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Yeah. This one has been brooding since my friend L made a joke which implied that I was agender. I don't think I would be so pissed about it if this hadn't happened before, and if I haven't occasionally heard her use "asexual" as a shorthand for "agender."
I'm not even sure where this comes from. Admittedly, most of the real-life people I know conflate asexuals with me, probably because I am the only open ace most of them have ever met. (Probably not the only ace, if that old 1% Category X figure is correct, but I am one of few lucky enough to have discovered AVEN and patient enough to be Asexual In Public.) And I am not the most effeminate of women. One of the things I love most about my asexuality is the freedom it gives me to defy whatever social norms I want to, which means in practice that if I feel lazy, I'm damn well going about my day in sweatpants and a t-shirt. I don't wear jewelry often because fiddling with it is counterproductive. I don't have pierced ears because I'm too afraid of having to sit still and let someone do something to me that hurts, and I don't feel like the shiny things are quite worth it. And I do have short hair, because I am lazy in the mornings and I hate things on my neck.
And then there's all the other things about me that don't code conventionally female. I don't get emotions very well, least of all my own, and I'm no good at negotiating tricky social situations which can't be solved with profuse expressions of fondness. I am fairly aggressive and have no hesitation about getting angry and pushing to get my way, or enforcing my boundaries, or reacting badly if someone crosses one. I like my world to be ordered, logical, and routine. (Most of those traits, ironically enough, I seem to have inherited from my mother, who I greatly respect and think is a totally awesome woman and who not-so-incidentally seems to have a lot of panicky issues related to her femininity.)
But the thing is, I'm still cis-female even if I don't play to the stereotypes. I identify as strongly female, actually. I resonate with strong female characters and stories. It's a little difficult to elaborate on this properly, actually; it makes me feel sharply for transgender people who don't fall neatly on the extreme of their gender presentation, because if it's this difficult for me to impress upon others how strongly I feel that I am a woman, not a neuter, how difficult must it be for someone like me in their presentation who was still born with the wrong genitalia? I am a daughter and a sister and if I ever choose to parent children I will be a mother, with all the weight that that implies. I think like a woman and I feel like a woman and I am a goddamn woman irrespective of whether I actually want to copulate with anyone.
And it makes me angry, because that's my history and my identify and my sense of who I am which is getting erased. I have been raised as a woman, I have all the glass ceilings and drawbacks that being a woman brings, in every way that counts (and some that don't) I am a goddamn woman, and it pisses me off that a few people I know seem to have a hard time recognizing that. I thought we left this gender-essentialist crap behind in the fifties, where it belonged. Guess not.
I'm not even sure where this comes from. Admittedly, most of the real-life people I know conflate asexuals with me, probably because I am the only open ace most of them have ever met. (Probably not the only ace, if that old 1% Category X figure is correct, but I am one of few lucky enough to have discovered AVEN and patient enough to be Asexual In Public.) And I am not the most effeminate of women. One of the things I love most about my asexuality is the freedom it gives me to defy whatever social norms I want to, which means in practice that if I feel lazy, I'm damn well going about my day in sweatpants and a t-shirt. I don't wear jewelry often because fiddling with it is counterproductive. I don't have pierced ears because I'm too afraid of having to sit still and let someone do something to me that hurts, and I don't feel like the shiny things are quite worth it. And I do have short hair, because I am lazy in the mornings and I hate things on my neck.
And then there's all the other things about me that don't code conventionally female. I don't get emotions very well, least of all my own, and I'm no good at negotiating tricky social situations which can't be solved with profuse expressions of fondness. I am fairly aggressive and have no hesitation about getting angry and pushing to get my way, or enforcing my boundaries, or reacting badly if someone crosses one. I like my world to be ordered, logical, and routine. (Most of those traits, ironically enough, I seem to have inherited from my mother, who I greatly respect and think is a totally awesome woman and who not-so-incidentally seems to have a lot of panicky issues related to her femininity.)
But the thing is, I'm still cis-female even if I don't play to the stereotypes. I identify as strongly female, actually. I resonate with strong female characters and stories. It's a little difficult to elaborate on this properly, actually; it makes me feel sharply for transgender people who don't fall neatly on the extreme of their gender presentation, because if it's this difficult for me to impress upon others how strongly I feel that I am a woman, not a neuter, how difficult must it be for someone like me in their presentation who was still born with the wrong genitalia? I am a daughter and a sister and if I ever choose to parent children I will be a mother, with all the weight that that implies. I think like a woman and I feel like a woman and I am a goddamn woman irrespective of whether I actually want to copulate with anyone.
And it makes me angry, because that's my history and my identify and my sense of who I am which is getting erased. I have been raised as a woman, I have all the glass ceilings and drawbacks that being a woman brings, in every way that counts (and some that don't) I am a goddamn woman, and it pisses me off that a few people I know seem to have a hard time recognizing that. I thought we left this gender-essentialist crap behind in the fifties, where it belonged. Guess not.