Category Archives: Identity & Relationships

I am not evil scum (or: thoughts on feminism)

May 10, 2012 | Posted in Identity & Relationships

In many of my social circles, saying “I’m not a feminist” is roughly equivalent to saying “I am Satan”. If you aren’t a feminist, you must be a sexist, which is the lowest form of scum, and your arguments are no longer valid. To avoid causing this ad hominem reaction and having my arguments ignored, I will not say that I’m not a feminist. Instead I will say that as a person with no gender, I find feminism to be limiting, and I don’t like to take on a label that tries to cover more ground than it can.

One definition of feminism is: “the belief that women are equal to men and should be treated as such”. According to that definition, I am a feminist, sure. But I don’t think that this definition is inclusive enough for me to take it as my label. What about all the people who are not men or women? I’d rather use a word that includes us.

Well, all right, let’s try a more nuanced definition: “the belief that femininity is equal to masculinity”. Those who use this one usually say that all people who are oppressed due to gender are oppressed because femininity is considered worse than masculinity. Anyone who “should be” masculine but is feminine is oppressed for leaving the “good” side and going to the “bad” side; anyone who “should be” feminine but is masculine is oppressed for trying to sneak over to the “good” side; naturally, a feminine woman is oppressed because she is on the “bad” side where she “belongs”. According to this definition, too, I am a feminist, but since I don’t think that masculine and feminine should be the only ways to exist, I’m not all that interested in defining myself according to them. I’m also not convinced that elevating femininity to be equal to masculinity will stop people from oppressing those of us who don’t want to be feminine or masculine.

Other feminists say that the definition is “the belief that all people are equal regardless of gender” and that the word is used because of its historical roots. When the feminist movement began, gender was still all about men and women; our understanding of gender identity has broadened, but the principle of equality remains the same. I certainly get this point of view, and by this definition I am a feminist, but it makes me feel erased. I am indebted to the feminist movement, of course, and I respect much of its philosophy and certainly its writers and activists, but I wish to take on a label that, if it does not explicity include me, at least doesn’t explicity exclude me as a person who doesn’t identify with femininity.

So, sure, I am a feminist — I believe that women are equal to men and femininity is equal to masculinity. I’m also a neutralist, and a genderqueerist, and an agenderist, and all kinds of other -ists, and my stance on those is equally important to my stance on women and femininity. Trying to say that “feminism = equality of all genders” is kind of like saying that “blackism (a word I just made up) = equality of all colors and ethnicities”. There are a lot of people of color who are not black, and lumping them all together under the word “blackist” wouldn’t be cool, even if the argument for the word was that all POC are oppressed because blackness is considered worse than whiteness and everyone who is not white is oppressed for being closer to the “bad” black side. It would be especially uncool if a POC who was not black stood up and said, “I want a word that includes me,” and everyone said, “Sit down, Satan — if you’re not a blackist, you’re a racist.”

Instead of focusing on one segment of gender possibility, I focus on all of them and call myself an egalitarian. I would rather not identify as a feminist, partly due to my desire to make a more inclusive word more widespread, and partly due to bitter rebellion against the assumption that feminism is the epitome of gender equality and all who reject the label are sexist scum. The adjective “feminist” fits me, but I don’t like to wear it by itself, because it just doesn’t cover enough.

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I found the right person and I’m still aromantic

April 22, 2012 | Posted in Identity & Relationships

Once upon a time, I experienced love at first sight, except it wasn’t romantic love and we couldn’t actually see each other because we met online. I am drawn to people who are good at spelling and use punctuation in instant messages; it’s the internet equivalent of a great smile. And if that great internet smile is accompanied by kindness and openness and shameless dorkiness— oh, be still my heart. I wanted to learn everything about this person and I felt like I could share my scary secrets and I just knew that we could talk for hours and hours about anything and everything and I wanted to start right that second.

The intensity of this freaked me out. First, this was my friend’s girlfriend, so I had to tread carefully. (I failed at that.) Second, I’m aromantic, so I was all confused. What do you do with a strong attraction that isn’t romantic? And what if it actually was romantic and I just didn’t know that? What is romantic attraction? What is romance?

Oh, lord, not this again.

Fortunately, I was completely right: we could talk for hours and hours about anything and everything and share our scary secrets, and we did. Four years later we say we are “together”, in some undefinable, undeniable way, and I still don’t know what romance is.

I’ve got this relationship… Am I still aromantic?

Yes.

That should be enough, because what is identity if not our own deep down feelings about who and what we are? If a description of myself feels right to me, that’s about as well-justified as it’s going to get. (Telling people they are wrong about their own identities is obnoxious and oppressive, by the way. I see it happening way too often. Please don’t do it.) Still, analyzing things is fun, am I right?

A while ago on Hot Pieces of Ace, a YouTube channel about asexuality, one of the members was an aromantic in a romantic relationship. She’s the only person I’ve come across who has talked about being in this situation. She defined her aromanticism as a lack of romantic drive, but not a lack of romantic attraction, which is interesting because I have usually seen aromanticism defined as a lack of romantic attraction, and I don’t know what a lack of romantic drive is called. Quirkyalone?

Whatever it’s called, I’m completely certain that I am it. Romantic drive is a free-floating desire for romance, analagous to the free-floating desire for sex that is called a sex drive, and it causes people to do such things as go on dates with strangers and complain about being lonely when they’re single. This is not me; I am the opposite of this. Dating is a bizarre ritual that perplexes and repels me, and I love being single. I’ve never gone looking for romance — in fact, I have often gone to great lengths to avoid it.

Romantic attraction is the tricky one for me. It’s when you’re drawn to a particular person or type of people in a romantic way, but to me this makes very little sense. I’m only drawn to people in one way. If I think a person is interesting, I am drawn to them. The only difference is in degree. I was drawn to my person (I call her my partner or my person) more than anyone else I’ve ever met; does the extreme degree make it romantic? It seems like there should be some qualitative difference in the feeling, but I don’t know what that might be.

My person suggested that romance might be something that is completely up to the individual, and if the individual doesn’t find it a useful concept to describe their attractions, they are free to ignore it. Wise suggestion. This is how I deal with gender, too.

In conclusion: I ignore romance because I don’t find it a useful concept. I think the best word for this is aromantic, so that is what I am.

Is my relationship romantic?

I don’t know. Neither does my person. It looks a lot like other relationships that people call romantic. So maybe? If it looks like a duck…

I already talked about how I build relationships, but since I’ve spent some more time in public with my person I’ve begun to wonder how we look to other people. We sometimes hold hands or do other small physical things to show affection in public, and we talk about each other in a very matter-of-fact way that sounds like an established romantic couple. We still talk about anything and everything and share our scary secrets, though there aren’t really any scary secrets left to share at this point. We have every intention of staying together longterm. From the outside, it looks like romance.

From the inside, I’m not sure. My person is a panromantic demisexual, so our relationship is quite mixed since I’m an aromantic asexual (see my definitions here). She has her own idea of what romance is and it can’t easily be put into words. With that in mind, her feelings for me are romantic, but that doesn’t mean that our relationship has to be romantic. We both like subverting social norms and we are interested in getting away from the strange fairytale drama of romance.

I’ve toyed with the idea of calling it queerplatonic, but I don’t feel comfortable saying that it’s definitively non-romantic in nature, since I don’t know what that means. I’d rather leave that label to those who are more certain. Instead I call it close. A close relationship. My closest relationship. There’s no confusion in that.

Sometimes, though, it’s easiest to let people think that we’re romantic. That word gives a relationship a certain social status; people treat it as something important, something almost sacred. And, most of the time, we just don’t feel like explaining ourselves to anyone. Let them think what they will. I’m sure they’ll get the basic idea.

In conclusion: Whatever you want to call it, my relationship with my person is awesome. It gets me thinking, which I love, but it never demands that I be anything other than 100% unadulterated me. Who could ask for more?

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I’m not twelve (Juya High Performance Velcro Short Binder review)

February 10, 2012 | Posted in Identity & Relationships

Here is a picture of me a little over a year ago, in January 2011:

And here is a picture of me in October 2011:

Notice anything different? Same clothes, same hat, same sunglasses… different hair… Let’s try some better lighting.

I know I got thinner between January and October, but did I get thin enough to completely flatten my chest? No, no I did not. I have the High Performance Velcro Short Binder to thank for that.

This binder is made by Juya and I bought it from Les Love Boat, which is based in Taiwan. I chose it because the reviews said it’s comfortable but still effective. I wanted to look less female-bodied, but comfort is more important than looks for me since I can’t actually be read as genderless until society at large recognizes genderlessness as a thing. I don’t have any experience with other binders, so I can’t compare, but here are my thoughts on this one.

Buying

It cost me $66 including shipping, and it arrived in just under two weeks. It actually arrived before something that I had ordered on the same day from California. The package was very small and inconspicuous, but it did need a signature, so I had to go to the post office and pick it up because I was at work when they tried to deliver it. My parents didn’t seem to pay much attention to the little blue plastic envelope, but I guess that me receiving a package from Taiwan didn’t seem that strange to them by that point.

Fit

I am about a 34-36C and I chose a medium. I was afraid that it would be too small, but it turned out to be perfect; I’ve had room to make the velcro tighter as I get thinner, and if I needed to I could go a bit bigger, though not much. The scratchy part of the velcro will be off the soft part and touching my skin if I make it much bigger.

Comfort

Wearing this binder feels like wearing a tight sports bra made out of swimsuit material. It doesn’t restrict my breathing or cause any pain unless I do the velcro much too tightly, which I sometimes do by accident when I haven’t washed it in a while and it’s getting stretched out. At first it was hard to get things to stay in place and not slide down to the middle and turn into a single, uncomfortable (i.e. sweaty) bump, but with practice I figured it out. It helps to do the velcro slightly unevenly, with the bottom of the binder tighter around my body than the top, which stops downward slippage. I’m glad I got the velcro instead of a pullover for my first binder, because I needed to adjust it a lot at the beginning, but now it’s starting to annoy me a little bit. There is a loose corner on the bottom that you can actually see in the pictures on the website, because the velcro doesn’t reach down the whole length of the fabric. Most of the time this is fine (it makes a nice handle when I want to pull it off quickly) but sometimes it catches on my shirt, or makes a bump if I’m wearing a t-shirt.

Ventilation

On that day in October 2011 when my sister took pictures of me and the Giant Cream Puffs of Doom, it got way too hot for my liking, and I ended up sweaty and miserable. A lot of it was because skin was pressed against skin and was sticking together, which is going to happen with every binder when you are a C cup, so I can’t really blame my binder for that. My back felt fine, not hot at all, so I’m guessing that this binder is one of the better-ventilated ones and I just can’t stand binding when it’s really hot. Which is fine, because I don’t do it every day anyway.

Flatness

You can judge for yourself from the pictures above, but I’d say that this binder is very effective. I’m not sure how it manages to be so comfortable and yet so effective. The magic of Tactel, whatever that material is.

Results

When my person saw me wearing my binder for the first time, she immediately put her hands on my chest in a casual way, as naturally as if it was a male-assigned flat chest. When I’m not binding and she touches my chest she is always surprised and pulls away quickly, though it doesn’t bother me.

Three times I have been read as a boy while binding, twice around the bathroom. The first time I was coming out of the women’s bathroom and two little kids were coming in, and they froze and looked at me in fear. I smiled, kind of confused. One of them whispered to the other, “Is this the boys’ room?” The second time, I was waiting for my sister to come out of the bathroom and a man pointed to the men’s room and asked me, “Are you in line?” I’m fortunate that I haven’t had any bad gender-and-bathroom experiences.

The third time was when I went to the NaNoWriMo Night of Writing Dangerously. My NaNo name is Seabird and doesn’t indicate any gender. A few people asked if I was in the Young Writer’s Program, which is for novelists 17 and under. They were very surprised to hear that I was 24 and started calling me “she” instead of “he” after that, and one person said that I should play twelve-year-olds in movies. I suppose I don’t mind being read as a twelve-year-old boy. Since I left high school I have often been read as much younger than I am, but a girl, so this is a nice change.

Most of the time, though, I am still called “she” and “miss” and included in “ladies” and “girls”. Even a great binder can only get you so far, I’m afraid. My face and voice still make people see me as feminine, even when I’m wearing a blazer and a tie. For this reason I don’t stress about binding, and when I don’t feel like it, I don’t bother. It doesn’t seem to make a lot of difference to most people.

But, of course, it does make a difference to me, and that’s why I still do it about a third of the time. When I look at my silhouette when I’m binding, it finally looks right. For me, that’s what counts.

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On misgendering

December 4, 2011 | Posted in Identity & Relationships

Sometimes when I’m in public, I play something I call the Gender Game. The game goes like this: When I see someone who strikes me as a man, I first try to imagine that they are actually a woman, then I try to imagine that they are a trans man, then I try to imagine that they are genderqueer, and using all of this information I try to determine what made me think of them as a man in the first place. I do the same thing, reversed, when I see someone who strikes me as a woman. When I see someone who doesn’t strike me as a man or a woman, I imagine them as one, then the other, then genderqueer.

Duck? Rabbit? Quirrel Duck and Voldemort Rabbit? This is what the Gender Game feels like.

This exercise is very easy with some people, and very difficult with others. And it’s not only easy with androgynous folks; certain overtly gendered qualities lend themselves to this optical illusion, such as wearing lots of makeup or having a big beard that could be fake.

I began playing this game because I wanted to figure out which specific qualities made people read me as a woman, but now it’s gone way beyond that. Now I’m thinking about how people construct their gender presentation in general, and it has me in a dilemma. As a genderless person who hates being misgendered all the time, how can I avoid misgendering others while still respecting the presentation they have constructed?

Option #1: Assume nothing

Imagine: Every single time you meet someone new, no matter who they are, what they look like, or how you met, you treat them as if you don’t know their gender — whether it seems obvious to you or not — until they tell you what their gender is.

Pros: You will never misgender anyone. You will get very good at the Gender Game. You will be questioning society always (this is a pro for me; you may disagree).

Cons: You ignore the hard work people put into their gender presentation. You will confuse others by using gender-neutral pronouns when it “seems obvious” which ones you “should” use. You will have to think about gender all the time.

As a genderless person, I feel self-centered doing this. Treat everyone as if they were exactly like me! Nice. It’s also very hard for me to do when I’m meeting someone whose presentation is so obviously male or female. Not only am I ignoring how carefully they have put together their gender appearance — and most people are careful about this, because even if they don’t care about looking good they still want to look like a woman or a man — I have to be constantly aware of gender. I have to actively avoid gendering every time I meet someone new. This is exhausting and also kind of depressing to me since I often get sick of thinking about gender.

Option #2: Assume everything

Imagine: When you meet someone, you probably make a snap judgement about their gender based on things you’ve been taught, so accept this judgement. If someone’s appearance doesn’t lend itself to an instant judgement, take your best guess. Go with this until proven otherwise.

Pros: You probably do this already, so it doesn’t take any effort. You will get it right with most people. You won’t have to be conscious of gender all the time.

Cons: You will be playing along with society’s gender rules (this is a con for me; you may disagree). You will misgender some people.

I don’t like this one because I don’t like being misgendered and I don’t like misgendering others. This is what prompted me to think about the problem in the first place.

Option #3: Ask

Imagine: Every single time you meet someone, no matter who they are, what they look like, or how you met, you ask them what their gender is — or, perhaps, what pronoun you should use for them, which doesn’t always correlate to gender but is useful to know.

Pros: You will never misgender anyone. You will raise awareness of people’s ingrained gender assumptions everywhere you go. You will make some people happy and grateful.

Cons: You will have to think about gender all the time. You will ignore the hard work people put into their gender presentations. You will make a lot of people offended and upset.

I’ve seen a lot of people in the genderqueer community who suggest that we should always ask about people’s genders and pronouns rather than risk misgendering them, but I’m not sure that even they do it all the time. Would they ask, for example, when they meet their boss for the first time? Their partner’s parents? Their lawyers or real estate agents or doctors other professionals? If they would, then they have a lot more courage than I do, because I can’t bring myself to offend the majority of people I meet.

And yes — I believe that most people will be offended or upset if you ask them what their gender is. Some will be happy and grateful and think that you are polite and kind for asking. Most won’t. Many who don’t know much about gender diversity would be offended because they think their presentation is obvious and that the question is intended to insult them, and many trans people would be upset because they hate having attention called to their gender. Even I hate being asked in certain contexts. I don’t always feel comfortable talking about my gender, and I’m definitely not yet comfortable enough to come out every time I meet someone new.

I may be wrong about this, though. Maybe most people wouldn’t mind being asked. I may try an experiment to find out.

Any suggestions?

This isn’t one of those posts that lays the answers out for you; I don’t have the answers. My general approach is a mixture of options 1 and 2. If someone’s presentation seems obvious to me, I go with that, but if it doesn’t seem obvious, I reserve judgement and treat them in a gender-neutral way until I have more information. And whenever I’m doing a bit of people-watching, I play the Gender Game.

What’s your approach? What do you prefer people do when meeting you? Do you care about being misgendered? Do you care about being asked?

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What’s in a pronoun?

August 21, 2011 | Posted in Identity & Relationships, Writing

If you happen to take a look at my About page, you’ll see that my preferred pronoun is the singular ‘they’. This means that instead of saying “Jillian put on her coat” or “Jillian put on his coat”, you would say “Jillian put on their coat”.

This is not that unusual. We already use ‘they’ when we’re referring to someone without knowing their gender. Look, I did it right there — “their gender”. Some snobby grammarians would tell you that it’s incorrect, but they are wrong. Personally I think it would be best if we took gender out of it altogether and referred to everyone as ‘they’ all the time. There are already some other languages that don’t use gendered pronouns, such as Persian and Finnish, and they seem to be getting along just fine, so I don’t see why this wouldn’t work for English.

For now, I have to deal with a language that uses gendered pronouns, and so far I’ve been told by at least four people that my pronoun is awkward. They’ve said that it makes me sound like I have multiple personalities, that it doesn’t flow in a sentence, and that it’s hard because they’re talking to people who already know me as ‘she’. These are my friends and they are all open-minded about gender, which makes it even harder to hear. If my friends aren’t comfortable with my pronoun, what chance do I have of getting anyone else to use it?

This made me realize that my pronoun is not just about me. Of course, a person’s pronouns are mostly about them, and if someone tells you they prefer a certain pronoun then you’d better use it. It’s rude and unkind to ignore someone’s pronoun preferences, even if they use one you may never have heard before, like ‘sie’, ‘zie’, ‘xe’, or ‘ey’.

But… have you ever noticed that you’re the only person who doesn’t actually use your pronoun? And that asking people to use a pronoun that requires an explanation is basically asking them to come out for you? I don’t like doing that. I don’t like making a huge deal about my lack of gender. I just want gender to leave me alone. Especially in everyday life when I’m trying to eat my lunch or whatever and I’m not prepared to launch into Gender 101. I would love it if people commonly asked each other “what’s your preferred pronoun?” and no one took offense.

What’s a person to do? Well, sometimes it seems like the most practical option for me is to use ‘she’. Most people are going to use it anyway, so it’s the only pronoun I wouldn’t have to explain at all. This would allow me to stop making a big deal about my lack of gender.

But ‘she’ hurts. It feels like a tiny sucker punch when someone uses it, especially if I’ve already come out to them. So I could ask people to use ‘he’, which is equally incorrect but at least doesn’t cause the same pain.

If I’m going to use a pronoun that requires explaining, though, I might as well use one that’s correct. So I could work on normalizing ‘they’, helping people feel less awkward about using it.

I don’t know what I’m going to do, honestly, so I decided to try something. I wrote a little story about myself in third person, using ‘they’ for the pronoun, hoping that if people read it enough times it will feel normal to them. If this helps, I could write more stories like this. Better stories. I might even write a novel, if I ever finish my current work-in-progress.

For now, I ask that you use ‘they’ online. It’s easy to type something, even if it would be strange to say it aloud, and I’m out as genderless online anyway. Offline… things becomes blurrier. Until I have decided for myself, feel free to use whatever pronoun suits the situation if you’re talking about me offline.

Oh, and here’s that story.

“Disengage”

They’ve never thought of themself as a morning person. In fact, they’ve always been a proud night owl, and in college they became infamous for answering the door in pajamas, blinking away sleep, when their friends came to get them for dinner at 5:00pm.

But things change, and today they don’t even hit snooze before they fling back the covers and climb into the shower at six in the morning. Showers are so much easier now that they have short hair. In five minutes they’re wrapping their towel around their waist and putting some baking soda deodorant under their arms. Then they move their towel, covering their chest, before they leave the bathroom. Oh, how they wish the towel could stay around their waist.

They put on their work shirt with the company’s name emblazoned across the shoulderblades, and it might as well say “Property of”. They eat a bowl of oatmeal, pack a lunch, and become a pair of hands for the day, a pair of hands folding cardboard in a blur of repetition, a pair of arms covered in tiny cardboard cuts, a brain disengaged.

Free of reality, their brain composes. If only there were a machine that could record thoughts! Their novel would be finished by now. Instead, they repeat the sentences over and over, silently sculpting and polishing, and when someone calls “break time” they take out their notebook and scribble furiously before their thoughts are lost to the mundanity — the inanity — of small talk.

“How was your weekend?”

“Pretty good,” they say, “how was yours?”

Inspired.

Sometimes their brain listens to music instead of writing, and they dance. They turn their repetitive movement into choreography, never holding the same position for long, and even though they stand on concrete all day and have to look down at what their hands are doing, they don’t often get stiff or sore. There are, at least, a few lessons they have learned from this job.

The minute hand moves. The days pass. It becomes easier and easier to switch off the connection between brain and world, stopping time in its tracks, but time will not be stopped. They know this. Their life is passing them by while they take things out of small boxes and put them into bigger boxes, or vice versa, or fold cardboard. Of course they know this, but paying bills is nearly as inevitable as passing time.

When they get home, they reacquaint themself with the world. Profiles and streams and feeds paint a picture of others’ thoughts, reminding them that they are going the right way now, finally, after four years of crashing and burning — yes, now they are on the right road. Their brain is tired, and their hands are tired, but they open up their novel and they write.

It’s strange for a self-defined night owl to be ready for bed at 10:00pm, but things change, and bills arrive, and the company has its rules. They set their alarm and collapse into the pillow, and their brain disengages.

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