as small as a world and as large as alone, ozymandias271: youneedacat: ...

5:15pm June 18, 2014

youneedacat:

unculturedlittleshit:

Can someone explain the difference between agender, genderless, and nongender? Whenever I attempt to google, it just takes me to stuff about the difference between sex and gender.

All three can mean the same thing. They can also mean different things. And each one can mean different things to different people. I think that’s where the confusion comes in.

The two biggest things that any of these words is likely to mean is:

* Totally lacking in having a gender at all. Not male. Not female. Not in between. Not some other gender. No gender at all.

* Having a specific gender, like a ‘neuter’ gender, but still definitely a gender.

I don’t quite understand the second one, but there are people who say they’re agender or neutrois and that for them it “definitely is a gender” so I’m just going by what they say. I don’t have that experience so I can’t understand it any better than I can understand having any other gender.

Also, some people use ‘neutrois’ to mean more specifically, people who are genderless or neuter-gendered who have strong body dysphoria and want to have their body changed to match a gender-neutral appearance in some way.

For some reason, I find it really hard to identify as neutrois despite being genderless (without any gender at all) and having body dysphoria. I don’t know what’s up with that. So a lot of which term people choose, comes down to personal comfort.

I’m comfortable with genderless and nongendered, less comfortable with agender just because it feels awkward, not very comfortable at all with neutrois. And each genderless person is going to have a different comfort level with different words.

One reason there’s so many words is because different people have come up with them over and over again. Like I came up with nongendered and I thought I was the only person using that word, but I likely wasn’t. Other people come up with genderless on their own, but lots of different people independently discovering it. Same with agender. I imagine that neutrois was coined by one specific person and spread to other people, because it’s not the sort of word that just pops into your head. So that’s why there’s so many words.

And the reason there’s two main meanings, is the same thing — the people who come up with or apply these words to ourselves, have somewhat different experiences from each other. The main difference is that some of us feel like we have no gender at all, and some of us feel like we have a gender, but it’s outside all the other genders, kind of a neuter gender. And we use the same words to describe both experiences because nobody exactly owns a copyright on language. Which is probably as it should be, but it can be confusing to people.

I’ve also seen people identify as agender whom I would call more cis by default: “I don’t feel strongly connected to my gender identity but *shrug* I don’t have any particular objections to it either.”

I feel like that is liable to cause a ton of confusion with “I do not have a gender and I am upset by everyone insisting that I have one” as well as with “my gender is neuter.”

I am also super-confused by all these words because my gender is really… embodied and social? I don’t know how to translate “I don’t want sexual characteristics and I want everyone to be aware I am neither a boy nor a girl” into, like, “neuter gender” or “both genders” or anything. I’m somewhere under the nonbinary umbrella clearly but none of these words make any sense.

I can only really explain my own experience of genderlessness, not anyone else’s.

I remember being about seven or eight years old when I started getting a concept of gender in other people. Boys had a certain smell, a certain texture, and a certain synesthetic feel. Girls had a certain smell, a certain texture, and a certain synesthetic feel. And – it sometimes caused me a great deal of agony, other times merely puzzlement – I didn’t fit into either, and this confused me.

My expectations of puberty were all wrong. I don’t want to go into great detail here because the exact nature of my body dysphoria is something I try to keep private for some reason. But I definitely have it. And it’s… not exactly tied to normal expectations of ‘male’ or 'female’.

Other kids seemed to pick up on something. I remember being called 'she-male’ in high school and people asking about whether I had a penis. And this was while wearing clothing that would normally be considered fairly feminine. I don’t know what exactly they were picking up on.

As I got older and encountered the trans community, I wondered if I was FTM (that’s what we called it back then). I spent a long time exploring the issue, and eventually decided it was just as wrong as being presumed female. We didn’t really know anyone who was nonbinary, everyone was FTM or MTF in the language of the time. I thought my only options were the FTM community or the lesbian community, and for then I chose the lesbian community, although I honestly wasn’t very well-connected to it due to the ableism I found there. (For some reason the trans community had been far more accepting of disability.)

Over the years, I became more and more dissatisfied with the idea that I had to be either female or male. That these were my choices. I’d heard of genderqueer but for some reason that didn’t seem to fit either – everyone I knew who was genderqueer had a gender, it just wasn’t a binary gender. I looked and looked and I couldn’t find this thing called a gender, something that all cis people had and most trans people had. And that’s when I started calling myself nongendered.

One thing that confuses people about some nongendered people is that we seem to have what would be called a 'gender presentation’ – we may look, dress, or act like a certain gender some of the time. And people assume that means we have a 'gender identity’ underneath it and that we’re just being stubborn or obstinate when we insist that we don’t. It can also greatly confuse people when we do what we think is a simple change in clothing or hairstyle, and suddenly everyone thinks our 'gender presentation’ has dramatically changed, and therefore our gender and our personality as well. There was a time when people called me 'butch’ all the time and thought I was very 'masculine’, and right now people seem to think I look relatively 'feminine’, but none of this is about gender identity for me, like it literally has nothing to do with anything other than aesthetics. I know of other genderless people who’ve gotten crap for this – both from trans and cis people.

I would be happiest with a gender neutral name, and in fact I go by one now. But my legal name is female, and that bothers me, but I was persuaded that my life would be in danger with a gender-neutral name given my appearance, my disabilities, and my past encounters with the medical system. This was a huge sacrifice, it was not made with no reason, and it’s upsetting to me when people act like there’s no danger there. There is absolutely danger there, I have run into it before , and my friend was right when she persuaded me that one little thing like a gender-neutral name could tip the scales towards death in certain situations. She’s seen it happen even without that, in medical settings, including with stuff related to my appearance and (lack of) gender, and people’s prejudice, and life-threatening reactions. Anyone who treats me as someone whose life is not in danger (usually people who’ve never met me and are making assumptions based on group membership), hasn’t seen the situations I’ve been in. I’m in especial danger as the combination of an ambiguously-gendered “[r-word]” in the eyes of medical staff, that combination throws me into a very devalued category that either one alone wouldn’t account for.

I get people asking about my gender a lot. People at the hospital ask whether the “F” on my wristband is “real”. (Uh, yes and no? How do you answer that?) They see I have boobs, but they see I have facial hair, and they see my body type, and they see the way I move and interact, and it all throws them off, as far as what I’ve been told. For most of my adult life I’ve gotten this reaction, sometimes from extremely hostile strangers. Some of it before I even consciously identified as gender-variant in any way.

But for me, genderlessness is like… there’s this thing everyone else seems to have, and I’m missing it, and I can’t imagine what it’s like to have it. My mother tried to explain what it’s like to feel feminine, and it was heartbreaking. Because to her, feeling feminine is a connection she very much wants to have with me, and we’ll never have it. She told me that wearing a particular bracelet is a way of feeling feminine. I almost cried, because I’d worn the particular bracelet to honor the fact that she’d given it to me. It was a pretty bracelet, but it didn’t make me feel a gender I don’t have. I’ve had similar conversations with people who assumed a shared masculinity that I didn’t have. I don’t know what it is to feel masculine, I don’t know what it is to feel feminine, I don’t know what it is to feel both, I don’t know what it is to feel something in between, and I don’t know what it is to feel something different. These are traits I can sometimes see in others, but I have no sense of them in myself, at all. Sometimes I’ve tried really hard to create them in myself, and it felt like I was putting on an act, whether I tried to be male, or tried to be female. I just feel like me, and me doesn’t have a gender.

My body does have a particular type it would like to be, but I don’t like to disclose details about that. I don’t know if it has anything to do with my genderlessness or if it’s separate. It’s extremely specific, though, in several different areas of the body. Some of which I didn’t actually understand what they were until I saw how other people’s bodies worked and made the connection. Sometimes this is a source of extreme pain for me, and other times it’s more bearable. I know it will never happen for me, though, because our society and gatekeepers don’t believe in people like me yet, and won’t for some time. Honestly for now I’d just love the ability to have an X (rather than M or F) on my DMV ID and other ID cards, but even that isn’t going to happen, likely.

I don’t know if this is more information than you wanted, but hopefully it’s a little information about one way to be genderless. I’m sure there’s as many ways to be genderless as there are genderless people. But I know that I’ve felt something was off, even if I had no name for it (as honestly I had no name for most things, back then) from the moment (at a later age than usual) that I was able to even pick up on gender in others. It made me realize that most people had something I didn’t. (And I did notice other people who didn’t fit, but most of them were people who had genders, their genders were just different to some degree than their assigned genders. I didn’t see a lot of people like me, who just didn’t fit at all.)

I’ve noticed that genderless people can have this weird tendency to totally stick out in some contexts, like stick out so badly that everyone notices something is different, and in other contexts to blend in so far that nobody can tell there’s a difference at all unless they’re really perceptive, and I’m not sure what’s up with that.

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