Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: identity

More about health and identity

Posted on by • 0 Comments

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.


Continue Reading

Health in relation to identity

Posted on by • 0 Comments

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.


Continue Reading

Martial arts are my life

Posted on by • 0 Comments

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*.


Continue Reading

More about labels because I can, part two

Posted on by • 0 Comments

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’.


Continue Reading

Let’s talk about labels, shall we?

Posted on by • 0 Comments

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.


Continue Reading

More about gender just because I can

Posted on by • 0 Comments

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.


Continue Reading

My (not) final thoughts on gender

Posted on by • 0 Comments

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.


Continue Reading

My final (hah) thoughts on gender

Posted on by • 0 Comments

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.


Continue Reading

In the in-between In My Ideal World

Posted on by • 0 Comments

In my last post, I intended to talk about the little things around the big things in my life, but ended up talking about writing–which is a big thing. It’s not one of my identity issues, though, except that I’m struggling with writing fiction now in a way I never have. Before my medical crisis, I had stories in my brain all the time. I had one writer’s block that I could remember, and it was for a month. That was very tense for me, but it went after that month or so with no problem. Now, however, while I still have ideas and fragments in my brain, I don’t have the stories I used to have.

I have been mulling over an idea for a trilogy for the last year. I’ve been refining it as I go, but I can’t make it gel in a coherent whole. Acutally, I have a few different ideas (for different trilogies), and I’m trying to find a way to bring it all together. I don’t want to talk too much about it before I start writing because I find that the more I talk about my writing, the less I actually write/the worse I actually write. That’s not unique to me, by the way. A lot of writers find that if the talk too much about their writing as they’re writing, it takes the verve out of said writing.

Here’s the thing. The big things such as sexual orientation, race, gender, etc., are important, yes, but so are the spaces in between. Or the things that don’t quite fit into any one character. And they’re all connected–at least in my mind. Which I’ve discoverered might be because I’m neurodivergent.

Side note: It’s refreshing to know that I can still learn things about myself at my old age. Refreshing, but also daunting. Daunting because there is so much about myself that I would like to fix. Refreshing because apparently, you can teach an old dog new tricks!

This is one of the reasons my writing has stalled. I think that since my medical crisis, my brain has become even more wedded to the idea that everything is related. If I want to write about one thing, say, my medical crisis, then I have to start with my family dysfunction. I have to add in my Taiji practice, not to mention just my life in general.

When I start thinking of all the things I need/want to add to the story, my brain mentally gives up.

Side note: After Elden Ring came out, Ian urged mo te pitch to his editor a story about FromSoft games and my medical crisis. See, before my medical crisis, I was so hyped for Elden Ring. It was announced….before the pandemic? Or at least rumored, and then it didn’t come out. And didn’t come out.


Continue Reading

In My Ideal World, all the little things

Posted on by • 0 Comments

In talking about my new series, In My Ideal World, I realized that I wanted to talk about little things, too. Or rather, things that don’t fall neatly into identity categories. Things that are tangentially related, but not necessarily in a category of their own. Such as weddings. They are definitely related to relationships and gender identity (not to mention sexual identity), but they aren’t something I would consider necessary to any of those categories. (Here is yesterday’s post.)

And yet.

This is one of those issues that is so huge in our culture, and yet.

I’m hesitating to write how I feel about it because it’s SUCH a huge aspect of our culture (and most cultures, really). I’ll save the deeper thoughts until I’m going to write about it for real, but I’ll just say that for me personally, it’s not important. Marriage is a positive as long as it serves the couple/throuple/community, but weddings themselves? I hold no truck in them.

I do get the need for ritual and to anonuce to the world your intent. But, I don’t get why it has to be a BIG WEDDING. I know it doesn’t, but many people seem to think it does. Even people whom I consider pretty progressive seem to get stuck on this tradition.

As with many things, I’m libertarian with a small l. I wish and want people to be free to do and be who they are. As long as that doesn’t hurt other people (actually hurt them and not “hurt” them. I’ll explore that difference in future posts), have at life as they wish. Want to be in a monogamous relationship with a person of the traditionally opposite gender? Have at it! Want to have children and watch cheesy Disney movies with them? Have at it! (Well, no, don’t. Don’t support Disney!) Want to go to church on Sunday and tithe religiously? Have at it!

I mean all that, truly. No hate, no snark. Well, maybe the teensiest bit of snark. My biggest issue is that I don’t get the same accord from the normies. Believe me I know all about how being a minority means not being seen–especially when you’re in the categories I am. It makes me cranky, though, when I’m asked to show empathy to someone in the majority because I always have to think about others.

Like with marriage. I have known since I was in my twenties that I didn’t want to get married. That was Not Done, apparently. I dated a guy in my late twenties who said to me, “I know you have said you don’t want to get married, but what would you say if I proposed to you?” He also once got really excited after going to a wedding (or maybe a bachelor’s party? I can’t remember) because the couple got a toaster oven. He waxed rhapsodically about it and said jokingly (but not really) that maybe we should get married so we could get a toatser oven. I looked at him in amazement and said, “We’re adults. If we want a toaster oven, we can buy one.”


Continue Reading