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.
The video I included below is from four nonbinary Asian people talking about what it means for them to be nonbinary. I really wish I could have found the equivalent with agender Asian people, but I could not find one. Ugh. I’m watching the video real time, and at the end of it, one person said that when you’re introducing yourself to new people to add your gender pronoun because “it’s just that easy”.
No, it’s not. Some of us do not use gendered pronouns. Deeeeeep sigh. Way to other people who are even more of an outlier than nonbinary people. It does show, though, how easy it is for anyone to not take into account that there may be people who are even more of a minority than they are.
When I was in my twenties, I really struggled with the way that some people who were minorities (and very cognizant of all the ways they’d been mistreated) were blithely bigoted in other ways. To me, if someone experienced bigotry in one way, they should be able to make the connection to other bigotry, right? Wrong. Now, as an older, and very weary person who cares about social justice, I know that humans are very flawed, myopic, narcissistic, and fucked up.
I have my own weak spots, such as classism (for instance). I know better than to talk about money and some of the things that set me apart from most people in that venue, for example. This post is not about that, though!
3. Agender. I tried to gel with a more popular/known term for gender identity. Genderfluid? Nope. My gender is what it is. It’s not fluid; it doesn’t change; it just is. Genderqueer is the one closest to what I felt because I liked queer as a word for many reasons (the main one being that I am queer (meaning weird) in so many ways), there’s the same problem with it that queer in general has–everyone takes it to mean nonbinary.
Thirty years ago, I probably would have called myself nonbinary and be done with it. Now, however, I don’t feel it fits me. I mean, it’s close, but it’s not quite there. Again, my gender doesn’t change. I don’t feel that I’m fluctuating between the two genders or that my gender is somewhere in between.
That’s beacuse I don’t identify with the concept of gender at all. I can relate to women and the experiences that they’ve had because I’ve had similar, but I don’t know what ‘feels like a woman’ means. And, yes, I’m fluctuating between one quote mark and two just because.
It’s pretty discouraging to look for content from Asian agender people. There is scant content about/from agender people at all, and most of it is from, not a surprise, white people. And as with any other topic, that means that it’s coming from the view of someone who is in the majority when it comes to a very important factor–race. In this society, it drives a lot of policies, traditions, norms, expectations, etc., so it’s not surprising it drives identities as well.The video I included above specifically addresses the problem that nonbinary conjures up a skinny white person who looks androgynous.
Side note: I’ve written before about androgyny and how even that is influenced by society in that androgyny means looking like a twelve-year old boy (in general). Why can’t androgyny include the feminine as well as the masculine?
After all my deliberation about gender, I (metaphorically) threw up my hands and said, “Agender! Close enough.” I have noticed, though, that some people describe it in a way that is not pleasing to me. One video I watched (which I thinkk was done by a nonbinary person) said that agender people used gender-neutral pronouns like they/them. That may be true, but this agender person does not use gendered pronouns at all–and I consider they/them as gendered pronouns because nonbinary people use them, and nonbinary is a gender.
Look. I know I’m being difficult. I know I chose the least palatable/most finicky cthoice possible. I know that this is something that people will roll their eyes over and think I’m being precious. It’s really the opposite of that, though. It’s me, defeated, reluctantly choosing the term that is closest to how I feel.
As with religion, I’m mostly apathetic about gender. I know it’s of utmost important to a lot of people, but it’s not for me. Oh, the other thing that other video I watched said with which I did not agree–gender dysphoria. They said that agender people might feel body dysphoria. Again, that’s true. But it’s not a given. I am fine with my body. Before my medical crisis, I didn’t like it because I felt fat and gross (which, I will admit, I’m struggling with now), but I had no issue with my bits. I have big boobs, and I like them just fine. My pussy is great, too. But neither of those have any bearing on my day-to-day, either.
Hips, good. Waist, eh. I need to choose my food better, but my body got me through my medical crisis. It’s been good to me, so I’m now good to it.