[saint cherubim]

dude.

i feel so seen!!

I'm asexual. I figured that out not long after I first came across the term in high school. But figuring out my gender took a lot longer. I didn't really think about my gender identity for years, it wasn't until I was in college that I started trying to figure out what my gender was. That process took years.

I didn't really feel attached to my assigned gender, but I also didn't feel the gender dysphoria that trans people described. I didn't particularly feel like I was neither of those either. For a long time, I honestly didn't feel like any of the gender descriptions and identities I was coming across really fit. I just didn't care that much about what my actual gender was. Eventually I decided upon the agender label as that seemed the most apt. As the paper says, it's really hard to be truly without gender in this highly gendered world. Agender is a way of defining myself in a way that people who experience gender might be able to understand when "I'm just me." isn't really an acceptable answer to the "what's your gender?" question.

I don't mind being perceived as a gender, none of them are offensive to me. While I do like when I am perceived as male or at least not female, I think that more has to do with growing up female and not wanting to be pushed into traditional female roles and values than a connection or repulsion to any gender. I'm impossible to misgender because I frankly don't care.

Honestly, the biggest problem I have with my gender, is trying to define it to people. There's been a large push in recent years for asking people for their pronouns, or including pronouns in things like email signatures and surveys. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is a bad thing! This is very affirming for a lot of people. But it feels like I need to pick something that doesn't quite fit. At pride, for instance, there's always pronoun buttons. But they're all she/her, he/him, they/them, she/they, he/they, it/it, xe/xir, etc etc. And that's great. I'm always glad that there are a lot of options for people. But there's never any pins for any/all pronouns. I've never picked up a free pronoun pin at pride, despite always looking, because they all feel like picking what pronouns I don't want poeple to use and the answer is that I don't care. I fround an any/all pronoun pin once at a queer museum and I cried.

In order to not get Al Capone'd by the IRS, you do need to report income received from illegal activity. However, in compliance with the 5th Amendment right to refuse to confess to a crime, you are not required to disclose the source of that income if you believe that doing so would result in self-incrimination.

This is all totally accurate, and I just pulled this post out of my queue because I've got one of these on my desk right now. On the taxpayer's Schedule C, the self-employment income form, where people put their kind of business or profession, this individual has written "Unnamed activity."

That could be anything, from something legal but salacious to something that would lead to a long prison sentence, but per IRS policy I don't care, and it's none of my business.

As my delightful supervisor is wont to point out to one of my more pedantic coworkers, we're neither auditors nor the number police; our job is to mainly to care about if a tax return is cleaned up and ready for data transcription. I make sure a return is signed, that numbers are on the right lines and all the forms needed are present and in the right order. I also write down codes to indicate when specific forms or conditions are present, and I flag things for other departments like identity theft and certain kinds of fraud. (A note for people afraid of the IRS: I'm specifically looking for kinds of fraud that it's impossible to commit by accident or through well-meaning ignorance.)

My "unnamed activity" person's return doesn't have anything for me to code or flag: it's signed, all forms are present and filled out correctly, there are no suspicious or improbably large deductions, they're not trying to argue they're a sovereign citizen and the IRS is illegitimate and/or has no authority under blah blah blah deranged argument. They filled out the form to pay self-employment taxes, correctly, and they filed well before the deadline and paid their tax bill in full.

The IRS has no reason to go after this person, and they won't, because the IRS largely doesn't care about crime beyond the various flavors of tax fraud. It's actually mind-boggling just how much the IRS doesn't care about, even with things that seem to very much belong in the tax fraud category. I know a lot gets sorted out further along down the processing pipeline but yikes.

Unrelatedly, it's an extremely good idea to file as early in the tax season as you can, and to also get an Identity Protection Pin before one is eventually assigned to you, because the amount of identity theft and fraudulent returns I've seen in the last month alone has been enough to make me daydream fondly about mass extinction events and how much humanity deserves one.

Take a knife or two to complete any tasks you need to finish soon. Reblog to give your mutuals a knife for any group projects you may be working on