11:51am May 9, 2014

Some more personal history wrt genderlessness and the trans community.

As usual – my terminology is sometimes outdated because my trans-related language was cemented in my brain over ten years ago. Saying certain words doesn’t mean I hold to certain ideologies. Thanks for understanding.

My first exposure to the trans community was something over ten years ago. I spent a lot of time believing I was FTM (that’s what we called it, it was not considered incorrect terminology) because that was the only option, and it seemed to explain the way I felt about my body and about my apparent detachment from a female gender. I hung out with a lot of trans men and watched friends transition. I also watched some people decide that maybe transition wasn’t for them, some of whom remained non-op FTMs, some of whom left the FTM community entirely, and some of whom tried to find in-between positions they could live with. Like one person who ultimately decided he was going to identify as a woman who used he pronouns.

But there wasn’t a lot of room, back then, for people who were in any sort of grey area. And somehow I absorbed the idea that trans meant going from the gender you were presumed to be by others, to the gender you really were inside. As in, ‘transgendered’ involved being 'gendered’ in some manner, as far as I was concerned, and seemingly as far as everyone around me was concerned.

I left the community very troubled and confused about gender. I knew that I had the same sorts of body dysphoria that many trans men had, that in fact there were very few differences there and a lot of similarities. This was from talking to a lot of people, including trans autistic people with very similar body awareness issues, in depth about our experiences. However, I had also learned that I didn’t feel like a man, or a boy, and that no matter how much I tried, that felt just as out-of-place as feeling like a woman. I thought at this point that my only two options were FTM man, or lesbian-with-gender-issues. Yes, I know that sexual orientation and gender identity are not the same thing, but I’m talking about in my particular case, I’m attracted to women and nonbinary and genderless people, and the lesbian community does allow a wider range of gender identities, because historically there has been less division between lesbian/gay communities, and trans communities, than there is today. (That historical fact is one reason that there continue to be niches for certain sorts of trans people in the lesbian and gay communities, even though current politics suggest that they should be entirely separated. You can’t so easily separate groups that have grown up organically connected like that – just because your ideology says they have to be separate won’t create the separation.)

So after that I felt a lot of disquiet and confusion. I knew I had made the right decision not to view myself as FTM. But I also knew that I was not a cis woman. And even though people frequently called me butch (mostly because of my hair? but then… people were calling me 'she-male’ and arguing about whether I could 'get woodies’ when I was in high school and had long hair and long skirts, so IDK), I was not comfortable with 'butch lesbian’ either. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I felt that there was no gender, either gender identity or gender expression, that ever sounded or felt like an accurate representation of my identity.

And by that point, I was hearing about a lot more of them. There was male, female, infinite gradations of butch and femme, 'third gender’, 'boi’, 'androgynous’, etc. I sometimes became rather obsessed with trying to find one that fit me, and I always came up short and got really depressed. It felt like they were just words, just ideas, not things that fit or belonged to me.

And at some point, I decided that if there were people who were cisgendered (which I saw as meaning “having a gender, the one that people assume you ought to have based on your biological sex”), and people who were transgendered (which I saw as meaning “having a gender, any gender other than the one people assume you ought to have based on your biological sex”), then maybe I was nongendered (not having a gender, regardless of expectations). I had never heard this term before. I had never heard of agender or neutrois or any of the other words people use nowadays.

And that actually fit me, and felt comfortable, for the first time in my entire life. I also began meeting other people who said it fit them. In all cases, these were people who had had issues with gender since childhood, whether anyone else knew it or not. In all cases, this was something we had thought about a good deal, and usually suffered about a good deal. This wasn’t an identity we came up with in order to be cool, or in order to get away from anything. And none of us had much connection to communities like the neutrois community. We were just individuals who were finally finding words for something we hadn’t had words for before.

Our relation to the gender society presumed of us varied, though. Some of us were okay with the pronouns people had always used. Others weren’t. Some of us were okay, in some circumstances, with being called women or men, or being part of communities that presumed us to be male or female. Most of us felt like the gender socialization we received growing up was meaningful, even if we didn’t ultimately feel like we were the gender we were socialized to be. (And we weren’t all socialized as female, contrary to stereotype.) It was complicated. In my case, for instance, there are pronouns I prefer, but I feel like it’s too much of a fight I don’t have the energy for. And my relationship to gender socialization is so complicated and fraught with horribly uncomfortable and confusing stuff that I don’t like to even discuss it.

I was 7 years old the first time I got called 'homo’, 13 the first time I got called 'she-male’. I’ve had strangers come up to me, get two inches from my face, and demand, in extremely hostile voices, to know 'are you a boy or a girl’, to the point that I feared for my safety. Sometimes this happened in crowded places where people who were supposed to be protecting me, failed to lift a finger to protect me. I’ve encountered public bathroom problems. I’ve had medical professionals in emergency rooms ask rude questions about whether the gender on my hospital bracelet was accurate.

Which is to say, this isn’t something I’m doing for fun. It’s not something I'm doing at all, for that matter. It’s just a way of describing an aspect of who I am. Or maybe more an aspect of who I am not – describing something most people, both cis and trans, have, and I don’t.

And it being the absence of gender, it’s not something I think about unless I bump up against expectations. But those expectations are so extreme that I’ve felt very much as if I can’t easily be myself. It’s taken me years to get up the courage to do things, ordinary things, that most people can just do.

In my case, a lot of it comes to situations where I’m going to be perceived as either masculine or feminine based on appearance. For a long time, I was okay being perceived as masculine, because I grew up with an expectation of femininity, and anything had to be better than doing what I grew up expected to do and be. But then it turned into just another trap, another thing where there were expectations just as restrictive against my actual identity (and lack thereof) as expectations about femininity. So then I began to do whatever the hell I wanted, but that has had consequences too. Because I have a tendency to enjoy decorative clothing, which gets considered feminine by my surrounding culture, and people assume that I have a feminine gender identity or 'gender expression’, neither of which is the truth. But then when I try to talk about this problem, people assume I’m trying to destroy femininity for political reasons and thereby hurting transfeminine people. When really I have had as many problems with presumptions of masculinity at other times in my life, as I have with presumptions of femininity lately.

And these aren’t like… things that bother me just a little. They’re things that feel like just living in this society cuts me to the core on a regular basis, because nobody seems able to make room for the existence of people like me. I kind of expect cis people to have trouble with it, but a lot of trans people have trouble with our existence as well. I’m not trying to be different. I didn’t even discover this on tumblr, or discover it anywhere, I came up with the idea independently on my own to describe something I’d never heard described before.

And to me the worst thing about any ideology, no matter what the ideology is or who it’s supposed to help, is when that ideology starts crushing real human beings under its foot because we somehow clash with part of how the ideology says reality is supposed to work. Lately I’ve seen a lot of genderless people becoming casualties of ideologies that have nothing to do with us, ideologies that have just assumed that people like us don’t or shouldn’t exist. And all most of us want is a society that allows for our existence and lets us exist without forcing various ideas upon us.

It hurts more coming from trans people because for awhile that was my community, that was the people I could talk to about issues that we very much had in common. And now that community is being ripped apart, battle lines are being drawn, and genderless people (as well as other people who don’t quite fit what some trans people want the world to work like) are getting lost in ideology wars that aren’t even our own.

Many of us are afraid to even discuss ourselves, our lives, our experiences. We get forced underground. And then when we behave like people who’ve been forced underground (such as by trying to pass as the gender people expect us to be, by not insisting on certain pronouns, etc.) that’s taken as meaning that we don’t have “real” gender issues and are just playing at this whole thing for any of a variety of presumed reasons that have nothing to do with our actual lives. It’s a vicious cycle – the more we’re forced underground by this kind of rhetoric, the more people can assume we’re not 'serious’. And I’m certain this is happening to trans people who do have genders, but who don’t fit whatever the established mold is in various trans communities. I imagine genderqueer, gender-fluid, and other nonbinary people get the same kind of crap.

As usual, I’m trying to be a little more open about things that get me treated badly, in the hope that it will open doors for other people who are just like me, but afraid to speak out. There are still things I’m reluctant to discuss, but I feel like I should discuss what I can make myself discuss, because these things are real. This is a real part of my life.

What bothers me, is it feels like it shouldn’t be so much a part of my life. Mostly because it’s not something that I am, it’s more something that I'm not. And the only reason that it comes up as if it’s something that I am, is because the rest of the world, cis and trans alike, it is something that they are, it’s something so deeply ingrained in just about everyone’s identity that they can’t even imagine it not being there. And a lot of common trans ideology and politics, because most trans people have a gender, are heavily ingrained with the idea of gender in ways that make it difficult for genderless people to navigate the whole mess. Not that I want to do away with gender, there just has to be ways of thinking that take our existence into account, that don’t automatically leave us out just because nobody has thought of us as a real thing.

And for people like me, being genderless isn’t about politics. Like, it’s not “gender is a bad thing, so I don’t want to have it”. And it’s not about trying to reject a cis identity, like “I don’t notice that I have a gender, because mine matches my society’s expectations so much that I don’t notice it”. I’m sure both of those things happen. And it’s certainly not “I’m trying to be cool or special”, especially given the work many of us put into trying to hide it and ignore it. But for most genderless people, it’s just an aspect of who we are, and it’s one that has a lot of parallels to trans people who have a gender, especially nonbinary trans people. It’s not a choice we made, especially given how many difficulties it creates for us. It pretty much ensures we don’t fit anywhere, and we’re treated like a joke by some of the few people who should get it.

Notes: