Feel free to ignore this if it's too personal, but I saw your post on the arogender flag and your tags saying that you relate to that label, and I was wondering if you could elaborate? How does being aroace interact with your gender identity?
(For anyone curious, the post mentioned can be found here)The single most concrete example I can think of about how being aroace affected my gender is that 15yo me deliberately switched from feminine clothes to wearing “neutral” clothes, citing that feminine clothes were generally more tight/revealing and I didn’t want to feel sexualized. In hindsight, I realize that a lot of this probably had to do with me not feeling like a girl and that hidden in my discomfort with “being sexualized” was also the dysphoria I felt. In this way, my aroace identity kinda obscured my agender identity, but simultaneously it allowed me to explore my gender expression, by adopting a generally queer aesthetic and cutting my hair short because I “didn’t want to look straight”. I am Aromantic, Asexual, and Agender, which puts me in an interesting position where my identity is primarily defined by what I’m not, rather than by what I am. It can be difficult to realize what you don’t feel and even harder to define it, which for me was especially the case with my gender. Gender is rather ambiguously defined, perhaps because it differs a little for everyone. However, I think a lot of masculinity and femininity is expressed through how people experience their attractions, or at least it was a lot more difficult for me to find explanations of what gender felt like because many were dependent on romance and such. So while being aroace made me accustomed to examining my identity and whether or not I felt something, it also made it much more difficult to understand gender enough to determine whether or not I feel it.I really like the term arogender because if I had seen it 2-3 years ago, I would’ve been able to confidently identify with it rather than continuing to procrastinate the whole gender thing. I’d been considering agender for years but was never sure because definitions are so confusing (and it was only the recent realization that answering “She/Her” as my preferred pronouns felt like a lie which had me finally identifying confidently as agender). So basically I identify as agender for simplicity because it is accurate, but I very much consider arogender to be a more precise term for my gender and thus I use it as a modifier to describe the way I experience being agender.
