Retroversy

Happy Pride month, everyone. Let’s talk about gender.

Check my passport and you’ll see an “M” there. Does that mean I’m a man? My answer would be a resounding “… I guess?” I was assigned male at birth. I don’t necessarily wish things had been different, but do I feel like a man? Do I care about living up to expectations people have about me, as a supposed man? Not at all. If anything, I relate more to traditionally “feminine” virtues like, I dunno, kindness and creativity than to traditionally “masculine” ones like courage or ambition. I have always related more to female characters in fiction than to male ones. I have always liked playing as a girl, first when play-acting all kinds of popular franchises on the elementary school playground, then in video games, and as of recently, in tabletop games as well. In a way, it has always felt obvious to me. Playing a character of another gender immediately puts a distance between you and them, makes them something other than what you are outside of the game — which to me has always been a part of the appeal of play.

On the other hand, plenty of other aspects of my gender expression are traditionally more closely associated with masculinity than with femininity. I like action movies and hearty meals and heavy rock music. I dress like your average subject on Queer Eye, and putting on make-up or having a skincare routine sounds to me like little more than a hassle. I have longer than average hair, sure, but that’s mostly because I greatly dislike getting a haircut and am permanently stuck in the era when indie rockers with that kind of hair were on top of the world. Suffice to say, it’s certainly true that that “M” isn’t exactly dragging me down. Being called “he” or “sir” or “dude” doesn’t cause me anguish, even if being forced to pick “sir” or “madam” whenever I want to have something delivered to my house ticks me off in that “what difference does it make” kind of way.

Does that mean I’d be better off identifying as non-binary or genderfluid, then? Once again, I can’t muster up a more enthusiastic response than “… I guess?” I feel no particular need to change the way I dress, and I don’t think there is anything people can start calling me that would make me feel more like “me” than whatever people call me now. None of these things are a prerequisite for identifying as non-binary, of course, and people who do so without dressing androgynously or using gender-neutral pronouns still deserve every ounce of respect. In the strictest sense, I am non-binary. I do not believe in a gender binary, nor do I want to be subject to one. But I also don’t feel as if it would change anything for me to explicitly change my identity to reflect these beliefs.

That said, I can’t talk about this without addressing the elephant in the room. I was assigned male at birth, and have to acknowledge that with that comes a heck of a lot of privilege. As someone who is perceived as a cis, straight, white male, I am considered the default, and as such I have never experienced my gender, let alone my lack-of-a-gender being used against me. I will admit that makes it easy for me to go out there and say things like “gender isn’t a part of how I live my life”. Nevertheless, Jessie Gender’s recent videos on the topic of “male socialization” invited their viewers to explore their gender, or at least think about the concept of it all, even if they have felt comfortable in their being-perceived-as-male all their lives. So I did, and this is the conclusion I have come to.

In the end, of the existing labels, “agender” is probably the one that fits me best, in that the concept of gender doesn’t really factor into how I experience myself, or live my life. I dress in a masculine fashion and am referred to as “he” or “sir” or “dude” because at this point, that’s how I’ve come to be comfortable with being seen. Yet I don’t care, nor would I care if someone were to prefer calling me by different pronouns or gendered monikers. I would, however, be upset if someone tried to argue that my masculinity is anything more than an outfit I decided to throw on because its familiar, or because it doesn’t tickle or chafe, or because I just didn’t feel like digging through my other clothes that day. I would be upset if someone assumed that my masculinity is a part of who I am at my core, or can be used as an argument to make any kind of assumption about me.

The reason for this is simple. The concept of gender is more than how I experience gender. The fact that I don’t particularly care about it doesn’t mean it can’t be extremely important to others. My refusal to stop thinking about gender and how I experience it, despite the fact that I am for the most part what you could argue is a fairly typical cisgender male, is an ideological impulse. It is important to think about gender, even if it is no part of your personal frame of reference, because doing so acknowledges that this gender binary that society enforces is a form of violence. Nevertheless, this perpetuation in spite of, well, overwhelming scientific and sociological evidence to the contrary, is to me an ideological injustice rather than an obstacle to my personal self-actualization. It is something that should not exist, but it doesn’t feel to me like it is for my sake that it shouldn’t exist.

In other words, those Matrix movies sure were on to something, huh?