agender thoughts (under the cut)
All right, so, for me at least, the feeling of being agender isn't, "I'm not like other x, therefore, I am not an x." It's the feeling that, girls/boys/women/men can be a wide variety of things, none of them are naturally constrained by artificial norms or stereotypes, so the whole concept of gender, of identifying people as “girls” “boys” “women” “men”, makes no fucking sense, therefore, I reject it. I do not identify as any gender because gender as a concept is pointless and destructive.
The concepts “man,” “woman,” “feminine,” “masculine,” etc. don’t make sense, and I’m not obligated to use them if they don’t make sense to me. And it’s not my job to make sense of them when others are the ones creating and insisting on them. It is their obligation to make their concept make sense, not mine to make sense of a mess they’ve handed me. And they can’t make it make sense. And in any case, if a concept doesn’t feel useful to me, then I’m not obligated to use it. Because in that sense, gender feels like religion: it’s a belief system with no real basis and one I don’t have to believe in when I see how much mental gymnastics it takes to justify it.
That’s not to say that I think just by dis-associating with gender I can fully step out of the gendered world and escape the consequences of gender (same as with religion). It means that I live in a double reality where in my head, gender doesn't exist, and where outside of my head, when I engage in the world, it feels like I'm playing in a weird alternate reality video game that has unnecessary complications that I want to turn off in the settings.
And it doesn't mean I deny the existence of my genitals, it means that I see no reason for there to be an identity built out of them. It doesn't mean that I deny that the world has created a system that categorizes and identifies people by those genitals, as if by saying I don't identify with that identity I can opt out of the consequences created by them (of course I acknowledge that sexism/misogyny/transmisogyny exist and have tangible consequences for people). It again means that I live in a double reality where, in my head, genitals are an inconsequential addition to the list of things I might know about a person, and where outside of my head, I know that people see my body and automatically push an identity on me against my will and react to me according to that identity.
And when I explain to people these things (that I reject the necessity of gender and that I don't consider my genitals an important enough aspect of my being to be the foundation for such basic things as pronouns or titles), I'm not necessarily trying to convert the world to my thinking (though that would certainly be nice, imho). And I don't expect that everyone will immediately be able to adapt to using gender-neutral language for me or remember that I am agender or even respect that I am agender. And it's not like I think I can actually change the world by presenting my case to the people in my sphere. I'm just trying to show that there ARE people like me who have other ideas about gender and sex and identity and just letting people know that someone like that is RIGHT HERE in their community. It's not some distant thing they might hear about tangentially in the news. There is a living, breathing, agender person right in front of them and they HAVE to confront that and think about it, even if just for one minute.
I can't force everyone to make changes that make me feel comfortable and respected, and I'm not trying to be an inconvenience to everyone. Rather, I just want to be a reminder to people that the way they think (or really, don’t think, since they live with gender as unconscious background noise) isn't the way it is for everyone or the way it has to be. Keeping the concept of gender is a choice society makes, and even though I as one person can't change society by my choice to reject the concept of gender and the concept of my biological sex as an IDENTITY (a physical reality, ok, but not a thing I IDENTIFY with), I can at least show that it is a choice, that we as a society could do things differently if enough of us decided to do so.
I know my personal feelings/beliefs don’t exempt me from social structures, it’s not that simple, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have those feelings/beliefs. I can believe that gender is fucking stupid and feel like gender and sex as identities don’t apply to me personally while still recognizing that others fit me into that schema of gender and sex identities and that those schemas exist and have an effect on the world.
I can have an ideal vision of a genderless world while still recognizing the current struggles that gender creates and the need for tangible solutions in the present context(s).
And I can wish that people would show me the easy, simple courtesy of using gender-neutral language toward me because it’s an easy, simple way to make me feel comfortable, while still recognizing that that alone is not going to dismantle the concept of gender in the world or even in my own small sphere.
But living in this shithole world is hard and frustrating, and if I can have a handful of people who are willing to recognize my preferences and work against their learned inclinations to automatically gender people, then why wouldn’t I encourage them to do so, even if it is a small thing that might not have any far-reaching effect beyond my individual relief? Why should it be a bad thing to take the small comforts and victories that I can get? I can want those small comforts while still advocating for wider social changes. These are not mutually exclusive. And while I personally think the world would be better off without gender, I can still acknowledge that, realistically, we are going to live with it probably forever and, therefore, that fights for gender equality/equity/justice are worth having.
It’s like how I can be an anti-capitalist anarchist and believe that capitalism is stupid and destructive and that we would be better off abolishing it completely, while still recognizing that I live in a capitalist society and believing that within a capitalist society it’s not wrong to fight for achievable tangible goals like getting a livable minimum wage. That doesn’t mean that I actually accept capitalism as a justifiable system, rather it means I understand there is a difference between reality and the ideal, and I’m not going to not identify as an anti-capitalist anarchist just because we haven’t reached a non-capitalist society built on anarchism. I can see the value in fighting for sex/gender justice within a gendered society while still believing that everything would be better if we just abolished sex and gender as identity constructs.
