12:00pm July 16, 2014

What bothers me about that response I got?

It’s not so much that the person has a particular definition of what gender is and what it means and where it comes from.

It’s that they insist that this is and should be the only definition of the word, and that all other definitions of the word are nonsense and should be totally discarded.

I don’t mind the word ‘gender’ meaning different things to different people.  I don’t mind that there are people who use it to mean, entirely something that is socially imposed and that nobody can escape.

But I do mind that any such person would then say, “You can’t use gender to mean a particular identity-based experience that you don’t happen to have.  Therefore you can’t call yourself genderless.  Because your definition of gender doesn’t count for anything even though thousands of people use gender to mean exactly that every single day.”

Words have more than one meaning.  Gender can refer to a lot of things.  One thing it refers to is an internal sense of identity that’s connected to a lot of social things and is notoriously hard to define.

The vast majority of people experience gender as a part of their identity.  This is true no matter where it comes from – whether it’s social, whether it’s a story people tell themselves in their heads, whether it’s something biological, whether it’s some combination of the above.  Cis people experience their gender as the one they were raised in.  Trans people experience a gender other than the one they were raised in – or don’t experience one at all.  And those of us who don’t experience gender as part of our personal identity call ourselves genderless, or agender, or nongendered, or neutrois, and probably some other words I haven’t heard yet.

And we have an absolute right to have a word for not experiencing an identity that practically everyone (whether cis or trans) experiences.  And to use the word gender in this way.  Regardless of anyone else’s usage of the word gender.  Regardless of anyone else’s ideas about where gender comes from and what it does.  There is still an experience of gender that we completely lack, and we have every right to make up words and concepts to describe this lack of an almost-universal human experience.

And I have to agree with clatterbane when they said, of people who want to take away other similar concepts, it takes a lot of gall to try and take away people’s ability to describe important things about their identity and their experience of the world.  It takes a lot of gall and it takes being insensitive and cruel, and possibly too focused on your ideology to notice that there are real human beings in front of you with real human feelings that are getting stepped all over when you tell us we can’t have words to describe our experiences.  The world really is big enough for us to have multiple meanings for words and multiple opinions on things without anyone having to deny someone else’s identity or right to self-describe that identity.

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