I’ve been asked twice this week whether I will start taking hormones soon or if I’m thinking about getting some kind of surgery to alter my sex. It turns out that P will be starting T this October and has also changed their name. My answer is always a clear and plain “no”, but I sometimes have a hard time explaining why.
So this week I had to try and explain my gender to P and my art teacher again, although I had already come out to them a year ago. I had a great conversation about stereotypes, non-binary identities and sexless angels though, so that was nice.
I often just tell people that I’m genderqueer and hope they’ll more or less understand where I stand on the gender spectrum, but the term “genderqueer” encloses so many different kinds of people who all experience their gender differently that it hardly gives any kind of explanation to start with. That is actually one of the reasons why I like the term though. I’ve talked about my sexuality here before and even made a table to separate which kinds of attractions I feel and to which degree, but my gender isn’t so easy to pin down. However, I feel like I have to write this down someday if I want to have a less difficult time explaining what it is I am when somebody asks about my gender identity. So here goes. I warn you that this may turn complicated and end up with me contradicting myself a couple of times.
Let’s start with the easy part. When I’m asked whether I’m a boy or a girl by somebody who I don’t know/will never know, I do what I’m not supposed to do and automatically classify them as cisgender, unknowledgeable of non-binary identities, and faithful partakers of the female-male binary. I then answer with a “male” or “female” depending on the day, simply ignore them or, if I’m in a really good mood and my safety isn’t in danger, answer with a “yes”, “no”, “sometimes” or even a “both and neither”. To be honest, all answers are correct. I’m a girl; I will always be a girl to some extent. But I’m also a boy. But I’m not half girl and half boy, I’m FULL girl and FULL boy. Some people treat gender as some sort of cube which you can fill up with bits of genders and once the cube is full, well there you have your gender identity (25% female, 40% male, 35% neutrois for example). But I’d need more than one cube; I’m 100% female and 100% male.
At the same time, I’m sure the way I experience me being a girl or a boy is probably different to how other people who identify as a girl or boy feel. I don’t really fit in at women or men spaces, and I share no bonds with people who are from the binary only because they share my gender identity. I don’t identify with them. This “neither” feeling would be connected to my non-binary identity, which I refer to as agenderism or neutrality.
Yet I sometimes feel like I would more likely fit in more with the masculine side of the binary and sometimes I lean more towards the feminine side. That’s why I also say I’m genderfluid, and will usually dress according to which way I bend. Of course when this changes halfway through the day, it can cause dysphoria. I had a hard time learning that clothes are just clothes, and I can wear skirts when I’m in boy mode and a shirt saying “I am a boy” when in girl mode. Agender mode is more like an in-between; I’m not particularly feeling more like a boy or a girl. In neutrality mode there is a sense of absolute gender void; there’s hardly anything there, and it would be very hard for me to understand what feeling like a certain gender would feel like. It’s like I forget the concept of gender altogether. This doesn’t occur often though, so I usually don’t bother making a difference between my agender and gender neutral identities.
So to resume all of the above I’ll use my original mathematical formula that combines all aspects of my gender:
Girl + Boy + Agender + Gender neutral = Genderqueer. Emphasis on one of the first four depending on the situation (a.k.a. gender fluidity).
Some people say that gender and sexuality terms only limit who you are and close you into a box. But since I’m in favour of people defining terms in their own way, finding their own meaning, breaking any lines that might limit them and also happen to love words, I see these terms more as a way of letting people try to understand you. My identity overflows from any kind of box that the gender spectrum has, but the term genderqueer is precisely a term that means “there are no boxes for me”, so I’ll be going with that until I find a better one.
Now that my gender is covered, I’ll get to the pronouns. I like he/him/his pronouns because they contradict what is established to be the norm according to my biological sex, so having someone refer to me as a boy makes me feel like I’m challenging society’s binary understanding of gender, which of course makes me glad. Until I realize that they are actually labelling me as male because that is what they see me as, and then I can feel uncomfortable. Because of the same reason, she/her pronouns sometimes also make me uncomfortable. Note that this only occurs when the person referring to me doesn’t know about my identity; I have no problem with any pronouns when used by somebody who acknowledges my gender, which is why I usually say I don’t mind which pronouns one uses after coming out as genderqueer. Any neutral pronouns are great, though I’m more used to hearing they/them/theirs.
The two exceptions are French, in which I prefer she/her pronouns, and Japanese, in which I prefer he/him/his.
And if you want a short Catalan lesson, when speaking I use she/her pronouns to refer to myself, but I usually write using he/him/his. In English this isn’t necessary, but in Spanish and Catalan we end all adjectives with one termination or another depending on our gender. For example, “I am tired” in English upholds no gendering, but in Catalan it would be “estic cansat” if you’re male or “estic cansada” if you’re female. There is no neutral form. But since all substantives have a gender (table is feminine, tree is masculine) I can sometimes manage to make sentences that don’t gender myself, since the adjective then refers to the substantive and not to me (“I am a happy person”: “sóc una persona contenta”). Of course this is difficult to think of quickly enough when speaking, so sometimes I talk with both he/him/his pronouns and she/her pronouns in the same sentence, just to confuse people.
So which pronouns do you all prefer? And how do you identify gender-wise? I challenge you to try and describe it (if not in the comments in a post maybe?). I hope I managed to make some sense…