9:40pm June 20, 2014

Gender is never going to make sense.

Part of the problem with discussions of gender (especially trans and genderless issues), on tumblr and elsewhere, is that people desperately want gender to make sense. They want to be able to neatly categorize genders. They want to be able to neatly categorize levels of privilege between different genders. This is never, ever going to happen.

Gender is complicated. Because gender is part of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the world. And those stories vary not only from culture to culture, but from person to person. And some people don’t tell ourselves stories about our own gender at all, just to make things more complicated. And the stories we tell ourselves feel as real as the things we experience more directly, because that’s how the human brain works, it works on stories. Different cultures can have vastly different stories about gender, and each person within those cultures has their own unique story about gender that’s specific to them.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. A lot of the human mind runs on stories, a lot of the time.

But we try to pretend it’s different than it is.

We try to pretend that there must be some easy way to classify genders.

We try to pretend that gender isn’t multifaceted, fickle, changing, confusing, and often alarming.

We try to pretend that gender is just this thing that we have independent of all other things. The way we have black hair or blue eyes. Simple. To the point. Uncomplicated. Not tied back to all these other things about ourselves and the way our minds work.

Identity is weird at the best of times, gender is one of the weirdest parts of identity.

I find that my genderlessness makes the most sense to me when I think the least about it. The reason I write about it at all, is to help the next genderless kid who may be reading this, wondering who sie is, wondering if there’s even a word for who sie is, even wondering what ‘sie’ means and looking it up and finding the world of nonbinary pronouns. The other reason I write about it at all, is because most of the trans community gets genderlessness all wrong because it’s outside their experience. They get it as wrong as I would get it if I were to start writing in depth about what it means to be gender-fluid.

There was a time in the trans community when a lot of people spent a lot of time talking to each other about our experiences of gender. We were trying to make sense of ourselves. We were trying to connect with other people like ourselves. We were trying to learn about people different from ourselves.

And sometimes things got messy and upsetting. Sometimes people said things they shouldn’t have said. But instead of jumping all over the person and making them afraid to ever speak of gender again, we talked to them about it, showed them our point of view. And sometimes they agreed with us and sometimes they didn’t. Back then, people knew that reasonable people can disagree without being The Enemy, no matter how much their views may sometimes look like elements of The Enemy.

I wish things were back to that.

Because right now the trans and genderless community is bigger and more multifaceted than ever. We could go so far in exploring with each other what gender and genderlessness means to each of us. Without judging. Without slapping each other down the first time we hear something that makes us feel uncomfortable or threatened. Without mockery. Without trying to shame everyone into repeating a party line that half the people repeating don’t even understand.

There are so many of us and we could learn so much from each other.

But that’s not what people want.

People want to draw boundaries, who is in and who is out. You get words like genderspecial, transtrender, special snowflake, directed at genderless people like me (among others), falling out of the mouths of people who were still kids who’d never heard the word trans, when I was first putting in serious time with the offline trans community. It gets ridiculous when I think of it that way. You get battle lines drawn in the ground, and people fighting to get in, people fighting to keep others out.

People want to be able to mathematically work out how much privilege you have, pretty much. By which I mean, they take statements that are true when taken statistically across a group of people as a whole, and then they try, really badly, to apply those to individual people within the group, without knowing the individual person. This is how I came to find out that because I’m DFAB I’ve never been in danger of my life due to being genderless – serious news to me. It’s of course absolutely true that trans women of color face the worst violence by far of any trans people. And that nobody should forget that. But you can’t apply overall statistics to individual people, and you shouldn’t try.

And what I’ve found is that there are parts of the trans community that do want things that simple. They want to be able to look at a list of your characteristics, and add up how much risk you’ve had, what kind of risk, what privileges you have, what oppressions you have, and you can’t do that. You just can’t do that. You can make overall guesses about populations, but you can’t do that with individual people without making drastic, dangerous, horrible mistakes.

Privilege in the trans community is always going to be complicated. Because it’s not just your gender (or lack thereof) that plays into it. There’s your real gender, your perceived gender, your gender presentation, sometimes the gender you were raised as, the amount of knowledge held by the person observing and interacting with you… you can take two trans people and they can each have privilege over each other in different dimensions at different times. It’s not simple. It’s not mathematical. It’s not easy.

And the thing about gender is it’s all of those things.

It’s never going to make sense.

It’s never going to fit into neat little slots.

We’ll never be able to draw a line between who’s real and who’s not.

Privilege will never be simple and straightforward and one-dimensional.

Whenever we try to stuff certain parts of reality into boxes so nobody will see them, they’ll come poking out the sides and rattling and making noise until nobody can forget them.

And there’s right now a lot of people committed to stopping the rattling and making the boxes stronger and making everyone shut up about things that don’t conform. And that isn’t helping anyone. I wish we could still be exploring our various experiences of gender – gender socialization, gender identity, gender presentation, gender discrimination, transphobia, transmisogyny, genderlessness, all of it. Without that instinct that tells us to jump at someone, claws and teeth out, the moment it seems like they might be doing or saying something that might sound like a threat. Because when you jump at people like that, you can't do that at the same time as having a conversation where everyone is trying to learn about each other with a minimum of judgement. And you can’t learn when you’re in attack mode. And attack mode silences people who are already some of the most vulnerable people in the community. So it harms everyone, helps nobody, pads a lot of egos but what good does that do?