I know it’s late and isn’t still May 19 for everyone but it still is for me where I am. Hopefully it is for you too.
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don’t need a gender to be a slut
My genitals are like a mystery surprise box.
Wakko is nonbinary and uses he/him pronouns?
It would appear so. Lots of nonbinary people use traditional pronouns.
I’ve been rolling this concept around in My head of the cis-agender and the trans-agender people. Because I’ve met a lot of cis people who don’t have an internal attachment to their gender. I asked them “If you woke up tomorrow with a body of the opposite sex, and everyone remembered you as always having that body, but you still remembered your current body, what would you do?” And they say they’d just get used to it. They identify and present as cis for external benefits, not internal ones. To fit in, or to make romance easier, or just out of habit. They don’t really care. I ask permission to they/them them and they say sure, it doesn’t matter.
But I’ve also met people who have a personal revulsion to the idea of presenting with a gender, or being seen to have a gender. And people who present more androgynously because they’re politically opposed to how much our society is gendered. People for whom it really does matter.
So I think we need to build a linguistic distinction between these two groups. And the best idea I have for the name is, cis-agender and trans-agender.
After a quick search, I found out that the term for what you’re describing seems to be gender apathetic. I’ve met people who seemed a bit apathetic to gender before, so it makes sense that there’s a label for it.
Oh, and don’t forget that non-binary people that use ‘he’ and/or ‘she’ aren’t necessarily gender apathetic. They could, for example, be demigender.
Or … you could let people label or not label themselves, and not worry about that at all.
My wife is very non-binary (moreso than me) and says if anyone tries to put her in a box like that she’ll not talk to them again.
She uses female pronouns because others expect one or the other, especially where we live.
My mum didn’t understand why I was trans, because she’s cis-agender. She thinks being trans is some kind of obsession, and she scolded Me for talking about gender roles with My younger sister, who turned out to be trans. She doesn’t know that having an internal sense of gender affinity is normal. She thinks most cis people are like her.
The conflation of cis-agender people and cis-affinity people is dangerous. It’s harmed My family. We lost a young one to suicide. I’m certain it’s killed other people too. I’m gonna do everything I can to build a better set of tools for discussing gender and helping people find their own truth. Because ignorance costs lives.
It sounds as though there’s too much to unpack here for a simple reply.
Are you saying that sorting agender people into categories will help some of them develop empathy?
Since you’re obviously highly motivated about this, are you campaigning for psychological research (or conducting it yourself) into how many people are agender, and how they treat people with a strong sense of gender?
As an example, one of my exes had a highly autistic son. She went and did a degree in psychology and then became a charity worker that helped autistic people who need living assistance.
You could do something like that, but in trans support,if you want to make the world a better place in memory of your sibling.
Some time ago, I wrote an article on My blog, designed to be read by cis-agender people who feel like My mum does. Since then I’ve shown it to many others, and it is My hope that it has saved or will save a trans person’s life one day.
I’m a politician. My method is to use words to make the world a better place. And if the words don’t exist, I invent them. If the words we have are constraining people’s thought, I deconstruct them. A good politician is an engineer of social constructs.
The question of how many cis people have a gender is an interesting one. But I’m not sure how much good that one number can do. Once we have the number, we still need activists to spread the word. We still have the same steps in front of us to educate the populace and build a better social reality.
And transphobic cis-agender people aren’t My passion. They’re not the biggest problem I see affecting trans people. The biggest problem I see affecting trans people is the desire for objective truth.
I don’t think objective truth exists. I think consensus reality is a social construct. I’m a postmodernist. But more than that, I think the pursuit of objective truth is dangerous. White culture teaches us to seek out The Answer to any question, which can be verified independent of anyone’s feelings. To be impartial, to reach conclusions without a perspective of our own.
And I think that’s dangerous. I used to think that way, and I was miserable. I thought the question “what gender am I?” had an objective answer, and it was the one My parents and My teachers and My doctors said. But I was wrong. My life finally, truly started, and I first became truly happy, when a bunch of memes on Reddit said “if you want to be a woman, you can just do that.” The notion that I can just do the things I want, and I don’t have to find an objective reason for My actions, has transformed My life.
And it’s not just about being trans. Doing what I want lead Me to realise I’m otherkin and embrace My species. It lead Me to plurality and meeting the other beings inside My head. It brought Me to the creatures I wanted to make a family with. All of it, unreal. Unconforming to anyone’s standard of objective reality.
And I still see transphobic people saying “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” Well fuck you, objective facts don’t exist. We should be building a collective understanding of the world starting from our feelings.
It shows that you’re a politician, that was a lot of words.
I’ve met a lot of cis people who don’t have an internal attachment to their gender.
That is apagender. I’m one of those. They’re not technically cis, but since they’re fine with presenting as the gender they were born as, there’s not much difference.
That’s a silly etymology. The word apathetic comes from a (no) path (emotion) y (state). Apathy: the state of no emotions.
Apagender is the a plus half the path. You can’t just use half the root word, it’ll make the nerds upset. Like Me! You’ve gotta at least have a (no), path (emotion), and gen (type) in the final word. Like agenpath: someone who doesn’t care about labels.
A good word etymology is important because it tells people what the word means as soon as they hear it. Anyone literate in English or Latin can intuit what agenpath means.
That’s just a term that people have used for what you’re describing; I didn’t create it. Personally, I find “agenpath” rather inscrutable.
That’s really interesting, I like that concept. You explained it really well!
I’ve always just called those people cis by default.
If gender’s what’s in my pants, than my gender is poop
preach
not knowing it’s a thing and celebrating a day late seems like the most appropriate way to do an agender holiday honestly.
