Theme
5:28am August 21, 2014
musictomylove asked: Hello! Its me. So how did you know you were genderless?

Okay so…

When I was a little kid, maybe seven years old, I began to pick up on gender in others.  That’s kind of late but I had some developmental delays so it’s not that late.  Anyway, that’s when I first noticed that girls seemed to be one thing (or rather one collection of things), and boys seemed to be another collection of things, but that I didn’t fit into either category, and neither did some other people I noticed.  I was supposed to be a girl though so I went along with that for a long time.

I did develop questions about how my body should work.  Basically, there were parts of my body changing in ways that I wasn’t expecting, the same with puberty anywhere.  And there were parts of my body that I knew “should be” a certain way, but weren’t, and I later learned those were supposedly “boy’s” attributes.  Anyway I don’t like to get into detail about my body dysphoria, but it included both primary and secondary sex characteristics, including breasts and body hair and voice depth and a lot of other things.  

In my early twenties, I discovered the trans community.  But it was just, as we called people back then, FTM and MTF people.  Not a lot of genderqueer or nonbinary people, certainly nobody without a gender.  So I started attending a group for FTM people, as well as a more general trans group.  And I fit in pretty well in many ways, and I didn’t fit in at all in others.  I went back and forth on the desire to transition, but after a lot of soul-searching, something just didn’t seem right.  They were very supportive about any decision I wanted to make.  At that time, my two choices were the FTM community or the lesbian community, and I sort of chose the lesbian community even though I had trouble fitting in there as well, for reasons unrelated to gender.

Over the years, I kept thinking about what I was with regards to gender.  And I eventually realized that nearly everyone I met, they had a gender identity.  Whether they were cis or trans, they had a gender identity.  And that was what I lacked.  I lacked any gender identity at all, whatsoever.  And it was like a weight lifted from my shoulders.

At the time, I thought cis meant that you were the gender you were raised as, and trans meant you had a gender different than you were raised as, but I thought trans still meant you had a gender.  So when I coined the term “nongendered” it was set up against “cisgendered” and “transgendered”, as this nether-category that was neither trans nor cis.  Now I realize that most people consider genderless a part of trans, because it’s not cis.  And that’s fine with me. I think it’s up to each genderless person how much they identify with being trans, and why.  I feel kind of in between, like I feel part of the broader trans umbrella, but I don’t see a lot of trans people reaching out to include me unless they’ve already known a lot of genderless/agender/neutrois/etc. people.  And I think genderless people — people who truly have no gender identity — confuse gendered people, whether the gendered people are trans or cis.  

So there’s a lot of debate about whether we do exist, whether we should exist, whether we’re just saying we don’t want a gender role, to what extent our body dysphoria should affect whether we are accepted, etc.  All I can say is that for myself… genderless just means that unlike people with a gender identity, I don’t have a gender identity.  It doesn’t mean I don’t live with the genders imposed on me by others, which can be male or female depending on the day and on which part of my body they look at.  (I have boobs and facial hair.  I have been approached by strangers and screamed at about being gender-ambiguous.  It’s weird.  And scary, because you never know when someone’s anger will turn to violence.  One time I was in a place where people with authority were supposed to be maintaining some kind of order, and they just stood there while someone, with escalating tension and anger in her voice, demanded to know if I was “a boy or a girl”.  I had to leave before she would stop.  And I didn’t know the answer to the question anyway.)

Anyway, not having a gender identity… I don’t know what it’s like to have one.  I just know that all cis people and most trans people have one.  I know that gender is a deep and important part of their identity.  I don’t want to disrespect that in any way.  I just lack that part of my identity.  I searched for it for years, thinking if I didn’t have a woman’s identity maybe I had a man’s, but that was not forthcoming either.  Neither were any third, fourth, fifth categories.  Just nothing, a great big gap where gender identity ought to be.

Other genderless people have a slightly different experience.  They do have a gender identity.  It’s just one that’s somewhat androgynous, or otherwise off the beaten path.  Or some have a gender identity but it’s extremely weak.  And some are gender-fluid, so that they sometimes have a gender identity and sometimes they don’t.  As for me, I simply lack every bit of gender identity.  I do have body dysphoria, and I’m not sure how it ties in with genderlessness or whether it’s just coincidental.  I know that it’s not the exact kind of body dysphoria you’d experience as a trans man, but it does have a lot of similarities to that.  And that’s all I can say, because that’s one part of all this that I feel like it’s private.  Not something I want the whole world hearing about.

Anyway, I’m not someone who believes that genderlessness has to mean having an androgynous “gender presentation”.  I feel like what I do, and what clothes I wear, have nothing to do with gender at all.  I have a few different aesthetics.  One is one my friend calls “hippie/old lady”, with long skirts and floral prints and stuff, and often gets me read as female or feminine.  Another one is characterized by “dad shirts”.  My father is dying and I’ve been trying to stay more connected to him by dressing like him, which mostly involves wearing a specific kind of shirt he likes, suspenders, and a hat.  People see that as more masculine and I’ve been mistaken for a man in that kind of clothes.  Then there’s some clothing styles I’d love to wear but don’t have the money — mostly steampunk stuff, both Victorian men’s suits specifically tailored to my body size and favorite colors (middle and upper class stuff), and also more the sort of thing you’d see on someone tinkering with their airship, lots of leather and tool holsters and stuff.  At any rate, any aesthetic that I happen to like, I like it for what it is, not because of gender.  And so I can confuse people a lot, because people equate clothing with gender and gender with personality, so they think my personality is changing radically with a change of clothes, and that’s not how it works.  I do like mixing elements of “male” and “female” clothing together, too, though.  Especially since I don’t automatically read some clothing as male and others as female.  People have told me I’m good at taking clothes that don’t look like they should work together, and making them work.

I see a lot of photos in the agender tag of people trying to look as androgynous as they possibly can.  And that’s fine if androgyny is your preferred appearance, or your goal.  But for me, it isn’t.  I don’t mind looking androgynous sometimes, but it’s not my goal in terms of my appearance.  I suspect if I could get all the body modifications that would match my body to the way I feel it should look, though, I would end up looking more androgynous.  For instance, I would prefer not having any breasts (nor a sculpted “male” chest pattern, I just want nothing there), and would prefer having more facial hair than I can currently grow.  And I would definitely look more androgynous if those two things came to pass.  But my goal isn’t androgyny for its own sake.  

But for many genderless people, genderlessness and androgyny go hand in hand, and that’s fine if you’re them.  I guess, to me, you can be genderless and look androgynous, you can be genderless and look very female, and you can be genderless and look very male, and any combination of these things or anything in between — and none of them change the fact that you’re genderless.  Because to me genderlessness is about lacking an internal gender identity.  It doesn’t place any restrictions at all on what I wear.  Although I was afraid for a long time to wear anything remotely “feminine” because I was afraid people would question whether my genderlessness was “real” if I was a DFAB person wearing “feminine” looking clothing.  I’ve gotten to the point now where I barely give a crap.  And that’s as it should be.

I do wish that I could go out in public, dressed however I want to, without anyone drawing the slightest conclusion about my gender from what I wear.  That’s not a realistic wish, but I do wish it sometimes.  It kind of clashes with the needs of people who very much do need to signal gender through their clothing, and I’ve never found a good solution that works for everyone.  Other than taking people on a case-by-case basis instead of imposing rigid rules from without, to everyone.

So anyway, finding out I was genderless was a really long process, but when it really hit me was when I realized the fundamental disconnect that had been confusing me all those years — everyone else, almost everyone else, had this part of their identity that they called gender.  I didn’t have that part of my identity.

I’m also aware that there are many definitions of gender.  Some people have told me that it’s not possible to be genderless because gender is something imposed on you by your society.  I actually agree with them, but only from within their definition of gender.  There are many definitions of gender.  If you see gender as something imposed on you from outside, nobody’s going to be genderless, they’ll all be male or female (or more genders, if their society happens to have them, which some do), and it won’t be their choice which one they are.  But gender identity is also a real thing, regardless of what else you believe about gender.  It doesn’t matter where gender identity comes from — outside, inside, some combination of both — what matters is that most people have gender identity.   But a few people lack this internal gender identity and we call ourselves genderless.  (Or agender, or nongendered, or neutrois, or probably other words I haven’t heard yet.  My preference is for genderless because it sounds more like a natural word than the rest, which feel like they’ve been cobbled together out of parts, and neutrois doesn’t even sound English, most people can’t pronounce it.)

I hope that answers your question, and gives you some additional information along the way.  Every genderless person is different.  You’re going to find people who have always known.  People who went through a lot of other identities before realize what was up.  People who didn’t used to be genderless and are now.  People who used to be genderless and aren’t anymore.  There’s as many possibilities as there are people.  And different people use the word genderless in different ways.

I’d say be careful of anyone who insists that there’s only one way to be ‘truly’ genderless.  There are people like that out there, who think that you need body dysphoria, or that you need one particular kind of body dysphoria, or things like that.  But to me, genderlessness isn’t about my body, even if I do have body dysphoria. Genderlessness is about the fact that most people have a gender identity and I don’t.  Everything else about it is just details that vary a lot.  And not having a gender identity doesn’t restrict me to any particular way of dressing or appearing or wearing my hair.  It just means that I don’t have this part of my identity that most people have.  But for other people, their definitions are going to be different, and that’s as it should be.  The short answer of “how I knew” is that at some point I realized everyone else had this piece to their identity, and that I didn’t have that piece, and it was really that simple.  And that complicated.