Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: identity

Stick your labels where the sun don’t shine (part three)

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I’m back to talk more about labels. I know they’re needed and useful, but I would prefer to do away with them. Here is the post from yesterday in which I veered hard into talking about horror games for a bit. Why? Why not. Because it was spooky season, and while I enjoy it, I don’t get scared by most pop media.

I have said this many times before, and I don’t quite no why. I want to emphasize that I don’t count jumpscares in that my body jerking involuntarily is not fear; it’s a startle response. Also, it’s the cheapest way to get a ‘scare’, and I don’t approve. Making my body jump is not the same as scaring me; I will die on that hill. I will also add that I don’t recoil; I don’t screech; and I don’t freak out in any way. In fact, sometimes, I don’t even externally jump.

It’s not a flex; I swear. I’m just born different. I always have had weird responses to things (again, probably a neurospicy thing) so I just don’t process things the same way other people do. I used to wonder why, and it wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I realized it was something with my brain. Not that it was broken, but maybe ADHD?

Side note: I’m glad we’re moving away from just citing the stereotypical symptoms that happen to white boys when talking about neurodiversity. I’m bitter that I might have clocked onto it sooner if I had known that the oft recited symptoms weren’t the only ones, by any mean.

I think that’s one of the reasons I’m chary about labels, too. They put you in a box, and they don’t allow for any wiggle room. It’s one of the reasons I want to opt out of all the usual labels. I’ve said this in terms of ‘woman’. It’s like wearing an ill-fitting raincoat when it’s pouring out. Sure, it’ll keep much of the water out, but I’m still going to get wet. And I’m not going to feel good about it, either. I can’t wait to get out of it and dry off.

In other word, it’ll do in a pinch, but I don’t love it.

That’s how I feel about most labels. They’yll do in a pinch, but I don’t love them. Even the ones I choose.

When I was in college, I loved having tests that had essay questions. I can bullshit my way out of anything because I am good with words. It’s a gift, and it’s something I’m grateful for. If it’s a multiple choice quiz, though, I do horribly. Why? Because I overthink it. I can see situations in which each of the answers would be correct. That’s because most multiple choice quizzes/tests are poorly written, but that’s neither here nor there.


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The core of my identity is “fuck it! That’s close enough”

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Let’s talk gender identity. This is something I’ve thought a lot about in the last five years or so. I’ve never felt a burning need to identify with ‘woman’; it was just the easiest way to define myself. It’s the gender/sex I was born into, and it was…fine. At least, if I did not look too closely at it. Once I gave it more than two minutes of thought, though, it all fell apart.

I’m going to be completely frank here. When I think of gender as it relates to myself, I come up empty. I have heard/read people who identify deeply with their gender and how important it is to them. I can accept that it’s a vital core of their identity; I just wish others could accept that about me as well. Meaning, my lack of attachment to my birth gender. And I wish that it weren’t so threatening.

But that’s me in general. I think a lot about many issues. I go deep, research, get obsess, and then I throw up my hands and go, “Fuck! That’s close enough, I guess” because nothing fits exactly.

Let me quickly run down the list.

1. Bisexual. I tried on pansexual and omnisexual (hey, this was thirty years ago), but I did not like either of those. Honestly, my favorite is queer, but people invariably think gay (both gays and straights) when they hear queer. Nowadays, I use bi out of habit, and I think of it is ‘people like me and people not like me’ when it comes to gender, but it’s very much an “eh, it’ll do” label rather than one I embrace or one that fits.

2. Areligious. I used agnostic for awhile. I never liked atheist because that’s way too arrogant and confident for me. I did feel like there is something out there, but my medical crisis showed me that ultimately, it doesn’t matter what it is. My mother and I used to argue about free will versus predeterminism all the time, and I could never wrap my brain around the concept that an all-knowing god allowed us free will. I mean, if He (in her religion, it’s a He) knows what I’m going to do before I do it, then it’s not free will, is it?

I had a friend who was Jewish. She wrote an article about how she believed god was all-loving, but not all-knowing. It was a fascinating article, and while I couldn’t quite accept that, either, it made much more sense than my mother’s version of god.

At some point, I realized that I was tired. And I just did not care if there was a god or not because that god had no affect on my life. If pressed, I would say that I believed there was something that was bigger than all of us, but it’s not something that directs the day-to-day goings on so I just let it be.

I used ‘apathetic’ for some time to describe my religious belief before stumbling on areligious. Once I read up on the latter, I knew that was for me. I just don’t care about religion (for me), and that’s that.


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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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Martial arts are my life

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I have been studying Taiji for over fifteen years. Yesterday, I was writing about how I did some light sparring with my teacher in our last private lesson. And how much I loved it. I am still in the midst of realizing that I am not a newbie any longer nor someone who simply studies Taiji. In class today, everyone was on Zoom because it’s been snowing (yay! Three or so inches. It’s not much, but it’s sure pretty). The other three students who were in class are all newbies to novices. It’s interesting to see them for once because it reminds me of when I was a newbie.

It’s hard to know what you don’t know, of course. And I still have major issues with my form such as having my hands too high andnot bending my knees. I’ve had my teacher give me refinements because it’s hard for me to see what I’m doing wrong, obviously. I’m not looking at myself as I practice and even if I were, I wouldn’t necessarily see what was wrong. When you do the same thing over and over and over and over again, you don’t necessarily notice the flaws.

It’s similar to how when you’re editing your own writing, you may not see your mistakes. That’s why it’s always better to have someone else editing your work for you.

I don’t know why it is that me re-learning the Fan Form is what has made me realize that I was not a dilettante any longer. I think because I was no longer just floating from form to form, dreaming about what I would do next. Instead, I made a concerted effort to clean up the forms  I knew. For whatever reason, that took it from me practicing Taiji to me being serious about Taiji.

Yes, it took me sixteen or so years to get there. What can I say? I’m a slow learner. Actually, the issue is the opposite of that–I’m too quick a learner, so I take it for granted that I can learn things easily. When  I can’t, my mind rebels.

It doesn’t help that my upbringing is within the Taiwanese culture, which is very strict on good and bad (what is which and what the standard should be for good). It’s either an A+ or an F. There is no in between. I have tried to move beyond that, but it’s hard. I still feel like I’m failing at life for many reasons, and it’s something that I don’t know if I will ever escape completely.

My mother sometimes laments the fact that I don’t tell her anything. Well, that’s when she’s not dumping her problems on me–which, admittedly she’s doing every time she calls. About two decades ago, she blamed my therapst for putting a wedge between her (my mother) and me. she’s not wrong that my therapst helped me individuate, but she’s wrong in blaming my therapist or thinking it was a bad thing*.


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More about labels because I can, part two

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I’m still on the label trip because that’s the way my hyperfocus works, and by the way, can I say that for all the bashing hyperfocus gets, it can be really useful, too. I have over 10,000 words on my NaNoWriMo project, and we’re barely into day four. I give all credit to hyperfocus. When I first started learning Taiji weapons, I fell in love with the sword. Once my Taiji teacher placed it in my hand, I knew it was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I pushed her to teach me the Sword Form as quickly as possible as I was obsessed with it. Once again, hyperfocus did me a solid.

What? I’m not supposed to be appreciative of hyperfocus? I’m supposed to say it’s bad and makes me lose time when I should be doing something else? That’s not wrong, of course. There are times when I’ve put hours into something I shouldn’t have. Such as FromSoft games. I have made a rule that I can’t start playing one after midnight because there is no way in hell that I will only play for an hour.

On the other hand, it’s a good thing when I use the pressure of something exterior to me to get shit done, such as NaNoWriMo. I have not been able to write (except here) for several months. Many months. So many months. NaNoWriMo was coming up, and a few weeks ago, I thought, “What if I use it to jumpstart my flagging writing?” I decided that was a good thing and started planning what I wanted to do in NaNoWriMo. In the past several years, I had been doing NaNoRebel because that was more my style and I was bored with NaNoWriMo.

Interjection: In yesterday’s post, I wrote about why I don’t date and what labels I could affix to that. It made sense when I wrote it. That’s all I can say in my defense. Back to my musings.

This year, I decided to go back to my roots precisely because I had not written in months. As the old saying goes, writing at all is better than not writing. It was time to go for the basic ‘write 50,000 words in a month’ and call it a day. I had all these ideas of what I wanted to write about with my NaNoWriMo project, but I wasn’t sure how to do it gracefully.

I had planned on doing two simultaneous projects, but now I’ve smashed it into one. A quick description of it would be mystical/surreal, murder mystery, autofiction (memoir because I like alliteration). To put it in friendly vernacular, I threw everything including the kitchen sink. Why? Because I wanted to. Also because I can. Also because why not? Wthi a healthy dose of ‘you can’t tell me what not to do’.


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Let’s talk about labels, shall we?

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I was reading an advice column for queer people, and I have to admit, I rolled my eyes a bit at all the labels the person applied to themself. Yes, I know we need heuristics in order to talk with each other (and, yes, heuristics is the word for the week. I’m seeing how many times I can cram it into my posts this week. Deal), but at least for me, there’s a limit as to how useful they are. Also, the more granular we get, the less useful the labels/groupings become.

What do I mean by that? I’ll use myself as an example as related to sexual identity. Let’s say that I identify as queer. That’s pretty broad and, sadly, has come to mean gay. I’ve fought against it for twenty years, but now, I’ve just accepted it. I don’t make the rules, but I have to follow them, begrudgingly, to a certain extent. I still call myself queer, but I have to clarify that I don’t mean gay.

Thirty years ago, I discovered that I was attracted to men and women. Yes, those two categories was what we talked about back in the day. I went through all the different available labels of the day (bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual) and decided with great reluctance that bisexual would do. I wasn’t happy about it, mind, but it was the best of the worst. Which is pretty much how I feel about most labels. The least worst rather than the best.

Then, we have to talk about sex v. love. I can sex with just about anyone I’m attracted to (or not, as it turns out. I would not suggest it, but it is possible). Sex is easy. I’m really good at that. When it comes to sex, I would say that I’m aro in that I can easily hook up without romantic feelings. In fact, I prefer that because sex is much less messy than romance. And because I have enough mental health issues that I don’t want to have a romantic relationship. Romance brings out the worst in me, and I don’t want it enough to fight that particular battle.

I explained it to my friends is this fashion. I love being alone. It’s my preferred state of being. Well, I wish Shadow was still with me, but beyond that, I don’t want a human being in my space 24/7. I have my issues; don’t we all? But I’m happy with myself overall. I like what I like, and I don’t like what I don’t like. I wear what I wear, and I eat what I eat. I mention that because there was a thread an Ask A Manager about clothing. A teacher wrote in and said that after she got home from work, she liked to change into her pajamas. Her husband, a CEO-type, came home later and while he would change into comfier clothes, he did not like that she wore her pajamas.


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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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