#questioning agender

[agender-culture-is]

agender culture is wearing lots of piercings to become more with yourself

[questioning-culture-is]

Questioning culture is being unsure if you really feel like your agab if you were just socialized to do so. But at the same time feeling enough like it to not fully consider yourself agender.

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[raavenb2619]

Hi. Recently I’ve been questioning my gender.I never really realised that most people feel their gender innately. I’ve never felt like a male and so presumed I was female but If I don’t think I’ve ever really felt female either. I just feel like me. I don’t mind she/her pronouns but I’ve been thinking I might like they/them.I’m worried I’m just overthinking it because I don’t feel the need to present androgynous my appearance doesn’t bother me much.How do I know im not just overthinking and cis?

I can’t tell you if you’re cis or not, because the only person who can determine that is you. That said, I can tell you that most cis people don’t question their gender at all or worry about overthinking gender. As far as I can tell, most cis people have a confident, internal sense and understanding of their gender. My #cisgender-experiences tag has some submissions from cis people talking about gender, and if that doesn’t line up with your experiences, that might be because you might not be cis. In particular, if you don’t feel gender at all, that might be a sign that you’re agender. 

I’ll also say that gender presentation and transition are personal, and there isn’t a set way you have to transition or present yourself be a certain gender. For example, some nonbinary people want to present androgynously, while other nonbinary people prefer to present more in line with expectations of male or female gender presentation, and still other nonbinary don’t really care how other people see them. (The same sort of variation is also true for nonbinary people and the pronouns they use.)

Hope that helps, as always feel free to ask for clarification/any follow up questions. 

[agender-culture-is]

Questioning agender culture is wondering how much of your current gender identity and presentation is an act enforced by your family telling you to “man up” when you cried as a child and not wanting to come out to anyone even if you figure out you are because you’re afraid of the same response again.

Sorry for venting

[questioning-culture-is]

Questioning agender culture is wondering if you're even agender in the first place if you dont mind using gendered pronouns and names for legal and in passing stuff

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[questioning-culture-is]

questioning culture is wanting to identify as agender because you connected to it when you first heard about it, but knowing that the definition doesn’t fit you as well as some other micro labels.

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[raavenb2619]

I've never really cared about my gender, so I've always just used my birth gender, but how does a cis person FEEL their gender?

You can read through my #cisgender-experiences tag to draw your own conclusions, but it seems to me that cis people very strongly know/feel their gender as an innate, inherent, intrinsic, internal part of themselves. If that doesn’t seem like you, or you find yourself not relating to many cisgender experiences, that can be a sign that you’re not cis. 

[raavenb2619]

Wow, those asks about gender made me wander what “gender” even is. I never really “felt” like anything. I have a female body and was told I’m female so I kinda just rolled with it? For me it’s the same thing as being told I’m human and having a human body so I’m like ok I’m human. Like, that’s how I was born, and my actions, thoughts and lifestyle probably won’t change much if I was the other gender.

What is gender? Gender is...weird. You know that thing about “what if when I see blue you see green”? That’s an example of what philosophers call “qualia”, which is basically an immediate sensory experience. I can describe the colors of a sunset or a rainbow, and I can think we’re in agreement because we agree that the top of the rainbow uses the same colors as a sunset, but I can’t ever know for certain that your qualia is the same as mine. I can talk about blue, but there’s nothing I can do to send my direct experience of what it is that I see when I see blue, and know that you’re receiving it and experiencing it exactly as I intend. 

I haven’t seen that much writing about this, but I think gender is basically just another example of qualia. It’s this internal experience that most people have, and, if you’re not agender, you kind of just...feel it. Different people have different internal qualia, which accounts for different gender identities, and some people might experience multiple qualia at once, or the qualia they feel might change over time, or their qualia might change in intensity, or it might be defined completely outside of “man” and “woman”, or something else entirely. The cool thing is that, for the most part, we can actually communicate about these differences in qualia and find people that feel the same or different from us. 

So if you’ve never really “felt” gender as an intrinsic, internal experience, you might find it helpful to read up on the experiences of agender people (or people questioning if they’re agender).