11:59am June 20, 2014

I have a question. About genders.

People who are agender. Isn’t that the same as being pangender? I mean, can you actually be no gender? How does that work?
And I’ve heard of secondary genders. What is included in those? Things like Trans?
I mean no disrespect, I’m just genuinely curious. Thank you!

Pangender is being all genders.

Agender is not having a gender. (Usually. Sometimes it’s something else that I don’t understand well.)

So they’re kind of opposites.

I don’t understand pangender well, not having known anyone who identifies that way. But I’m genderless (agender) and it’s literally not having a gender identity. I don’t know “how does that work?” In fact what I don’t understand is how it works, to have a gender identity in the first place. I tried very hard for a lot of my life to find my gender identity, and it just doesn’t exist – tried being female, tried being male, tried being ‘other’, until all I could say in the end was that there was nothing there.

That doesn’t mean I don’t do things that other people decide are masculine or feminine or androgynous or whatever. It just means that unlike other people, those things are not expressions of a gender identity, they’re just things I do, or ways I look, or aesthetic preferences, or whatever.