Theme
9:53pm September 22, 2014
Anonymous asked: what gender are you or sex?

I don’t have a gender.  Some people call that agender, or nongendered, or neutrois.  I just call it genderless.  For me, it means that while most of the world has something called a “gender identity”, I lack one.  I don’t care where gender identity comes from – whether it’s hardwired, or socialization, or whatever else.  I just know that most people identify strongly with a gender, even an unusual gender, but that I don’t identify with any gender at all whatsoever.  I came up with this awhile back, before I even knew it was a thing that had names other people gave it, or communities of people, etc.  I first noticed when I was about seven, but it took until my late twenties to understand it, going through several attempts at defining my gender along the way that never worked out because I never had a gender to define.

As for sex… when I was in the trans community years ago, we differentiated gender from sex.  Gender was who you were inside, and sex was biological.  So I would have said I’m “bio-female” or “biologically female”.  These days, that has fallen out of favor in favor of clunky terms like FAAB (“female assigned at birth”), AFAB (“assigned female at birth”), etc.  I understand why it’s fallen out of favor, but it’s a lot of work for someone like me to catch up with.  So if you’re asking about what I was raised as, I was raised female and to my knowledge have all the standard parts that are normally considered female.  (Although obviously there are men and genderqueers who also are born with those parts, which is one reason calling them “female” has been seen as a bad thing these days.)

That may be more than you ever wanted to know, but answers to questions about gender are rarely simple when you’re genderless.  Cis people don’t understand, but most trans people have genders too, and likewise don’t understand.  Or even belittle us for it.  All I know is I have no choice in the mater, I literally have no gender identity.  And I also have both body and social dysphoria.

If you’re able to do so, I use sie/hir pronouns.  If you’re not, xe/xyr/xem and ze/zer/zem are okay.  If you’re not able to do that, singular them is okay.  If you’re not able to do that, then anything goes.  I don’t want to make people feel bad whose language difficulties make it hard for them to do nonstandard pronouns.  If I hadn’t been exposed to sie/hir from a young age, and xe and ze from late adolescence, I wouldn’t be able to use it either.  (I have serious trouble with Spivak pronouns, because I didn’t see them until my twenties.)  So I know that pronoun trouble is real, especially for autistic people, and not just an excuse people make up.  So totally disregard anything I’ve said about pronouns if it ends up being too much trouble for you.

Also, the misgendering that hurts me the most is the misgendering that comes from within the trans community.  That is, people who assume I’m cis (misgendering – anything giving me a gender of any kind is misendering and all cis people have a gender by definition) because I don’t automatically condemn people who get pronouns wrong.  Or people who try to shove me into genders I don’t belong in because it fits their political views better than to acknowledge genderless people exist.  That stuff hurts more than someone missing a pronoun could ever hurt me.  I know how much getting the wrong pronoun can hurt, but it always hurts me worse when a community that’s supposed to be my community, deliberately assigns me genders (of any kind), thereby misgendering me.

Again, this may be more than you ever needed to know, but it’s late and I’m rambling.

Notes:
  1. withasmoothroundstone posted this