as small as a world and as large as alone

6:13pm June 18, 2014

socialjusticefeline:

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.

For what it’s worth I go by both agender and genderless. To me, they’re the same thing. I know for others, agender is more of a neutrois thing, but for me, it’s just…a complete and total detachment from any sort of gender identity. A lot of it has to do with my complete lack of understanding of gender. I identified as female up until I was 19 and until then I wasn’t aware that I could be something else.

A lot of my identity breakthroughs happen like that: I identify as something with quite a bit of detachment from it until I learn that my options aren’t limited. With gender, I spent months and months questioning what gender was, if it was something I felt, and ultimately, I learned that I had no clue and that gender wasn’t something I experienced (and the key thing to note is that I didn’t experience gender, but the gender people I assume I am has a very LARGE impact on my experiences).

That’s my experience with the concepts of genderlessness and agender; I don’t really separate them.

Yeah, it’s interesting how some of us like certain words more than others.  For me, I prefer genderless because it feels like it flows the best as a word, then nongendered because I made it up, and agender feels a little like.. one of those words that makes it a little hard for my brain to wrap itself around it, although not fatally so.  So that’s the order I prefer it in.  I don’t do neutrois because it makes my brain go !?! and it may be different from me.  (Although it is used for genderlessness + body dysphoria, which I definitely have.  But it just feels like a community thing, and a community thing I don’t know enough about that I’m wary of claiming it when I’m not part of it.  And I’d be wary of going into that community and talking to people, because I’m very private about my body dysphoria.)

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