#gender void

The way I look at it, there is no freedom to be found in gender, but some people are more comfortable in a cage. And fundamentally, I just don't understand that. But, you don't need to understand something to accept it, which seems to be something a lot of other people do not themselves understand, for whatever reason. I don't understand gender or other peoples' experience of gender, but I accept it. Respect it, even.

I'm not here to force you out of it. If you feel more comfortable living in a box, then more power to you. And I'm not trying to be particularly dismissive by describing it like that either, just being direct in my wording to try and get across how I personally feel about the idea. Because any gender, all of them, are nothing more than sets of standards and parameters. A method of performance which is understood by people, however many or few, to be shorthand for a sort of person or aesthetic view or experience.

And this has lead to these genders being given different roles. It's a game of simplification more than it is stratification, I think; human brains are lazy, they avoid effort at all costs; that's why optical illusions are a thing. So it makes a lot of sense to me that they would simplify something as infinitely vast and variable and nebulous as a human being through different categorical strata. To take a collection of traits and visual cues and ascribe different meanings or functions to them.

This is how we get things like a softer aesthetic, a softer look, being conflated with a softer person. The way you present elicits ideas in others via the cultural shorthands known to them, and assumptions are made accordingly. X thing is associated with Y trait and is normally worn by Z people, so using these associations, a guess is made as to who and how that person is.

And it's not just surface level, it's on every level. People decided all this means something, but it's as ethereal as the concept of money. A single human person is so complex and varied, there is no way to judge at a glance everything about them and get a genuine grasp of who they are, but if we didn't do this it'd be almost impossible to function as a society at scale. There is simply not enough time to get to know each and every person you meet so deeply as to not need some sort of shorthand.

And this ultimately is, in my eyes, gender's purpose. Even all the niche little microgenders and xenogenders you might raise as counterpoints, all of them function in the exact same way. The very fact they exist and have a name means that they are defined, that there is a set of traits or parameters which bound what it is to be called that, and anybody who knows of that gender and knows its definition can thus apply those traits and those parameters and gain an introductory understanding of that person.

And these can be very useful! In a lot of ways, it's a lot more personal and customizable to subscribe to some sort of microgender. Chiefly because it's so small and unknown, it becomes more specific. But a gender is always, always an oversimplification, no matter how hyper specific you try to make it. It can only ever approach who or what a person is, it is never truly 100% synonymous with them. It's like how you can count forever into numbers that would collapse the universe to try and write down, but never get any closer to infinity.

And for those who are particularly lonely or longing for connection, this can create a separate issue, where in order to try and fit in better, they will try to adhere more strictly to the definition of their gender. They will over perform, they will fit the mold to a T, they will be as approachable as possible within whatever sized niche they're most comfortable with, be it tiny and known only to a few, or the larger more questionable niches of "male" and "female" forced on us all by society at large.

And I can understand that feeling, that desire, on an intellectual level, but find it confounding on an emotional one. How can that possibly make you happy? To chop yourself up to fit nobody's mold, just some vague approximation of a definition of a person, all for the sake of hoping to skip a little extra work and make it easier to think you know others. Or worse, how can it make you happy to try and change yourself to fit a gender better in order be accepted? You're probably thinking of the false dichotomy of boy and girl when I say that, but I've seen it happen on all levels, from microlabels to Big Gender™️. And I don't understand it.

Similarly, I don't understand how people find these limitations not just comfortable, but in any way freeing, or validating. Even from the trans perspective, I cannot understand it. You are simply changing from one set of agreed upon parameters to another, you're no more free than you were before. And don't get me wrong, I can understand how it might feel more comfortable, more true to who you are, but freeing? Absolutely not.

Validation though, that's a bit trickier. Because I can understand how it may be validating to feel more comfortable in your own skin, to have some metaphorical (and literal!) clothes that fit you better. But is that really enough for you? To still just be a shorthand? Isn't it at all stifling to you that you still have to perform whatsoever? I don't care if it's the equivalent of Shakespeare or Reptar On Ice, do you really want to perform at all? Why? Isn't it frustrating? Isn't it exhausting?

I'd been told for years that by being non-binary, this makes me trans. That it's an umbrella that I'm welcome under too. But I have never once felt welcome under it, so I have said for just as long that my experiences are not at all trans in nature, and that I would feel uncomfortable describing myself as trans because it would feel disingenuous as a result. That it is an experience I do not have and do not understand, because there is still a sense of belonging they feel that I just don't when I think of what gender is, any gender.

When I first discovered what it was to be agender, it felt closer to what I thought and how I felt. To sidestep the whole ordeal and just not care, to exist outside of or beyond. But it also felt a little bit wrong. The fact that it was itself an identity could be part of it, though I'm usually not so philosophically pedantic in that particular way, but I think it was more that it didn't feel radical enough.

To me, to call yourself agender feels the same as calling yourself agnostic. You're still playing the game. You acknowledge gender exists and is real and is something that has power to you, be it because you're unsure, or you don't want to offend others, or it genuinely does have power to you but you've never found a niche that fit what your experience was. It felt like it was still, itself, a gender, or at least waiting for "the right fit".

But I don't believe in "the right fit". I don't believe in gender at all. I'm not gender agnostic, I'm a straight-up gender atheist. I believe in it on an intellectual level as something we have gone to great length constructing as an interpersonal shorthand, I believe in it in as much as I believe others find meaning in it and participate in it and find tremendous comfort in it. But personally, emotionally, I don't. For me, it isn't real. It doesn't exist. It's just not a thing. I don't care.

But the vast majority of people don't seem to really understand this, and they definitely don't feel the same. There are more people who understand xenogenders than there are who understand what it is to really, truly feel outside of gender entirely. Or at least that's how it's always seemed to me. And that is so very, incredibly, horribly lonely.

From a logical standpoint, you might think this makes sense. If gender is an interpersonal social shorthand, then by not subscribing to it at all, I'm fundamentally missing out on that icebreaker, that community. And on some level, that's true. But it's not as if I really chose this, I have simply come to discover with time that none of it clicks with or means anything to me.

And that in itself is not lonely! It's very possible to still meet and make connections without having any sort of gender. It's a shorthand, not the whole damn social language. It's an icebreaker, an easing into things, a simplification.

At the end of the day, as you know someone better and get closer and closer to them, you recognize and accept the idiosyncrasies of identity that define them because that is the complexity of a human person. There are other ways to start off relating to another beyond just gender, it's just one of countless ways in.

But where it becomes so lonely is that no one else seems to want to engage with that idea. People speak of abolishing gender all the time entirely through lip service, sure, but whenever they're confronted with the actual reality of trying and what that might entail, they balk at the idea or find it insane.

And this isn't just a thing I've seen with cisgendered people, I've seen it from trans folk, from those who use increasingly obscure microlabels. There seems to be this overriding idea gender isn't just real, but necessary, inseparable from the human experience. They speak of abolishing gender and its roles only in as much as it helps their own gender or idea of gender. Not in an actual, genuinely meaningful way that would truly abolish it for everyone.

So when someone like me comes along, I end up being made to feel like an outsider. If I take their words too seriously and actually speak of doing away with gender, I'm looked at weird, or with suspicion, or made to feel as if I am somehow wrong. Like my experience isn't real or one worth considering at all in this conversation.

Now add into that my own acknowledged rarity of experience. I almost never see anyone else speak on the ideas or the experiences I have on the daily. This place is a haven for trans identities as far as I've seen in my travels on the internet, and thank god for that, I'm happy and I'm excited that others feel in any way safe enough to be open about their identities and experiences and that they have an opportunity to find community through those things.

But I don't have that. And I can't engage in that. And I can't partake in discussions on that because my experiences are so far removed that it is seen as either some sort of threat, or as somehow insincere, or I don't even know what. I just know I'm never quite made to feel like I belong when I try, so I no longer try.

I don't want any of it to stop for anyone else. I only wish I knew there were more like me out there, or that I was at all valued in spite of me not wanting any part of gendered culture. I don't want to be male, I don't want to be female, I don't want to be trans, I don't want to be anything at all but me. And I cannot be simplified or so easily described.

I know I can't escape the labels people are going to sort me under in their own minds to try and make sense of that complex human being that I am, and that's fine. Everybody does this. But I would at least like to feel as though I was respected for it. That I was understood. That I was welcome. That I can participate, actually, and have a place in the fight for broader acceptance and integration of queer ideas and identities.

I don't want to take away from anyone. I don't want anything taken away from me. I just want to be. And I want to feel happy and welcomed for being. And right now I don't feel that. Right now I feel like everyone I see in passing, everyone I interact with in my life, everything I see in media, I feel like none of them understand me. Sometimes I feel like they don't want to. I know that they can if they tried, they're as human as I am. I just don't get the same feeling that they do with it.

And that's what's lonely, and that's what's isolating. To be expected to put in the work to understand others who refuse to understand you. Isn't that what we have been trying to fight back against all this time? I just want to be myself without expectation or presumption. I don't want to be stifled by the walls of a definition that can never match the depth of human iteriority. I don't want to be bound by any convention beyond my own personal tastes and desires. I don't want to be something, I just want to be, without compromise.