#and who made a STEM is a Spectrum Like Asexuality joke when i joked about archaeology being a fake STEM subject. role model

[professionalowl]

i love aspec people sooo much

[falloutboywife]

i want to start this off by saying i am infintitely grateful for all the support i've gotten while i was away, and i cannot express enough how much it means to me to know i have so much support during such a frustrating part of my life, even if i'm only showing you guys one part of it. i cannot tell you enough how thankful i am, and i'm going to respond to as many messages as i can tomorrow because this has taken a lot of time and energy for me to write and piece together emotionally

i definitely think the other week when i made that lengthy post about my identity and my place in online spaces may have been a bit of an overreaction, however while i've had some time to think about it on my own i think that just avoiding tumblr outright is causing me to become pretty insular in how i'm perceiving the entire situation, which isn't made any easier for me considering when i ask my friends who've been seeing it unfold what their opinions on it are, their responses have been pretty mixed.

as a whole, i think that being in online fandoms, as an outspoken artist (outspoken in this sense meaning redacted and fat kid fuckery, both shameful and heretical topics few dare to mention), tends to inflate my ego in a way i don't really find desirable. meaning people who are super kind and friendly towards me and who give me a lot of positive attention, while reassuring and definitely welcomed, tends to lean into people admiring me for reasons i don't really understand, and this can also end up trapping me into a certain role to fulfill in a community because of the kind of attention i tend to reward and validate, i.e. fat kid fuckery in my dms, which leads to the expectation of me being this sort of bastion of hornyposting where all evil (affectionate) thoughts are encouraged and endorsed.

on the other end of the spectrum, and if you know what i'm talking about then you know, i tend to attract a lot of negativity from people i've never interacted with or had any intention of interacting with, and this has been an issue for me pretty much the entire time i've used social media (me adding hornyposting as a facet to my personality is really recent, like i only started doing this late 2017 and i'm really tired of it by now but. again. it's what people expect of me, more on that later), and i'm not entirely sure how to make it stop. granted, when i was a lot younger, i was genuinely an asshole, but i want to stress a very important thing i think very few of my followers on here are aware of

i'm 28 and only just now aware of the fact that i'm autistic, and i was misdiagnosed with bipolar when i was 13 and because none of the treatment or therapy worked, i always thought there was something really wrong with me, so i couldn't actually learn how to cope with a lot of my problems in a productive way until recently. so yeah, i was a jackass when i was younger, and i can be a jackass in private sometimes when i'm under a lot of stress, but having this realization about myself is really helping me a lot on its own

and being autistic, people can think i'm annoying or obnoxious or irritating and that, juxtaposed with content or opinions they might personally disagree with, can make people very angry just inherently. i've spoken with my friends about how i can't seem to shake off any drama that i really, really have nothing to do with or any interest in, and the only ones who could really relate were other autistic people. my own friend actually told me that she thinks this is something i'm just going to have to struggle with my entire life, because even if it's not being horny or advocating for sexual positivty, i'm ALWAYS doing something that will piss someone off

(quick disclaimer: i know some of you are probably going to try to engage in bad faith arguments with me saying that i'm calling all my haters ableist, and if anyone tries to insinuate that this is the conclusion i'm coming to, i'm not only ignoring your ask but blocking you as well. i'm also not answering any asks trying to insinuate that i "need help" simply because of the type of fiction i enjoy, when the issue was HOW i was engaging with it, which i think i have made exceedingly clear.)

i think it's funny that me clearly being into waycest and clearly being into babystump is lost on people to the point where they feel they need to make callout posts "warning" people about the fact that i'm...openly and unabashedly interested in this shit, but the very second i say "actually i'm asexual but i'm glad you guys are so sexually open about yourselves and your interests" i lost more followers than any active campaign trying to cancel me, which is exactly what i fucking mean when i say this is what people expect of me

so i can't really make anyone happy in the current environment i've curated for myself because it is expected of me to maintain this personality and continue engaging in this nature of content regardless of my own personal feelings on the matter, because if i want to break free from it then i risk pissing people off. i also can't just act how i want or make the kind of jokes that i want or enjoy the kind of things i want anyway because simply by having a mental disability that effects how i engage with people socially, i am risking ostracizing myself by pissing the wrong people off and ultimately making things a lot worse than they otherwise would be

however. However. even if this is exactly how i feel, this isn't entirely a situation that is exclusive to this current blog, and when i said in the beginning i was taking this too seriously, i still mean that, and i think that my own personal problems with being in online fandoms stem from external factors that have nothing to do with this website. i'm almost 30 and a lot of my life this past decade has been very stagnant due to severe depression, with no real progress towards furthering my life in any meaningful way, and i think that what i was really frustrated with when i made that post was this very factor. in conjunction with this, i use online spaces a way to try to find an open and accepting community of people i can befriend and be myself in, because my undiagnosed autism has historically made it difficult for me to really socialize with people in a productive way that didn't make me feel like an outcast. i think a combination of the fact that online spaces are becoming increasingly more difficult for me to adapt to, as well as incresingly unfulfilling, adding to the lack of fulfillment in the rest of my life, was the subconscious realization i came to when i decided to make that post and take a break from tumblr for a bit. i'm frustrated that i have no fulfillment in my life, and i can no longer find it in online spaces that i used to enjoy and find so much meaning in

this being said, i'm actually doing shit with my life at long last. i'm enrolled in classes for an english degree, and i'm going to subsequently get an associates in creative writing that i'll be able to complete in a single semester after the fact, leaving me with two whole degrees under my belt that i can use in developing my future in the literary world. i'm taking my art more seriously as well, although i only post my bandom and lotr drawings on here, and i'm thinking of making an instagram account to start posting my art on there as well, as a sort of portfolio. i'm sick of this ongoing feeling of there being no meaning in my life, and i'm sick of feeling like i'm just wasting away and putting my mind to no use, and the immense joy i got just from seeing my class schedule for the fall semester made me realize that i am an intellectual, i'm an academic, and i'm in love with media and literary studies and this is what i find meaning in. this shit makes me so fucking happy and when i finished the picture of dorian gray the other day i IMMEDIATELY went on a tirade about its themes and symbolism just to myself and that, alone, was so fucking rewarding. i've been watching movies with my friend sweaterangst and just describing the themes of the horror used in the fucking texas chainsaw massacre movies made me feel so fulfilled even if he might have barely been listening LMAO i find meaning in seeking out complex and thought-provoking pieces of work and i

absolutely

am not getting that being on tumblr and talking about how i'm gonna let the fat kid deepfry me at the state fair (affectionate) (delusional) (severe)

with that being said, yes, i'm still asexual and i don't get fulfillment from purely sexual discussion, but i think i'm still gonna be answering asks about the sexy stuff so long as i find it engaging to a degree. i'm gonna start trying to use the guys you say as creative writing exercises because in the beginning that's what the fucking smut started as LMAO but i lost the plot a while ago and just let myself stagnate, like i said. i'm still gonna blog about bandom stuff but now that i have no reason to treat social media like it's all i have, and now that i'm breaking out of my depressed state in more meaningful ways, i think i'm gonna start blogging about a lot more things too and try to start having fun on this site again.

five nights at fat kid's is back, baby

[ayy-spec]

Anything to Add?

The final question in this survey was a write-in section for people to leave any additional comments. 113 people responded.

Important/Particularly Interesting Comments

• I hope this goes well for you because you seem nice and if you have any advice for new to the community 15 year olds like me, don't be afraid to share because I'm trying to embrace my sexuality as much as possible but it can be hard when I don't know where to go or turn to to find what I'm supposed to do and where to ask questions and just fully embrass this part of me and it can be hard when I don't even know many if any aspecs so representation is great and it is helpful to hear your experiences and how you handle certain parts, so just keep doing what your doing because it is making a difference [note: 🥺🥺😭]

• i often consider myself more as just aroace rather than aro and ace seperately so i prefer seeing the blue and orange aroace flag over the individual aro and ace flags

• I don't really shorten my identity often with aroace, only when im feeling very romance repulsed and its been a while since I felt romantic attraction. I am a pan-demiromantic asexual. My pan label makes me feel more connected to the lgbt+ community bc it feels like my nonbinary and intersex status doesn't count either. I know I belong in the queer community, but the lgbt+ community is so sexual orientation focused.

• Thank you for having a wide variety of labels to choose from in the options!! I don't see the term aegoromantic very often on things, it feels nice to be known I guess haha

• Thank you for this, i recently started thinking about being in arospec and it was so relieving, all this time i thought something was wrong or maybe i was broken. I'm still trying to learn more about it, and I'm grateful for people willing to teach and help

• didn't realize I hadn't experienced sexual attraction until I finally did and was like "OH, no wonder all my other relationships felt like I was playing pretend"

• I dont often tell people I'm gray aroace. Not because of shame or it not being "as important" (I'm a gay trans dude) but I think because I just feel its a very intimate part of myself, as well as my romanticism and sexuality (in terms of like asexuality) feeling as though it doesn't always need a label. I'm fine just being myself most of the time, a lot of labels can be tricky for myself I think. I'm happy the label exists nonetheless though because Its nice to know I'm not the only one who feels like this.

• I'm queer! But if I'm getting down to the bones of it, I'm pan/ace. Still relearning how to be proud of that, after The Grand Clusterfuck years back.

• even though I would be considered to have an alloromantic orientation, alloace isn't really a term I feel any strong connection or attachment to

• i'd like to add that i do consider myself alloaro and use that label openly but i'd also not consider myself 100% allosexual. i'm questioning my sexuality but even if i do end up feeling more solidly ace-spec i'd still use the alloaro label

• Idk who else does this or if this is interesting enough to write down, but I thought I would! I use Aroace as a label. Other, smaller labels inside that would probably fit me better! Aroace feels too big, like it doesn't *really* define exactly who I am. But at the same time, I prefer using it because more people know what Aroace means (at least compared to myrromantic and myrsexual). I use Aroace so the public can define me. I don't typically use it around my close friends 'cause they already know my idiosyncrasies and where I really am. They already made their own definitions for me, so I don't have to make one for them!

• I'm still figuring myself out, so I leave myself at the blanket terms and hopefully everything'll work out in the end

The rest of the responses are below:

Comments Alerting Me About Typos (that I was then able to resolve)

• There's a typo in your "sexual orientation labels" question, because you have Aroflux listed and not Aceflux, but I didn't want to confuse things so I put Aceflux (which I do use) under Other. I also am polysexual (I flux between polysexual and asexual but I am always aegosexual) but didn't know if I should but it under Other anywhere since it's not an acespec label. I consider my polysexuality tied to me being aego/aceflux though, which is why I mention it here.

• the sexual orientations options are the same of the romantic ones ( for example, there's arovague and arospike in the sexual cathegory)

People Clarifying/Expounding Upon Their Own Identity/Experiences

·  to clarify: i'm unsure whether or not i am demi or aceflux; so i use graysexual since both labels technically fall under that as an umbrella term.

• I’m still a confused gorl and I really only know that I don’t like sex it sexual acts but I do like romantic and sensual acts

• Sex/romance repulsed and I have aesthetic attraction

• I'm also animesexual and fictosexual (and romantic I guess but I don't like using the SAM for myself).

• I have never seen most of these labels, haha, I expect one of them is the one I always forget that's for being aro due to past trauma but people always assume it's romantic/sexual trauma so I don't use it and thus have forgotten it...but that's the essay I'm not usually up for writing: was biromantic but then had several awful life events on top of each other and had a complete breakdown and have been aro since. Unclear if it's permanent but it's been 14 years now. [note: I believe this person is thinking of caedromantic]

• I tend to use the word ace more than asexual because it's shorter, but I don't feel more favorably about one than the other.

• i can't tell the difference between platonic vs romantic attraction, and am unsure if people i have "liked" in the past was romantic, platonic, or a fake stemming from peer pressure.

• Also Gender-Neutral/Agender

• I’m gray-aro but identify more with being biromantic even though I know I’m aro-spec. As for sexual orientation, I’m just completely ace xD

• The fact I'm still trying to figure out my gender makes it harder to pinpoint exactly what my orientations are :( but I usually say I'm queer, and if it's safe: Bi Ace, and if I can get more specific: biromantic grey-asexual

• I also use a platonic label (biplatonic). I use it not in a friendship way, but more like in a QPR way.

• Thank you for doing this! My identity on the aro/ace spectrums has shifted a lot over the years and while I’ve just settled on aroace and queer for the most part, this community is so diverse and under appreciated. People who find joy in/identify with micro-identities are valid and deserve representation!

• I'm still figuring out my romantic orientation but it's looking less allo by the day lmao

• My romantic label is very fluid, but in terms of sexual labels, very sex repulsed Asexual

• Content with just Aspec cause it's difficult to pinpoint anything but cool with both asexual/ace and aromantic/aro

• I think of my romantic orientation as halfway between aromantic and homoromantic

• I'm a polyamorous ace, if there'd be a way to include that sometimes that'd be neat :)

• I am still questioning my identity

• I used to identify as 100% ace but now I have no idea other than that I seem to be pan-ace in some way shape or form so my identity is ???people???

• Sex/romance repulsed and I have aesthetic attraction

• to clarify: i'm unsure whether or not i am demi or aceflux; so i use graysexual since both labels technically fall under that as an umbrella term.

Queer Rights

• Trans rights, baybee 🤠🦂

• I just hope a-spec and aro-spec people will experience less negativity and hate this year <3

• Aspec rights!!

• aspec rights, baby

People Being Nice to Me  (I appreciated this thank you everyone!!)

·  :)

• Have a good day

• Uhhh, cool survey, nice to see a lot of labels.... good job! Nothing I have to add, it was great

• Have fun chief, thank you for your work

• Thank you for creating!

• thanks for the survey! I don't know too many aspec in person so I love participating in things like this about the ace/aro community!

• Thank you for what you’re doing

• just hi :)

• thanks!!

• I really love your blog! Reading your posts always makes me happy :) [note: thank you!]

• Good luck, have a nice day !

• I hope you're having a good day :)

• you're lived and valid af!! have a great day!!!

• Thank you for all your hard work i really appreciate it ☺️

• Drink some water Right Now OP

• Nope, :> hope the best for you.

• Cool survey, 10/10 would survey again.

• 💛

• Have a nice day uwu

• Nope! Have a nice day!

• Thank you for making pride flag edits! They're really nice! [note: thank you!!]

• nope, but this is really cool!!

• ❤️

• Have a good day.

• I think this survey idea is super cool! Definitely a great way to see what sort of aspec people are on tumblr :)

• You are doing the lords work

• Thank you for asking us.

• good luck!

• This is really cute idea :)

• I hope you're having a nice day!

• Good luck in your endevours!

• Thank you for making our community visible!

• Have a good day :3

• Have a good day!!

• Keep doing great stuff!

• Thank you for all the positivity I get from your blog! It's super helpful, keep it up :) [note: thank you!!]

• thanks for doing this. recognition is always nice

• Have fun <3

• Lots of love 💛

• This is a cool project, thanks for doing it and good luck! :)

People Saying They Love Me (and I love you, random a-specs)

·  i love you OP!!!!!

• love you, hope you have a great day

An A-Spec Person Being Rude to Other A-Specs

• If you enjoy sex with your romantic partner then you are not asexual

A Person Who Is Not A-Spec Being Rude To A-Specs

• sweetie im sorry that you're so insecure that you feel like you have to make up new identities to feel better about yourself. if you are a lesbian or bisexual please know that you are welcome in the community, but other than that making thousands of microlabels like this makes a huge joke out of what was once an important and respected group. nobody takes us seriously anymore because of this shit. does labelling your identity like this really help you with anything? demisexual and fraysexual and all this are just fancy words for normal human feelings that everyone has. there is no need to microlabel it.

Other

· [variations of “no” (12)]

• not sure that helps lmao but still hope it does. all the best

• Axolotls (or as I like to call them, asexulotls) are amazing and I love them [Note: the man in question]

• Sorry, I can't remember the names of any blogs that do edits

• Ok random but the colors of the aro/ace flag? The blue and orange one? They’re gorgeous.

• I'm not so sure if I should use the aroace flag, I feel comfortable using both aro and ace flags, but I don't like the colors for the aroace flag :c [note: these are in chronological order, it’s a total coincidence that these comments are together]

• Curious to see where the survey goes

• It would be cool if you could also do some aplatonic-spectrum edits!

• there were fully half of the terms on that list that i had never even seen before. like, everything below litho down to no label was entirely new to me. at some point i will look into those! (but not right now, my brain is full enough at the moment)

• actually had to look up the majority of these orientations. Thank you for the opportunity to learn!

• Gonna reblog and follow and hopefully learn a bit more, about others and myself

Note: The only comment that is not listed in order is the first comment, which I put at the top because I found it the most important. It’s so important that kids and teens have space to explore their identity and learn about themselves. The reason I made this blog in the first place was because I was 19 and working on figuring out my gender and sexuality. Now that I’m a bit older and understand things better, I’m so glad that I’m able to help people in this way. 

I make it a point to be very openly queer in my life and at work because I need LGBTQ+ people, especially youths, to know that we’re here. I’m lucky that I live somewhere that I can be visibly queer and speak about it openly. We are everywhere, and there’s more of us than you think!

Something that I really like about the comments at the top is that they show how diverse we are, and how people use words differently. Some people feel like they’re more aroace than aromantic and asexual separately, and others consider their romantic and sexual orientations to be completely different things.

I definitely relate to the person who identifies are myrromantic and myrsexual with their friends but just says aroace when speaking with people they don’t know as well. I believe a lot of people use different words depending on who they’re speaking with.

[gretchensinister]

Mostly About Being Queer, And A Little Bit About Why Trying To Police That Word Is BS

Hey everyone, I know that this might seem like kind of an odd time to post something like this essay about my identity, given other real-life stuff, but I actually wrote it a couple weeks ago and just finished reading it over now. And I still want to say the things in it, so I am.

This is a long piece, about 6000 words.

All this is kind of a knot in my mind, so forgive me if it doesn’t come out like a 5-paragraph essay.

Right. I’m going to start off with sexuality. If you follow me you probably know I’m asexual. I didn’t know about asexuality until my time on tumblr, and I first noticed conversations about asexuality shortly after I created my blog, in early 2013. Luckily, this was during a time when the posts I saw were mostly either explanations of what asexuality was, memes and jokes about being ace, and posts stating clearly that the A in LGBTQIA+ (and other versions of the acronym that included the A) stood for asexual, not ally. The atmosphere I encountered at that time was highly inclusive. Remarks that aces shouldn’t be in relationships with allosexual* people, and suchlike, were met with wide rebuttal.

All this was incredibly important to me for a number of reasons. First, learning that asexuality was a possibility freed me from the stress of an assumed future which included a sexual relationship with a man. Which was especially a relief since I had never met a man in real life, in person, that I had wanted to have sex with. Also, at the time of learning about asexuality, learned about the split attraction model, which is used to describe situations in which romantic orientation and sexual orientation are different. (I didn’t think that much about my romantic orientation at first, though.)

Anyway, the point is that I was so relieved that there was a recognized, non-pathologized “none of the above” option for sexuality. There was no point in the future in which I would need to spend needless time and effort using medical means to make myself feel sexual attraction. I didn’t need to care about sex!

However, however: the split attraction model had some other interesting consequences. Let’s back up. Previous to learning about asexuality, I assumed I was straight, because that’s what you do in a heteronormative society. But given my lack of attraction to men, I did wonder if I was, perhaps, attracted to women.

I should note that at this time I was living on my own in a “blue dot” city, was in grad school for literature, and had recently participated in planning and presented at a Queer Poetics conference. The environment was about as comfortable as it could be in the 2010s for a woman to discover she was a lesbian.

So. Before I knew about asexuality, I carefully considered if I wanted to have sex with women. I did not. So, I concluded that I must be straight. But with the split-attraction model, things changed. Now, knowing that romantic attraction without sexual attraction was a possibility, I could look at my feelings for certain close friends I had over the years in a different light. Using the possibilities provided by the split-attraction model, I was able to see that a few of these friendships had transformed into crushes of various strengths and durations. The knowledge of asexuality and the split attraction model allowed me to recognize that my feelings had been real and romantic even though they had no sexual component.

I should pause here for a moment, because I’m not getting the sequence of events quite right. There was something else that was going on at the time in which I was learning about asexuality.

I was also getting to know a woman (@marypsue) through tumblr, and we rapidly formed a friendship. When she, rather reclusive with selfies at the time, sent me one via sumbit, my heart skipped a beat. She was so much more beautiful than I could have guessed. I expressed this in an awkward way and we continued our friendship—all quite regular things, like writing each other stories, sending each other cards and letters, and generally being oblivious and ridiculous. We talked about meeting, and when an incident caused her to be absent from tumblr for a while (something that scared me maybe as much as I’ve ever been scared) we exchanged emails to have a more reliable means of communication with each other. Some more time passed. She mentioned on a few occasions having a crush on someone. She clarified that she was interested in women. This was notable info for me, but I thought it was for all the wrong reasons. I was so glad of our close friendship that I didn’t like to think of becoming secondary to whoever she ended up dating. (Because obviously the person one dates should be one’s closest friend, I thought—and, also, that of course as soon as she revealed her crush that person and she would become girlfriends at once. After all, she was and is wonderful.) I even, in the preliminary part of this process, wondered if, based on our communication, her crush was on me. But no, I told myself. I wasn’t a possible romantic prospect for her. And by even thinking she might have a crush on me, wasn’t I doing that bad thing that straight girls did? That is, learning that another girl wasn’t straight and then immediately assuming she was interested in me. After all, I didn’t have any romantic interest in women, did I? (And if I did, so what? I was open about being ace. Who would want me as a partner? And, and, I lived so far away from her. Of course her crush would be someone she saw every day.)

She sent me a necklace, among other gifts, for my birthday. By fortunate coincidence, I was reading a Jane Austen novel at this time (I forget which one) and while it wasn’t my favorite, it did include an episode in which one of the characters debates whether or not she should wear a necklace a young man gave her, as this would imply a romantic attraction between them. I was getting ready for work one day and I saw the necklace within that context. And then, basically, I shrugged and put it on anyway.

This was after I had sent her a long, rambling email from work, stating my wish to talk to her much more than tumblr made convenient. And I included my phone number with that email. When she first texted me, her reply was much more nervous than I had expected. After all, hadn’t I already argued, very convincingly to myself, that she could not possibly be interested in me?

Well, soon enough we were always texting each other good morning, as well as a great many other things. I talked to some other friends a lot in this stage, trying to find out if our conversations indicated friendship or something else. (I think I already knew it was something else.)

Anyway, the point of all this is that when I realized my feelings were indeed romantic, I felt giddy and nervous, because as it was, this was my first romantic relationship. But it all felt very natural, and our growing relationship made me happy.

Knowing that I was ace helped me feel free to explore what I felt towards women (and this one woman in particular). Learning about the vast spectrum of ace identities helped me become aware of the huge variety of ways of being in the realms of sex and romance. It was a good experience for me, because at that time, I did not see posts arguing that certain queer identities were actually wielding all the power of the peri-cis-heteropatriarchy and should be removed from queer groups. Rather, there seemed to me to be a joy in the discovery of queerness. So many people who knew they did not fit the power-position definition of straight (but found it difficult to determine if their attraction to the same or seeming-same binary gender was real and serious) were now finding that they (we) were not broken or sick, that we were part of a community, and the community was larger than we could have hoped for. We’re here, we’re queer, and there’s so many of us.

And this was so good, because once you realize you’re not going to get an A+ at the whole Straight thing, you’re desperate to find out you’re not alone. Because in a heteronormative society, there’s no partial credit in straightness.

And so, what I want to emphasize here is that when I, or anyone else, realizes that they’re not completely fulfilling power position straightness, it’s terrifying in our particular society. And all of us need a community we can go to in order to talk about our shared experiences—and about the experiences we don’t share, but distance us from power position straightness nevertheless. In the queer community, we should be working to validate many, many different ways of being in the realms of sexual orientation, desire, and action (and gender, but I will get to that in the next section) so long as, after careful consideration, they are determined to do no harm.

Exclusionist arguments against all aces and aromantics are wrong, just as exclusionist arguments against bi people, pan people, nonbinary people, and any number of microlabeled people are wrong (and, yes, I have seen all of this). They all stem from a rejection of ways of being that the exclusionists don’t understand, a habit of rejection that comes straight from the peri-cis-heteropatriarchy. Exclusion harms our ability to understand the full range of human experience, and it is not something that should be present in the queer community. If the idea grows that some identities are not to be discussed, that “queer” must have limited boundaries, we’ve not only taken the wheels off this community, but we’ve broken the axles and drained the gas tank as well. Forward movement becomes impossible.

I love being ace. I love being queer. I love how the discussion of many, many different kinds of sexuality allowed me to find a community, better understand myself, and find a wonderful girlfriend.

 Now, to talk about gender: if you’re online late at night or closely follow my blog in general, you probably know that I have been questioning my gender. I have not been questioning my gender as long as I have known about my asexuality, but I realized last week that it’s been at least two years since I have been thinking consciously and intensely about my gender. (This is, of course, disregarding everything in my childhood and early years of adulthood that could have been taken as signs. I am not interested in building a narrative of always-knowing, because I honestly didn’t. I still don’t know anything now.)

I began to question my gender after I began to make an effort to erode transphobic patterns of thought in my own mind. And as I worked on that, I ran into the question: how do I know I’m a woman? All my previous answers to this question had relied on transphobic assumptions. I’m a woman because I have a vagina (well, some women don’t). I’m a woman because I have breasts and a vagina and I don’t wish to change this (well, non-op trans men and non-op trans women exist). I’m a woman because I’m not a man (well, what about nonbinary people?). I’m a woman because I’m fine with “she” pronouns (there are many nonbinary people who use “she” pronouns). I’m a woman because I was assigned female at birth and I’m fine with “she” pronouns (there are nonbinary people that fit this description, too). I’m a woman because external society tells me I am, and I haven’t found cause to struggle against that (in a way that seems to be different from the way other women struggle with gendered expectations, anyway).

All of these answers left me unsatisfied. Trans women face incredible struggles to be seen as full and real women. If someone told me I wasn’t a woman, it would cause me distress, but not because a statement like that went against something I fundamentally knew about myself, but because it would mean that I was now being perceived dramatically differently, and that I doubtless would be expected to act differently, dress differently, and just plain be differently. I desire no such drastic changes in my life in regard to my gender, so the change itself would be the problem, not any particular fundamental identification with womanhood, which I cannot find or define within myself. I fully accept that a person’s understanding of their gender comes from within; however, this was a frightening understanding for me, because when I tried to look for gender within myself, I found nothing clear.

I believe in a world that didn’t demand that people have one of two genders (and, even though some small changes have been made, the vast majority of spaces I have been in function on a two-gender model, so let us not deny this) that I would never have picked any. I don’t know how differently I may have acted, or dressed, or felt in this gender-chill world—everything else would be so different to begin with. Or, no, I can say something. I probably would have felt different in this way: I wouldn’t have had to deal with the persistent nagging feeling that I was failing at being a girl, and that I really needed to care about this a lot more than I did.

Now, I know there is discussion to be had here: there are other aspects of myself that could easily have made me feel like I was failing at being a girl even though I was still a girl. I’m asexual. I fail the peri-cis-heteropatriarchy’s “girl” requirement of “is sexually attracted to men and only men.” I’m fat. I fail the peri-cis-heteropatriarchy’s “girl” requirement of “meets current beauty standards as defined by holders of privilege.” However, I have spent enough time reading in the queer community and the fat acceptance community to see plenty of queer women and fat women who are clearly confident that they are women. True, some of them write of their struggles to be seen as women given queer antagonism and fat antagonism, but for them these struggles seemed more focused on demanding to be recognized as the women they knew they were, rather than worrying about being recognized as women because that was “normal.”

You see, that is a significant part of my experience. I have often worried that I was pretending to be a girl, and that sooner or later I would mess up so spectacularly that everyone would find out and there would be some kind of disaster. I was just coasting along in this girl thing on the presence of my vagina! Somewhat an irrational fear, I know. After all, the kind of people I had most to fear would no doubt see my vagina as the final word on whether I was a woman or not.

And yet, I still feel as though I am faking being a woman in some detectable way, even though no one has accused me of such a thing, and it seems unlikely to ever happen.

(I remember reading the theory of gender as performance, and thinking, yes, that’s exactly it! All of gender is just a performance, as false as any theatrical costume! But then the theory went on to state that even if gender was performative, that didn’t mean that it could be taken off like a costume, or that it could be chosen. How confusing! My gender as a woman seemed to be as loose as a costume or any other item of clothing, and I certainly felt that to be a woman was a conscious choice I had to make, rather often, or else I would somehow (my thoughts were not clear on the mechanism) stop being a woman.)

And, now, I think that perhaps the reason I felt as though I was faking being a girl and woman is that I am not in fact a woman. This is a consideration that took me a long time to come to (as you can see in this very long post) for a number of complex reasons. I would now like to discuss these. At first, the main barrier was the ordinary cissexism that says that everyone is born either a boy or a girl and then they stay that way for their whole lives. But after identifying this pattern of thought as something to be continuously rejected, other barriers appeared.

Until a few years ago, I had no idea nonbinary identities existed outside of science fiction. (That is, it seemed being neither male nor female was something only open to aliens.) Again, it wasn’t until I joined tumblr that I heard of identities outside of man and woman as real identities that human beings could be. (Or—well, that is not exactly the case. I seem to recall reading of cultural third genders in some place like a National Geographic, but I correctly identified that these genders were not genders I could use to understand my own experience (I’m white).) I don’t remember exactly what the first things I heard about nonbinary genders were that weren’t part of specific cultures. Perhaps it was an explanation of the term genderqueer. I remember at some point thinking that it seemed like a lot of work to be nonbinary, doubtless because every image I saw of a person identified as nonbinary was a carefully presented and groomed, slightly-masculine androgynous person. It took quite a long time before I saw anything that mentioned that someone could be nonbinary without that look or a desire for that look.

And yet. And yet, in with all the vital information about strategies to reduce body dysphoria, the idea grew that some desire for significant physical change was a necessary part of every non-cis experience. Again, it took me a great deal of time to see anything that suggested otherwise. I was floored when I first read that there were trans men and trans women who did not undergo surgery not because they could not get the surgery, but because they did not want to. Now, I do not want to imply in any way that gender affirmation surgery is not necessary and life-saving. However, I do want to record that it was revelatory to me when I learned that in even some cases it was not desired.

So where was I, after all this? Still in an unclear space. I didn’t find myself having any particular trouble existing as a woman, though I wished again and again that I could live in a world where gender wasn’t that big of a deal. I also ran into another stumbling block (which, I am sure, has served as a lifesaver in others’ situations). The issue I found was this: whenever nonbinary genders were discussed in detail, many, many genders were listed and defined. So many! I read these lists carefully, open to the possibility that I might very well find a gender that matched my experience somewhere there. But I never saw anything that quite fit. So what could I be? No doubt just a cis person doing something appropriative. This was disappointing to me, but, well, I couldn’t take an identity that didn’t fit me just because…I saw other people being trans and other people being nonbinary? Because I wanted to distance myself from the transphobic acts of cis people? These were the suggested motives of the dreaded interlopers, anyway.

But there was one comic I couldn’t forget. It describes the protagonist’s experience not of gender dysphoria, but of gender euphoria. Without exploration, the protagonist would have been able to live without suffering as cis, and yet the protagonist finds peace and joy in new pronouns and presentation. If that was possible, then…oh, but no. I still had no name for what I might be, and no other pronouns seemed better than “she.” (I think, currently, that this stems from my wish for my gender not to draw attention. As long as I keep “she,” most people won’t say a thing—and I can continue to feel like the world’s laziest spy.) And in any case, the only nonbinary #relatable thing I really liked was the gender of the day blog. And I felt guilty about even reading those posts when other people reblogged them, because when I went to that blog to check it out, it was stated specifically that cis people should not follow or reblog. And what else could I be? I had no name for what else I could be. The closest thing was agender, and even that wasn’t quite right.

But the thing is, I don’t want a word for my gender. I don’t want to pick a word and have it give any sort of information about my gender to anyone else. I think, if pressed to pick one, I would choose nonbinary or genderqueer, because these are the broadest terms. But otherwise…I would rather leave the form blank, and fuck whatever data you were trying to get! (Though, this also depends on context, of course. As for face-to-face interactions, everyone who assumes gender will assume I’m a girl. This doesn’t bother me much, because most of the time, I want my gender to be less noticeable; I don’t want people to think about it. Luckily, for everyday wear, the range of possibilities already allowed to me is sufficient for my wants. Of course, my work also includes a gender-neutral uniform, and my previous job didn’t involve talking to the public face to face. Before that, I was in academia. I haven’t been tested very hard on this point.) And it also doesn’t bother me much because I consider myself woman aligned? Woman-adjacent?

I’m not sure exactly what term to use. The term woman-aligned makes me a bit uneasy, since I have seen it used in many cases to, effectively, police which nonbinary people were woman enough to call themselves lesbians. (And to police if women in relationships with nonbinary people could still call themselves lesbians. It got nasty very quickly.) And these arguments always seemed to take place without much input from nonbinary people. Luckily, I’ve seen less of that lately, but that’s because I’ve been carefully curating my online experience. I know others will have seen this kind of thing as well, though, which is why I want to explain what I mean by woman-aligned.

What I mean is that I have lived my entire life being perceived as a girl and woman, and assuming this perception was correct because I knew of no other options (and knew that masculinity was not right for me at all). I will face similar struggles in regard to my body image as a woman, and since I do not see any pressing reason to tell any doctor that I am nonbinary, I will face the same medical system issues that a cis woman would. My tastes run frequently to feminine things/things considered feminine, and I feel a personal interest in defending these things against the idea that masculine things/things considered masculine ought to be considered better/more worthy. Perhaps…(I am having trouble working out exactly how to phrase this without excluding any women)…perhaps another way to say this is that in my current society, which demands a division between men and women in so many areas, I will have experienced/be on the woman’s side far more often than not. Ah, I don’t know if that’s good either.

In a conversation with a friend, I likened gender to air pressure. Society’s ideas about the genders of the people that comprise it are like the general, external air pressure all around us. For cis people, their internal air pressure is in equilibrium with the external air pressure. For trans and nonbinary people, that equilibrium is not present. Either the air pressure is not what was expected, or something else is enabling us to hold our shape other than our own internal air pressure. This last is how I feel. In my experience, gender seems wholly external to me. I would not have had a gender if society had not demanded that everyone be a boy or a girl. In this experience, then, since gender as others experience it and as society demands it be experienced is foreign to me, I find being perceived as a woman and sharing many women’s experiences to be more surreal than odious. The negative things I experience due to the perception of me as a woman would be negative experiences for anyone, and I am glad to join in the fight against them, even if my understanding of myself tells me that I am not strictly a woman.

And aside from all of this, because I don’t want to have this conversation with everyone, I’m going to continue to occupy a woman’s space in the world. People say I’m a woman, and that’s close enough for strangers, so…I’m woman-aligned.

You will notice that throughout the gender portion of my post I have avoided referring to myself as trans, and that I have used the phrase “trans and nonbinary” to refer to everyone who is not cis. I have done this because of fallout from certain terminology arguments and the relative newness of my courage to claim even nonbinary for myself. Frankly, even though the widest definition of trans includes everyone whose gender is different from the one they were assigned at birth, I don’t feel like it would be useful to other people if I claimed the label trans. The fact of my nonbinary-ness is easy to hide—it’s not likely to lead to an emergency. (Yes, I know this is kind of fucked up—I’m not claiming a term because it’s easier for me to be closeted.) Still, I feel that if I, with my particular nonbinary experience, claimed the label of trans, it would muddy the issues faced by trans women and trans men, and all nonbinary people who cannot easily remain closeted. I have no need to access hormone or surgical treatments. When I buy menstrual products, or makeup, or any kind of clothing (because there’s a cultural trope of women buying clothing for their partners who are men, buying some clothes from the men’s section is, oddly, a way in which the true nature of my sexual orientation gets another smokescreen thrown over it) I do not risk outing myself. I have never felt in danger while shopping. I also don’t feel like trans is a word for me to use because I haven’t experienced dysphoria. I feel like if I used the word trans to describe my experiences, I’d be asking for sympathy based on suffering I have not shared in. I recognize that this is messed up, too! Didn’t I reject dysphoria as a qualification for determining if one is cis or not at the beginning of this section? I don’t want trans people to suffer. I think it would be better if dysphoria were treated as soon as possible. Transness absolutely should be able to exist without suffering. Pain isn’t part of transness, it’s part of being trans in a cissexist society. So perhaps that is a better reason for me not to claim trans? It is realistic to acknowledge the violence and other difficulties that trans people face, and to acknowledge that I don’t face this same violence.

Honestly, I don’t know how to approach this. I would hope the trans community is about more than suffering; I would hope that the trans community would continue to exist even in a time after transphobia has been eliminated. But I don’t know if I can say anything about it. I don’t know if my experiences are enough to count. And even though I know some of this comes from transmedicalist gatekeeping, I don’t know if all of it does. In this, I feel as if it is more important to exclude myself than to go somewhere I turn out not to belong. This is a painful way of thinking, but I cannot let it go (yet?).

However, I am more than willing to claim the label nonbinary. A nonbinary existence best describes my experience, and I would gladly fight anyone who would deny that part of my experience. I am not a man who hasn’t come to terms with that yet. I am not a woman (all the time or totally) who just has a complicated relationship to her gender, or is trying to distance herself from the pain of misogyny, or is trying to distance myself from femininity out of internalized misogyny. I mean, I do have a complicated relationship to my gender, but my gender is not “woman.” Realizing that I’m nonbinary doesn’t protect me from misogyny, as most misogynistic acts are directed at those perceived as women without consideration of the true gender of the victim. (Honestly—would any misogynistic act be stopped if the victim spoke up and said, “excuse me, I’m actually nonbinary.” I can only imagine the situation getting worse, if the person committing the misogynistic act even knew what the victim was talking about.) And I am not trying to distance myself from femininity, even though I know that I probably still have some internalized misogyny to work through (like mold, it requires constant vigilance to eradicate, and it is unwise to assume it is completely gone as long as the conditions that gave rise to it in the first place still exist). I love many feminine things, but not because of my womanhood, because womanhood is something I don’t really have. I feel at peace when I think of myself with no inherent gender, not because I think there is anything bad about being a woman, but because I don’t think that being a woman really, truly describes me.

Ultimately, I know that with the limits of language itself and with my limited skill in using it, there will be some things in here that are not 100% clear. I ask that you accept this, and assume good faith on my part. I will be glad to answer any questions asked in good faith as well. Really, what I want is to be taken at my word regarding my internal experiences. I understand that they are not familiar and comprehensible to all, but I ask those who find it unfamiliar find it within themselves to accept that there are ways of being unknown to them. I don’t need everyone to understand me, but I do want everyone to accept that I am who I say I am.

This is where gatekeeping does no good and some harm to me, by the way—nonbinariness is either ignored, looked on always as a stepping stone towards coming out as the other binary gender, or considered a symptom of some other societal wrong rather than a complete identity on its own. And the, even in groups that otherwise have much less gatekeeping than others, there is the issue of, as I mentioned before, the seeming assumption that every gender will be named, that there is a word for every gender (and that if the word is not known yet, surely it ought to be found or coined as soon as possible), and that with everything we know about gender now, we actually know everything about gender. And the thing is, we absolutely don’t. We didn’t know everything about gender 100 years ago, we didn’t know everything about gender 50 years ago, and 50 years from now we’re going to know different things about gender than we do today. That’s the thing about trying to understand a social construct in a society that’s constantly changing. And, yes, I do think all societies are constantly changing, because they’re made up of a group of people whose total collection of individual members changes every day. Honestly, I doubt we’ll ever fully understand gender, because people are unique and unpredictable. There’s always going to be something about ourselves that we don’t fully understand, and for some people, that thing is going to be gender. And, fundamentally, that’s all right. As long as we take the word of a person about their gender and don’t try to make them be another, this doesn’t have to be a source of strife. Instead, it can be a source of joy in the vast variation of human experience.

That’s where I want to go with this. Definitions are important, but only insofar as they describe something. Definitions should not be used to build walls to keep out people that can’t find any definition that really fits them in the first place. Sometimes there is no definition, and indefinite words are needed. Words like queer, and questioning. Sexuality and gender pose complex questions in today’s world, and we must be able to accept that sometimes these complex questions will have complex answers. We must also be able to accept that sometimes people will want to signal that their answers are complex without going into the full answer. So. Queer. Questioning. They’re good words, complete in themselves. The encompass ways of being new and old and they allow for instability in categories. Or flexibility, rather than instability. Better say that there will always be instability in definitions as long as people are people, and words with some give to them will always be necessary.

We also need to have space for everyone who isn’t sure what word they need yet. The narrative of always-known supposes words exist for every variation of human experience (they don’t). I want everyone who is questioning to be welcome in the kind of queer community I want to be in. I want them to be welcome no matter what they eventually discover about themselves. The permission to question oneself in regard to one’s sexuality and gender—that must exist in the queer community, because it doesn’t exist in mainstream heteronormative society. And isn’t it better to have the chance to question ourselves rather than not? I know that being able to question my sexuality and gender has made me a happier person and allowed me to question the structures of heteronormative society, as well.

Questioning is important. Questioning means more people who have the capacity to understand. If we tell everyone to stay away from the queer community until they’re absolutely sure they belong, then we only end up driving away people that need the conversations we could be having with them. Like it or not, there are thousands upon thousands of people out there whose genders and sexualities don’t fit exactly into any definitions we have so far. The boundaries of queer must be fuzzy, since the boundaries of straight (the kind of straight that encompasses the full privileges of that category) are strictly and violently policed.

In fact, I argue that the boundaries of prestige-straightness are so rigidly policed, and that it remains so physically and psychologically dangerous for someone to admit to themselves at all that they cannot function within the prestige straightness framework, that if they come to understand themselves as any non-straight identity—if they are able to come out to themselves—the they are most certainly truly queer. Furthermore, the more people that recognize that they belong to the queer community, the better it is for everyone else in the queer community. Larger groups can leverage more power, and that is what is necessary to dismantle the peri-cis-heteropatriarchy. Fuzzy boundaries help us. A greater chaos factor in definitions will help us.

And that’s where I’m going to wrap things up. I’m asexual, perhaps best described as panromantic, and nonbinary. But even more than that, I am queer and questioning. I want a larger community. I encourage questioning, and I trust everyone to choose the labels or non-labels that best describe themselves. You’re not a faker unless you deliberately chose to be so. It’s all right if your understanding of yourself changes, and it’s all right if it stays the same. Stay true to yourself first.

We’re here, we’re queer, and there’s probably so many more of us than we now realize.

 *I have heard the argument that allosexual should not be used as it puts gay and straight people in the same category. Well, so does the word cis. So does white. So does women. All of these are useful categories in certain contexts, so in a similar way “allosexual” as the opposite of “asexual” will also be useful in certain contexts—for example, when talking about asexual experiences in contrast to allosexual experiences. It’s exactly as blunt and useful as cis, or white, or women, or men, as a category.