3:25pm May 9, 2014

➸ Some more personal history wrt genderlessness and the trans community.

youneedacat:

As usual — my terminology is sometimes outdated because my trans-related language was cemented in my brain over ten years ago.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…

Thank you so much for writing this.

I don’t remember my earliest thoughts about gender. But I remember running across a blurb promoting ‘As Nature Made Him’ in Science News when I was maybe ten, and getting stuck on it, and seriously wondering if something similar had happened to me. So I was definitely aware even then that ‘girl’ didn’t quite fit. I think I was aware that ‘boy’ didn’t either, but I’m less certain there.

I didn’t find words like ‘nonbinary’ and ‘genderless’ until a few years later (but still pre-Tumblr!). It took me a couple years after that to feel comfortable using them for myself. Now, I only rarely use them. Almost never in public.

I tend to avoid LGBTQ spaces now, as well as most situations where preferred pronouns are asked for. I do have preferred pronouns, but I’ll usually verbally say I have no preference. (While this is supposedly okay for trans people to say, I have no clue how people who make these judgments decide who counts as trans.) Because I’ve learned that if I have a preference, all my opinions of people are supposed to be dependent on whether they use the pronoun I prefer. I certainly can’t have close friends who use ‘she’ and ‘her’ to refer to me.

I can’t stick to those social expectations. Part of what being genderless means for me is that there are things I care a lot more about than what pronouns I’m called. I have a hard enough time making close friends to begin with. I have no interest in ending relationships because of pronouns. I’m also not someone who insists on pronouns. I pick up on every little bit of tension and discomfort, and if I get the slightest notion I’m inconveniencing someone, I start obsessing over that. And that feels far, far worse than being misgendered ever does.

I’ve spent the past couple years going in loops in my head because “Oh god I let A call me ‘she’, I have to call myself a woman now, but that’s not me, but that’s not allowed.”

And for me, this all intersects a lot with disability and perception of competence and adulthood too. Professionally, I already feel like I have too many disabilities to be allowed. Having an atypical gender is definitely exceeding the capacity of my difference slot. Also, my health stuff makes me look much younger than I actually am. I’m 22 and regularly read as 15. Playing to gender expectations helps counteract that a bit, so I’ve started wearing more feminine-coded clothing in professional settings. In contrast, when I dress androgynously, I tend to get read as very young. I care a lot more about being perceived as competent than I do about being perceived as any particular gender.

It’s all about priorities, pretty much. I prioritize gender lower than a lot of other things. And that seems to not be okay. Makes me terrified to discuss it at all. It doesn’t seem that implausible that someone whose opinion on gender is “why do I have to?” would regard it as something not worth making a bit deal over. But for all its plausibility, it doesn’t seem like a view that fits within the narrow limits of acceptability in a lot of Tumblr conversations about gender.

I think I remember the first time I thought about gender. It wasn’t something I thought about in words. But it was something like, I was seven years old, I’d worked out what boys and girls were, and I’d sort of worked out that I didn’t fit either way, and this puzzled me. And I remember thinking about it many times and never reaching a satisfactory conclusion.

Another thing that sets me apart, though, from standard conversations about gender, is that I feel like being raised female has meaning to me. Like there are times when I don’t mind being included in ‘female’, because I’m included in 'people who are societally considered female’ and that’s had a giant impact on my life. That doesn’t mean that I believe the only way to be female is to be raised female, or that how you were raised makes you what gender you are. But with extremely black and white thinking that goes on around this, I get almost afraid to say it lest someone assume that I actually think that what gender you’re raised as, is the same as what gender you are. So there are times when I don’t mind being included in 'female’ or 'women’, and other times when I can’t stand being included in such, and I can’t explain the difference.

I’m also really afraid to talk about preferred pronouns, but I don’t know why that is. Maybe it’s because I feel like if I say I prefer certain pronouns, people will assume those pronouns mean a particular gender I prefer, even though they don’t. Maybe it’s because I’m afraid that if I say I prefer particular pronouns, people will become so afraid to use any other pronouns that it will create problems for anyone who doesn’t use the pronouns I prefer. I usually say I have no preference also, because it’s easier, but it’s not true. I guess I’m also afraid (since the pronouns aren’t 'male’ or 'female’ pronouns) that people will see me using those pronouns and think it means I’m trying to stand out or be special. When it’s more like they just feel better, and I still remember the first time someone spontaneously used them on me in a conversation and it felt right. (It’s ze/zer/zem, or sometimes sie/hir.)

I also guess I feel like using these pronouns would out me in a huge way and, like you, I feel like I have so many things going against me already. Not that I don’t get crap all the time about gender in public, without people even knowing what my preferences are, but it’s still frightening, especially given that I already have bullies trying to tell everyone I think I’m special.

Notes: