I had a lovely dinner with a dear friend the other day, and we got to talking about queerness and sexuality as we often do. I knew that my friend identifies as non-binary but we’d never really talked in depth about their journey to understanding their identity as agender.
Just in case:
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denoting or relating to a person who does not identify themselves as having a particular gender.“one of the mistakes is the presumption that an agender person must also be asexual”
They talked about things that have helped them with conceptualizing their gender identity, and I found what they were saying so illuminating that I actually took notes. When I got home, I used a page in my bullet journal to expand my messy shorthand into a list that I find extremely helpful in both my endeavors to simply understand my fellow humans better and in developing interventions for my non-binary clients:
Things that have helped with conceptualizing of and living as an agender person:
-> Thinking of gender as a very rather than a noun; it’s something I do rather than something I am. Gender doesn’t resonate as an identity.
-> Realizing I am an agender person who enjoys performing gender.
-> Finding ways to choose my femininity rather than taking the one that was handed to me. Reclaiming fem pronouns in the context of a queer, colonized lineage.
-> Understanding my dysphoria as social dysphoria rather than gender dysphoria. Reminding myself that when I feel social dysphoria, it is because of society’s skewed ideas about bodies, and I do not need to change my identity or presentation in order to better fit into these skewed frameworks.
-> Sitting with the truth that there is nothing wrong with my body and that society doesn’t get to decide who I am.
-> Oppressive ideas of gender are society’s problem; it doesn’t serve me to deny parts of myself, because there is nothing wrong with them
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