentioned in yesterday’s post–how identity is not static.

When I was in my twenties, I realized I was attracted to women as well as men (only two acknowledged gender identities thirty years ago). The emphasis back then was that sexual identity was not a lifestyle or a choice, but something you were born into. I didn’t agree with that entirely. I mean, I was born being attracted to people of various genders, but I could have chosen to go one way or the other.

Also, I didn’t like the narrative that we should be tolerated because we can’t help being non-straight. “It’s not a choice,” so the saying went. “I was born this way!” While I agree that this is true, I also hasten to add that I would have absolutely chosen to be this way. I love being bi because it means that I can romance/sex up anyone of any gender. Theoretically, that just opens up my possibilities, which I’m all for.

This leads me to my current tentative label of agender. I feel it’s the spiritual cousin to bisexual in that it’s about shedding gender labels or realizing they are just one of many different traits a person can have.

I want to be respectful of people whose genders are integral to who they are and who feel their gender in their very bones. I know that I have it easier than many others (trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer folk). It’s the same as being bi is easier than being gay, and being Asian is easier than being black.

But in both of the latter cases, there are ways in which it’s really hard precisely because of the lesser difficulty thing. What I mean is that racism against Asian is ignored, and biphobia is glossed over. Agender isn’t even a thing most people recognize. I would throw areligious in there, but that’s not a big deal at all. Mainly because I don’t ever have to mention it.

The few times I’ve talked about agender is mixed company, I’ve either gotten nothing in response (as in total silence) or a negative reaction. Like, a really outsized negative reaction. It shocked me, frankly, because to me, I was making a fairly tame comment and nothing to get upset about. But the reactions from these women (and, yes, it’s always been women) have been so over-the-top.


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Health, gender, and kung-fu fighting

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I have still more to say about gender and martial arts. That should not surprise anyone because once I get stuck on something, I go on and on and on about it. Yesterday, I talked about gender and what I think of it (not much). I’m so tired of talking about it, but it’s a big deal right now given the state of my country at the moment.

I have been voting for thirty years. I have voted Democratic almost every time*. I have not been happy about it most of the time because it’s just the least worst of two evils. The only times I’ve felt joyful about voting was for Barack Obama and Kamala Harris. Take from that what you will. I dutifully voted for whoever had the D by his (and yes, it was overwhelmingly male which says a lot about the Democratic Party, but taht is not what this post is about) name, but I never felt good about it. Or rather, rarely.

I know that I don’t belong to this time or place, but I also don’t think I would have fit in any time or place. And I don’t know how much fight I have in me to try to change the world for the better. I realize that I’m slipping back to where I used to be, more and more each day.

I know it’s because of inertia and because we tend to go back to homeostasis. In other words, we don’t move in a positive direction without being deliberate about it. Some people like my brother do it almost effortlessly. I envy that about him, by the way. If he thinks something sounds fun, he just does it.

When he was here a few days ago, he was telling me about his adventures in Taiwan and Thailand with his GF. Each day, they had a plan, but then they changed it on a whim if something else looked better. I remembered that from when we went to Taiwan together, and it was a nightmare for me.

I digress.

I tend to stick to my routines, and they work until they don’t. One big example is my sleep. I have always had shitty sleep, starting from when I was a kid. When I was six or seven, my mother would put me to bed at seven or eight, and I would put a t-shirt in the crack under the door so I could read until midnight. I have always liked the night better than the day.

When I went to college, I could not go to bed until 3:30 a.m, even though I had a class that was a quarter to eight in the morning. I would get up at 7:30 a.m. and race to class. I was so sleep-deprived that I could not find my portable alarm clock one morning. I looked for it for five minutes, and it was nowhere to be found.


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More about health and identity

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I am musing more about health, gender, and how I wish the world would be. Here is my post from yesterday in which I wrote about why I opted out of the ‘woman’ label–reluctantly and with some regret. As I said, in my previous post, I have no problems with the label itself or being called a woman in an ideal world.

Alas, we do not live in an ideal world, especially not now. And I am not a material girl living in a material world.

I want to be totally honest this post. I do not understand gender and why people are so wedded to it. This is not me saying I don’t believe that most people are very wedded to their gender–I know they are. I am just not one of those people. I wish we could just not talk about it, but I realize that this is not realistic.

In this society (and maybe others, but I cannot speak to that), we place so much emphasis on gender. It’s baked into so many things that even the mildest push back is considered radical, disruptive, and threatening.

Seriously. I cannot say how shocked I was at the pushback I’ve gotten from supposedly feminist women for…not wearing a bra. For quietly deciding not to have children. For stating the fact that calling someone by the wrong gendered ttitle is misgendering. For simply saying I’m agender. All of these in a very bland way because I know better than to be at all positive about it. Or for saying I don’t use pronouns.

I’m constantly reminded that me quietly living my life is a big shock to some people.

I mentioned this is an earlier post (I think), but I need to repeat it. Last year, I had to renew my license. When I went to the DMV to do so, I was pleasantly surprised to see that they had nonbinary as a choice. They didn’t have it when I nenewed (online) four years prior (early pandemic), so I was not expecting it.

And  I didn’t choose it. Why? One, I don’t consider myself nonbinary. As I’ve said many times–if I was thirty years younger, that’s probably what I would call myself. Not because I vibe with it, but because it’s the least-worst of the options. Much like I chose bisexual, reluctantly, because there’s just no better label. Well, bi.

The biggest reason I did not choose nonbinary, though, was because I looked at the political climate around me. I knew the possibility of a repeat of the orange menace, and I knew that no matter what, the Republicans were going to make hate of queer/genderqueer people a major point of their platform. So, I swallowed hard and went back in the closet. I shut the door behind me, and sighed in sadness.


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Health in relation to identity

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Here’s the thing I learned from my debacle about not wanting/not having children. And this took me a decade into my thirties at least to fully suss out. I had no idea why women would be angry at me for not wanting children and being vocal about it. It’s beacuse they had bought into the societal message that they were supposed to have children and they could not tolerate anybody who indicated the lie in that statement. Because if they did,, then they would have to examine the choices they had made in their life. And they did not want to do that. Oh, they did not want to do that.

I must stress as I always do that I did not crow about it or say that anyone who wanted/had children were stupid/ignorant/out-of-pocket or anything like that. I never brought it up because I didn’t think about it except when people asked me about it. I used to explain it like this. I would never bring up not not having a dog because it was not a part of my life. Same with kids. I would never bring them up because I didn’t have them, didn’t want them, and did not have them as a part of my life.

Anyway. I was not ashamed of not having kids nor for not wanting them. I did not apologize or act as if it was a failing on my part. Because it wasn’t. That was my first step to distancing myself from being a woman, though I did not yet know it. If I was going to get so much shit from not doing my womanly duty (including from my mother, oh so much so), then I did not want to be a woman.

The bra thing is the same. Here’s my post from yesterday. Most women/AFAB people do not like wearing bras. Many wear them simply because they’re supposed to.. It’s a societal expectation, and when some people opt out, it triggers the crabs in a bucket mentality/martyr complex in others. “If I have to suffer, so do you!” It’s a terrible way to live life, but many people have that mentality.

So these oh-so-feminist and progressive women could not explain why they were so upset that some women and AFAB people did not want to wear bras. But even more so, they were upset that we weren’t apologetic about it. There were a half-dozen other women/AFAB people who unabashedly declared they would never wear a bra again without a hint of apologia in their statements.

And some women got so mad. SO MAD. Like, you would have thought we came and took their bras so they couldn’t wear them, mad. Just for saying we preferred not to wear bras or wouldn’t wear them.


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Genderblender, not gender bender

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Talking more about gender. And about dating. Because that’s where I ended up in the last post. And why I am done with cishet white dudes.

I had an argument decades ago with a white dude about reading material. This was when I first realized that I was Taiwanese American and wanted to read literature by Asian American women. This was in college so over thirty years ago. I spent a year solely reading literature by non-white non-men people, so not even just Asian American woman. The white dude I was talking to sniffed and said that I was just practicing reverse discrimination, which really set me off. First of all, that’s not a thing. It just isn’t. Secondly, discrimination in the purest sense of the word is not positive or negative–it just is. And we all discriminate on the regular. When someone chooses to eat burgers for dinner, for example, that’s discrimination (in that they aren’t eating anything else).

We all make choices. No one notices when the choices align with the norms. It’s only when the choices are outliers do they raise an eyebrow. What I said to that obnoxious white dude was that I would bet any amount of money he wanted to bet that even with my then-current year of reading non-white dudes, I had read way more dead white dudes than he had people of color. I was 100% sure of that. Thatt shut him up, much to my smug pleasure.

It’s gotten better. In the year of our whatever, 2024, people are aware that there are more than white dudes out there. And yet. Still. Look for a list of ‘best of’ any kind of pop culture, and still, the preponderance of the people on the list are white men. Music, especially. And video games? There is literally a website that tracks how woke a game is, and something as minor as having a Pride flag in the game gets it labeled woke.

When I heard of this, I thought it was some kind of joke. It was not. When I looked at the list, I just had to shake my head and  feel both pity and disgust for the people who are so threatened by these kinds of things. I mean, seriously. A Pride flag?? Also, these are the same people who told us to make our own games if we were such special snowflakes that we could not handle mainstream games. And when we did that? Or developers realized that they could get good money out of us? (Or, less cynically, developers share those progressive viewpoints and want to include these things in their games! No way. That can’t be true, can it??)

You can bet that most of the people whining about diversity in games are white straight dudes. Again, I will bet any amount of money on this. All the monies.

I have heard it all. It’s pandering. It’s giving into the minority. They don’t want pronouns in their game. They don’t want to play as a black woman or anything other than a white straight man. Hell, they don’t want it to exist in their games (probably their real lives, too). Awwww can the poor widdle baby not handle the mere existence of a trans person in their game? Or having to actively choose ‘he/him’ as their pronouns when he starts the game?

Who’s the fucking snowflake now?


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More about gender just because I can

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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.


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My (not) final thoughts on gender

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Let me state my point up front this time. In my ideal world in which there were no prescriptive gender roles, I would be fine with being called a woman.  I have no animosity towards the label itself, and I have no issue with my body parts being what they are. I like my boobs, and my pussy is fine. Hips good, shoulders wide, and I finally have half an ass because of Taiji. I have never felt body dysmorphia or gender dysphoria. I have hated my body for most of my life, yes, but that was because of my mother’s fat loathing/phobia and not anything to do with my gender.

Here is my post from yesterday. Now, let’s get back to the subject.

As I’ve said many times before, yes, I prayed to a god I didn’t believe in when I was a kid to turn me into a boy. I was eight or nine, and I figured if God was all-powerful, then He* could make me a boy. I didn’t think I was a boy or feel like a boy, but I felt so restrained and restricted as a girl. Why? because I had rampant sexism around me. I grew up in the ’70s in America. That’s one vector. My parents were immigrants from Taiwan, a very sexist culture. That’s vector two. The church to which my parents belong was/is SUPER sexist as well.

I was what was considered a tomboy when I was little. I liked to run around, climb trees, etc. I got chastised for it constantly and by the time I was seven, I was severely depressed and hated myself with an intensity that should have scared people.

I thought being a boy would make everything better. I thought it would be better to be a boy because there was no freedom as a girl. Yes, there were rigid gender roles for boys, too, but they were more positive than the ones for girls. They at least allowed boys to do shit other than sit around and be decorative.

When I was in my early twenties, I realized that I was attracted to women as well as men (still in the binary back thirty years ago). I went to a conference for queer Asian women and it was amazing. I mention it because I have a point to make about it. We were playing the ‘place everyone on the butch/femme spectrum’ game which was a thing back in the day. There were roughly thirty of us, and the women were shouting where they thought everyone was on the spectrum. When they got to me, the woman who had been doing most of the guessing paused for a length of time. She finally admitted that she didn’t know where to put me on the spectrum.

Several years later, I got something similar from a big bull dyke (self -description). She said I confused her because I had long hair and didn’t hide my breasts, but I also liked sports and didn’t wear make-up (or care about fashion). She sounded both amused and bewildered by it.


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My final (hah) thoughts on gender

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I think about gender a lot. I have written about it quite often as well. A few decades ago, I was big on discourse re: sexism. I wrote for a political blog, and my beat turned out to be abortion. Not because I was assigned it, but because that was where my passions lay. I wrote so much about it and so often, I burned out. I must add that being in an even worse place now than we were then really makes me mad. I came back from the dead (twice) for this?

I do believe that in the long run, this whole anti-abortion bullshit will backfire on the right (probably after I’m terminally dead), but it’s going to hurt so many people in the meantime. In fact, it has. And it makes me so fucking angry. Like, incandescent with rage. I cannot believe we have taken this huge a step backwards. Well, yes, I can, but it still pisses me off.

Anyway. That is not the topic of this post. It’s gender. Back in the day, there were men and there were girls. Gad. I do not want to get into that, either. I’m trying to stay on topic today. Men and women. Two genders. There were trans people, of course, but it was much more on the downlow. I had a difficult time because I got so much shit from women about how I was womanning wrong.

Side note: There is a thing called being a cool girl. It’s when a woman declares she’s not like other women and doens’t get along with other women. All her best friends are men because she just likes guy things. I was like that when I was in college until I realized that I was there on sufferance. I was ‘one of the guys’ until I slipped and did anything even slightly girly. Plus, I met many wonderful women and got over the idea that I was not like other women.

Except.

(Here I go derailing myself again.)

When I was in my twenties, I had many women tell me that I was not a real woman (as I mentioned above). It wasn’t me rejecting womanhood, but womanhood rejecting me. When I started learing Taiji weapons, I would tweet about it (I was on Twitter then). The responses from men were, uh, shall we say, lustful. They would send me clips of movies that had women with swords and whimper about how hot it was.


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Gender and me

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I don’t get gender. I fully acknowledge this is a me-thing as most people seem very wedded to their gender, but let me break this down. And I mean this is the most real, non-sarcastic way. I know how it sounds and that it may seem like I’m throwing jabs. I truly am not.

Here’s the thing. As I understand it, gender is currently not predicated on genitalia, but on how you (general you) identify, gender-wise. For trans people, this seems to be that you don’t identify with the gender into which you were born, but the other (binary). But some people also think that being nonbinary is also being trans.

At any rate, one of the tenets of feminism is that you can be anything you want as a woman. You don’t have to be stereotypically feminine, but you also don’t have to reject things that are stereotypically feminine. I actually have a quibble with this because it has gotten to the point that anything done by a woman is a feminist act, and I am not down with  that. You can decide not to fight the sexism in an individual situation, but that doesn’t mean some things aren’t objectively sexist.

That’s not the point of this post, though, so I am going to move on with difficulty.

Well, no I’m not. Because it’s part of the point. I don’t understand why we have to use genders at all. K and I have talked about this at length. She thhinks that within our lifetime, we will resort to using they/them for everyone. And within her kids’ (the ones she teaches) lifetime, gender will be done away with completely. Her kids think that in her lifetime they/them wil be used for everyone, but not the latter.

I think they/them might become the default, but probably not in my lifetime. Then again, marriage equality took much less time than I thought it would. I remember roughly five years before it happened, I was saying to K that it would happen in my lifetime, but probably not for another twenty years. Then, after intense debate, it suddenly happened in a very short amount of time. Frankly, my head was spinning at how quickly it happened beacuse I was hunkered down for a knock down, dragged out, kick-you-around fig9ht.

I’m reminded of those early days with gender identity and how fast it’s been evolving. I was reading a post on Ask A Manager* from 2019 that had to do with  gender and sexism. Basically, an older woman was tired of being called ‘young lady’. She politely told a service worker why she did not want to be called that (sexism as part of the reason), and the comments were wild. I don’t want to get into them too deeply because the wildness is not why I’m musing on this post.


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Gender! What is it good for?

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I’ve been thinking more about gender. In part because I am writing a novel for NaNoWriMo that has an agender protag and a nonbinary love interest. Partly because I’ve been talking about it with different people. It’s just fascinating to me that of the four women/female-adjacent people I’ve talked to (five if you include me) all have similar feelings about being a woman (it doesn’t have to have a rigid definition), but the resultls have been very different.

All of us agree that society has put too much emphasis on A WOMAN MUST BE X, Y, Z, and is harsh on anyone who does not fit that very narrow build. It’s depressing to me that in 2023, we still haven’t made as much progress as I had hoped. When I was in my mid-to-late twenties (a quarter of a certury ago), I got hounded about not wanting children. I was taken off-guard because I had mistakenly thought that it was just a personal decision that had no effect on anyone else.

I was naive. Oh, I was so naive. It should have been that way, mind. It shouldhave been as unremarkable as me saynig that my hair is black or that I like Taiji weapons. A lot. Ok, that latter one has caused some distress as well, weirdly, also related to gender. When I talked about Taiji weapons while I was still on Twitter, the responses I received were divided sharply along gender lines.

The men wanted to fuck me. It was clear that they found it really sexy. I mean , at least one if not more sent me pics of sexy women with weapons in movie clips. I’ve read female cops say that they had the same issue with men. There were those who were immediately turned off, yes, but there were other men who were extremely turned on by them being cops.

On the other hand, women were shocked and appalled that I was ‘so violent’. One went so far as to say she never would have thought it of me. There was nothing I could do to convince her that I wasn’t violent, that loving the weapon forms wasn’t inherently violent, and that my love of the weapon forms was not unseemly.

I get it. My teacher and I have talked about how she (and her teacher before her) would have to talk men down in terms of, “You don’t have to go a hundo all the time, and ease up on the muscles.” Men are taught to always be on edge, to have to one up, to overpower their opponents (and problems). Women, on the other  hand*, are slammed hard if they step out of their lane. “Be nice” is so prevalent, and the cost for breaking that edict is swift and harsh.


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