Some Short Thoughts on Gender

1. Gender has always felt like something thrust upon me. For as long as I can remember I’ve been drawn towards depictions of characters and people in the spaces between genders, in the shadows cast by their wider public perceptions. The people caught in the wake of societies insistence on a model that doesn’t fit.
2. On a good day, I have an ambivalence towards gender that allows me to just ignore the whole question. Presenting as male has undeniable advantages. No-one questions me, I’m relatively free to drift through days without thought towards the performativity of my gender.
3. Media about the people who live in or otherwise transit the spaces between genders tends to focus on the people who have really strong feelings about gender. People who were so sure of their chosen gender from a young age. People who are confident in their fluidity. People who had definite eureka moments, where it all just clicked and they knew there and then they were really [X].
4. On a bad day, gender is like a slightly too small shoe. You can still walk, but you get the feeling it will do long term damage if you don’t take it off. I can’t really take it off through, and I worry about the consequences of (to extend the metaphor) walking barefoot.
5. I used to be part of online communities where mercurial identities were common, welcomed and cherished. I spent years teaching people about pronoun preferences, learning the best ways to provide support to people undergoing social and/or medical transitions. It was not uncommon for people to present themselves in one way for a week and then to alter it the next, sometimes subtly, others radically. We cheered them on, provided a bastion of hope, love and support to try and soften the blows of the real world. One by one, people flew the nest with their new found confidence, and the communities faded.
6. On the worst days, a gender presents its self to me in my mind almost fully formed, perfect in its entirety. But it is not mine, and I cannot have it. To take it, even briefly, would be to step down a path from which the consequences would be enormous. But more so, I fear it too would fade and I would be left alone again and now bereft of a gender I’d had but a taste of.
7. It is very hard to get a definition of gender, and where it and sexuality begin and end. Gender is inherently performative and I question how much of it relies on sexuality, if not our own then others. I am left wondering where the intersection of asexuality and gender lies.
8. There are communities of people who do not present a gender. They are full of people who have known forever, or had eureka moments, or found said communities and upon grasping the concept of being agendered (or whichever term fits the community at hand) felt a great surge of relief in knowing there were other people like them.
9. I never feel strongly enough to feel comfortable identifying as agender. Everyone seems so sure, I fear I would sully their commitment, their confidence by identifying alongside them.
10. Dysphoria only really comes in squalls, brief but intense with a fairly long tail. French food helps, anything that lets me forget and fall into the patterns of something well worn and well loved helps.
11. There is a third way, an entire new (to me) gamut of gender beyond the binary. Where it doesn’t matter if I have to piece it together each morning, if some mornings I forgo it entirely and others I dive headfirst into it.
12. For now, I’ll just keep muddling my way through it all.
13. How important is gender anyway?