cosmolinguist | [163/365] Agender

I wanted to share all the things that really resonated with me from an article I read yesterday, but I realized it makes more sense if I first talk about something I alluded to a few weeks ago: my gender.

I distinctly remember waiting for a bus home from uni in early February, and reading a Mastodon friend making a joke that talked about gender like it was alcohol:

[at a doctor's office visit]

"And how many genders would you say you have in a week?"

I quickly typed out a reply, making myself sound like the gender teetotaler I am.

"Oh you know, only on social occasions. Like a wedding or something. Only a couple times a year really. I'm lucky my friends and day-to-day life don't pressure me to have more than I am comfortable with."

The bus arrived. I got on. Soon I had a message from someone who was interested in me doing some volunteering on an LGBT project she does. "I’m trying to get people to deliver sessions with lots of info snuck in about communities they’re part of," she explained. "What’s your gender identity? I’m a cis woman and [person] who comes quite a lot is a demigirl."

And, maybe because of the joke I'd just written, maybe because it'd been building for a long time (most notably here), maybe because this person's an acquaintance and thus provided a lower-stakes environment for trying out a new thing I wasn't at all sure about, I for the first time did not answer "I'm a cis woman" when asked my gender. I said, "I'm agender."

Just like that, there it was in black and white (or white and blue, because this is Facebook messenger).

I didn't tell her this was the first time I'd ever said this to anyone. So I'm sure she thought it was perfectly normal but it threw me when she asked what pronouns I use. Shit. Shit! I thought. Fallen at the first hurdle. Since I was mere seconds into my life as an agender person, and I was on a bus where I didn't know anyone, all the pronouns used in my life suddenly didn't feel that helpful. And yet, I didn't know what pronouns I wanted to use either. I didn't feel any strong attachment to "they" or gender-neutral neopronouns. I...didn't feel a strong attachment to any pronouns. I waffled a bit, an answer that came down to "any pronouns are fine" without letting on I was working this out as I went along, and finished with "I need to work on a better answer to this question."

Her reply was the greatest; she said "I think that is an ideal answer aimed at a group of people questioning their own gender identities, so you’ve sort of created your own academic demonstration of gender." Which I thought was really nice of her to say. I smiled when I read it, and I felt a little better.

As soon as I dipped a toe out of the closet, I shoved myself back in that weekend.

I was well familiar with the "people at a queer event laughing at the idea of including pronouns with introductions" phenomenon from many years of experience, but this is the first time it felt personal. The "joking" changed me from being a person excited about sharing this news with a group that included a metamour and a couple of friends, to being a person who muttered "she/her pronouns" by the time it got to me in the introduction circle. This really ramped up my impostor-syndrome "you're just a woman really" feels, but also it distressed me sufficiently to tell this lie that it kind of affirmed I might be on to something. Because that is what my answer felt like: a lie.

I was able to come out to the friendly bits of that group in the course of registering a semi-formal complaint about the incident, and I was greeted with heart-warming congratulations and with the appropriate action being taken to try to keep the cis gays in the group from treating pronouns like a joke any more in future.

Since then I have written "agender" when my blue badge application and a feedback form at Leeds Library asked my gender with a blank space on the form to write whatever I want. I answered "yes" when that nurse asked me if my gender identity had changed since birth. I nearly cried in a sociolinguistics lecture less than a week after I'd first said I was agender, because it was the first in my two years here to admit the existence of more than two genders (while pointing out that lingiustics still often lacks the statistical data, because there aren't very many people in most studies that've disclosed a gender other than the Big Two and the nature of this kinds of data (I know now having worked with it myself) is that unsortable data like that tends to get disregarded).

I have learned what an agender flag looks like (lots of stripes, and confusingly simliarly-colored to the aromantic flag which I see more and which is only disappointing for me because that is a thing I am definitely not). I have read some "how to understand your agender friends and co-workers a bit better" stuff online but can't find much about "how to understand yourself." I'm still a little thrown by the idea of being trans or non-binary but not having to correct people's use of name or pronouns for me (I still don't mind what pronouns are used for me and I'm not planning to change my name so I think it slips people's minds a lot of the time and I'm mostly okay with that but it does make me feel like A Big Cis Faker). But as that link says,

Many agender people also identify as genderqueer, non-binary and/or transgender. However, some agender people prefer to avoid these terms, especially transgender, as they feel this implies identifying as a gender other than their assigned gender, while they in fact do not identify as any gender at all.

I'm actually happier with trans, which I understand as just "different from the gender I was assigned at birth" -- this certainly is -- than non-binary, which even though it is as technically true -- I am not a binary gender -- still apparently carries connotations to me of some kind of genderfeels itself, which I do not have.

But I don't use either "trans" or "non-binary" a lot for myself; I like to just be agender rather than any category it is in. I answered a survey a little while ago that was awesome about including agender in its list of options at first but then gave me a lot of trans-y questions about whether I'd experienced hate crimes or whether I was out at work and those kind of things just don't seem to fit for me and again made me feel like a bit of a fraud.

But through all this it has felt better to call myself agender than not. I haven't called myself anything else since that random whim on the bus home (except when I've felt I had to closet myself, which luckily hasn't happened a lot because it does distress me). Loved ones have been awesomely affirming of this all along, from Andrew correcting himself when he called me the most wonderful woman in the world (good thing too! I bet the competition for being the best agender person in the world is a lot less steep, haha) to

diffrentcolours putting scare quotes around "men's" and "women's" like that when he asked me what style of t-shirt I wanted for a present (especially hilarious when it ended up being an agender t-shirt (that also features my other favorite thing: space)). It's already gotten to the point where, a month or so ago when a friend of a friend changed a quote (saying something like "You're a free woman" instead of "you're a free man") in reference to me, it was all I could do not to respond with "oh yeah, people still think I'm a woman?!", ha.

tl;dr: I'm agender. Holly is still my name and I don't mind what pronouns are used for me. On bad days it feels like everything is misgendering me but mostly I feel like nothing is misgendering me because it's not possible when everything is drag.

Thank you. Good night!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

meepettemu

If you don’t know it, how to understand your gender’ by Meg John barker might be useful to you.

From:

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags