Coming Out / finding a label

[leora]

I found a label that seems to fit me a whole lot better than the previous ones I have had. I don't think my gender is female. I think agender fits much, much better. I just didn't realize it was an option. I've never liked being identified as female... actually, female is okay, but I really dislike being identified as a girl, lady, woman, gal,

Comments

[lady_angelina]

Yeah... I think agender is the best way to describe me, too, even though most of the world sees me as female. =P The odd thing is, while unlike you, I want to be more male than I actually am, I don't feel like I really fit into either the "female" or "male" classifications very much. I'm not "girly" by any stretch, but at the same time, I don't think too many people would ever mistake me for a male, even if I had a gender neutral or "male sounding" name or LJ username (and speaking of which, I've been wanting to change my username but just didn't know what to).

Apparently, I can understand the "male" mindset well enough to write and roleplay as male characters believably enough (or at least, no one's told me that I write them like women in men's bodies or somesuch)... but I can't always relate to it on a personal level. On the other hand, I've had a great deal of trouble writing believable female characters that weren't really oddball in some way, and I have trouble relating to the so-called "female mindset," so... *shrug*

[leora]

On LJ. when people don't know someone's sex, the default assumption tends to be female. But I used to hang out on IRC, and I was an IRC operator and a CSop (don't worry too much about what those terms means, but it meant that I had a lot of authority for both helping users, dealing with abuse, and generally fixing problems). And on IRC, the default assumption was very heavily weighted toward assuming people were male. So, people would sometimes seek me out simply because I was flagged as an oper (there is an easy way to search for opers, plus I hung out in help channels to be findable), but they didn't know me. Sometimes they would assume I was male. Especially since I learned early into my IRCing that it was useful to have a gender-neutral nickname. Having a female nickname made it too likely I'd get hit on, and sometimes as an IRC oper I had to sit in a channel to sort of babysit it when it was having problems. The channel could be any sort of channel allowed on the network that was having problems. This meant sometimes sitting in

[siderea]

Does this occasion a change of pronouns?

[leora]

No. I do kind of wish English had a convenient common gender-neutral pronoun, and I've tried using some in the hopes they'd catch on, but it hasn't seemed to take. I'm fine with people using whatever gender pronouns they want for me, and I am most used to the female ones. If a really good option existed, I might care more, but mostly, I'm just pleased to see there is an easier way to describe something I've tried to describe before with less good attempts and in more pieces.

Thank you for asking though. :)

[kirinn]

I tend to favor singular "they" as being the gender-neutral pronoun most likely to succeed in the long run. It even has some historical precedent, before things got all prescriptivist.

Anyway, general thumbs-up at ditching the gender binary. I never feel like I have much use for it, either. I don't generally feel like I fall far enough outside what society wants to categorize as "male" to bother with different labels, but I still enjoy undermining the binary whenever possible.

[leora]

I don't mind people using "they", but it doesn't really have precedent with a known individual subject. It has precedent with a known generic subject such as "If a doctor is going to make a good diagnosis, they should be sure to examine you well." But if you're talking about a single named individual, I don't think it does

[joreth]

I use a variety of different words, depending on who I'm talking to and what point I want to get across. Genderqueer, androgynous, gay-male-in-female-body, there was a term I saw once but can't find it now that specifically meant feeling "male" inside a female body but without any desire to change the female body. I liked that term and felt it described me best, but I can't remember it

[leora]

That reminds me a bit of when I was college-age and able to actually see the difference between a man dressing as a woman and a man wearing a dress. It's a very different thing. Sometimes a man is just a man who is wearing a dress, and it's not at all a man trying to look like a woman or dressing like a woman.

[finding_helena]

Definitely. I knew a guy in college who liked to wear skirts sometimes. He got up during orientation and said something about it--how he was not trying to cross-dress or pass as female, he just liked skirts and thought they were comfortable. He had a beard, shortish hair, didn't wear makeup, and otherwise looked within the realm of typically male. Nobody was going to mistake him for a woman, and that wasn't his intention.

[chaos_by_design]

I've often wondered about this sort of thing for myself, but haven't come to any sort of conclusion yet personally.

But I did want to comment and thank you for posting.

[diatom]

For the record: there is a FtA option, in the trans world: female to asexual. :)

[leora]

Huh, I've been hearing the term asexual used to describe people who are sexually-oriented toward not having sex with anyone (which is not my orientation). So, that's a bit of a term-space collision. Both of those concepts are certainly important and useful concepts, but quite different.

The terms are going to need to trickle into society and settle into single meanings or else some very big misimpressions can happen.