Gender

- - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - -

Section Break

Erika Hammerschmidt

Gender and stuff

Section Break

From my Blog on Dec 5, 2020

Update, April 2021: This was first posted in December 2020. My partner had chosen a new name, Esme, which she later changed to Elle. I have since edited this post to reflect the change.

So anyway: I have some things to say about gender and orientation, mine and others.

Some personal revelations that have been a long time coming, and my thoughts about them.

Anyway...

Part of the reason this has been so long coming is that I have always been... both uncertain and ambivalent about what labels to use for my own identity.

Labels are important. For lots of people, in lots of ways. But respecting that, respecting other people's labels, has always been very separate in my mind from how I feel about labels for myself.

As long as you don't intend any insult to me or others, and you're reasonably clear about who you're referring to... I don't care what words you use for me. I just don't.

That goes for my gender, orientation, race, nationality, disability. It goes for nouns, pronouns, names, everything. It does not matter to me. And that hasn't changed.

Perhaps the only reason I'm writing this now is because... well, some stuff is happening that means if I DON'T label myself, in certain ways, that choice will now also be questioned.

It began, I guess, with my sexual orientation.

Well, actually it began with gender identity.

Not mine, though. My partner's. (Together 15 years, in and out of legal marriage for insurance reasons, in and out of various polycules, but still very much my partner the whole time.)

My wife-- who is now named Elle, but is still deadnamed all over erikahammerschmidt.com because things are chaotic and we've just not yet gotten to the question of what-all we need to change on there, and in what ways.

It's been a hell of a time to try and make the shift from protecting her privacy when she wasn't out yet, to affirming her identity now that she is out.

I've known for a while, and kept using the old name and pronouns as long as she wasn't ready for the world to know, but that has felt so bad to me that I've kinda just not talked about her much lately, at least online.

That's going to change.

I'll leave it to her to speak in more detail, IF she wants, about exactly what her gender is and what she's doing about it. But for now, all you need to know is that she's my wife and I love her.

She has beautiful long wavy red hair and is very good at matching makeup to her coloring, and she wears pretty cowl-necked sweaters and long colorful skirts, and her name is Elle and her pronouns are she/her.

Even long ago, when there was no new name or pronouns, I was completely sure that IF anything like that ever happened--

(because I'm a writer and my imagination will show me every possible What-If scenario)

--I would be totally fine with it. No matter what extent of transition she wanted to pursue.

There were issues in our relationship, yes, there have always been problems we've been working through-- but pretty much all of them have gotten BETTER since she's embracing this side of herself.

And the problems did not ever include the way her body looked, or what clothes she wore, or what words she wanted people to use in referring to her. Those are just... not things that affect how I feel about a person.

And even back when it was just a What-If question in my imagination, I knew people might say "you'd feel different if it actually happened"... just like they told me "You'll change your mind" when I said I didn't want to have kids.

But when time went on, and situations came and went, and neither of those things ever changed... well, I was not even slightly surprised. I know myself pretty damn well, and that was what I expected of myself.

But I hadn't given all that much thought to what that would mean for my own identity.

I mean, I had thought about it in the abstract, about how my sexuality wouldn't really be changing, and I still wouldn't really feel any need to label it.

I've even written some, in the past, about the nebulousness of my own orientation and how hard it resists labels.

Sometimes it seems closest to "asexual" or "gray-asexual." Because my sex drive comes and goes kind of sporadically, and the times I've felt a focused, physical, sexual attraction, toward a particular person, have been...

Well, it's pretty much not happened in real life.

It's been just two fictional characters (Spock and the Tenth Doctor, if you must know)... played by actors for whom I DIDN'T feel strong physical attraction, despite the fact that they looked a lot like their characters.

So, while that very limited pool of examples does seem to suggest I have a physical "type"... it also seems like my emotional and intellectual type is at least as important.

And that part has very emphatically been the most important thing in my real-life romances.

Which I'd thought was normal. And maybe it is.

But, however natural it feels to keep on loving my spouse despite outward changes, it does put me in the position of... well, other people seeing me as being in a lesbian relationship, and labeling my sexuality based on that.

And that was the part I hadn't really given much thought to.

I can predict my own inner feelings pretty well, but... I sometimes forget how much I'll obsess about other people's perception of me.

If anything "feels different when it actually happens," that's it. I hadn't really thought about how this would result in other people seeing my orientation, or how I'd feel about that.

It's not a bad feeling, though. Just complicated. And I don't really have to make it all that complicated.

In regard to my sexuality, I think it can be as simple as just reiterating that I don't mind whatever words people use to describe me...

...While also admitting that "pansexual" and/or "panromantic" is probably the closest.

I can enjoy sex with people regardless of gender identity or assigned sex.

And those things also don't change my ability to feel attraction to people (although it's an emotional attraction that isn't like the hyper-physical obsession I've had a couple times for sexy fictional characters.)

But my exploration hasn't stopped there.

As I've been around Elle exploring her own gender, and been around other people she knows who are also exploring their genders, I see them making observations about my gender as well.

I see them pointing out which of my traits feel masculine or feminine to them-- perhaps as part of their own exploration of themselves, or perhaps in an attempt to express connections they feel with me.

And, while they understand that I don't see any personality traits as inherently masculine or feminine, that doesn't mean that those perceptions are wrong.

The more I'm around people who are encouraging exploration of my gender, the more I feel some... curiosity, at least, about how I might label it, if I were going to do such a thing as labeling.

And again, it has resulted so far in a reaffirmation of my ambivalence...

...along with the admission that yeah, if I were going to label myself, there probably is a word that fits better than others. In this case, the word seems to be "agender."

But I think part of the reason that took me so long is that... I genuinely believed that agender was how people are supposed to feel.

In a way it was like some anecdotes I've read about the obstacles that have blocked people from realizing they're trans or gay.

For example, a post by a trans woman who assumed in childhood that obviously everyone wants to be a woman, of course, why wouldn't they?

Or the homophobic rant by a man who seemed to believe that same-sex desire was a universal temptation pushed by the Devil on everyone, and he wasn't gay because he virtuously chose not to act on it.

Then again, those two stories really don't have much in common... except for the assumption, at some point, that one's own feelings are the norm.

And I guess that's what they have in common with my story, too, although mine is also very different from both.

What I'm trying to say is that I grew up being taught lots of different lessons about how to live... and certain lessons I was taught, about bodies and genders, came very easily to me.

And because I'd been taught them as lessons, I didn't feel that there was anything unusual about living by them.

They were the sort of lessons that came up in an upper-middle-class, eccentric, liberal yuppie-hippie family in the 80's and 90's.

Today I suppose there's a split between people who'd view them as dangerously radical and others who'd view them as not progressive enough.

But at the time, they felt average to me, and were probably representative of the overall time and place I lived in:

Don't focus on the appearance of your body or your clothing. It's not important.

Don't focus on the appearance of other people's bodies or clothes either. What's inside their minds is what matters.

Don't make assumptions about what's inside someone's mind just because they're a boy or a girl. That's prejudice.

Do the things you love, regardless of whether people say they're masculine or feminine things. They don't have to be. Boys can play with dolls, girls can play with trucks.

There are no boy pastimes or girl pastimes, no boy colors or girl colors, no boy books or girl books. Gender doesn't affect what you can do.

And because I was taught these life lessons, it took a long time for me to even think of analyzing my own adherence to them.

They seemed like the default in life. A default that many people found hard to follow, yes... but a default that we all knew was the right way.

Being taught these things was the reason I spent so little time questioning them. But it was not the reason why I lived by them so fully.

In childhood I learned plenty of lessons that I ended up not agreeing with, and plenty of others that I agreed with but still struggled to live by. These ones were different.

They made effortless sense to my way of thinking. They came easily to me. I followed them not because they were lessons, but because they aligned with my identity.

And, as I've matured, I have realized that life's a lot more complicated than those lessons. Despite intuitively feeling right to me, they're often very wrong.

You can't realistically expect people to be 100% neutral about their own appearance, especially when it comes to gender identity.

And you can't expect people to be 100% neutral about everyone else's appearance, especially when it comes to attraction.

And you can't expect people, in a gendered society, not to associate masculinity and femininity with things and people...

...not to feel emotions connected to those categories... and not to let that ever influence their expectations.

And you probably shouldn't, even if you could. These things that are inevitable in our society can also be joyful.

Having feelings about bodies and genders is often way better than being neutral. It can be freaking awesome to find your own body and clothing beautiful.

It can be just as awesome to look at someone you love and find them beautiful.

And depending on your identity, it can be wonderfully validating and empowering to view yourself and the things you do as masculine or feminine, and to feel the emotions you associate with those labels.

Some of these things I know because I myself am not immune from feeling them.

Others I know because people I care about have told me that's how they feel, and I believe them, even when I don't understand.

The thing is, I'm sure that even the various authority figures who taught me these lessons didn't intend for me to take them as far as I did.

To me, being pansexual was the logical conclusion of "Don't judge people by their bodies or clothing."

To me it was unthinkable that my husband turning out to be my wife would change anything about how I felt.

All that was changing was her body and clothing! Her mind was the same all along. And it wasn't having a female mind that attracted me... because minds didn't have genders, did they?

It was a long process for me, to accept that they could.

And I still wonder just what part of a mind the gender identity is, and whether it's a part that is even possible to be attracted or unattracted to.

I think, in another universe where Elle was made differently, she could still have all the same personality traits I love-- including many that society labels "feminine"--

--even if she didn't have the part that causes her to identify with the noun "woman" and the pronouns "she" and "her."

For those of us who respect people's self-identified gender, that part is the only thing we consider when labeling someone as a woman.

And I don't think that part, by itself, plays any role in whether or not I love a person. I can't even imagine how it could.

To me, being agender was the logical conclusion of "Don't worry about your own appearance" and "Pastimes and ideas aren't divided into boy and girl things."

And "You can't assume anything about people's minds based on them being male or female." It didn't even require a train of thought to get from there to the assumption that minds couldn't have genders at all.

It took me a while to even grasp the idea of having a gender identity. I thought that being transgender was outside the norm because having ANY inner sense of one's own gender was outside the norm.

It took me a while to separate the idea of gender identity from the idea of gender stereotypes.

To accept that "feeling that you're female" didn't mean "believing that you adhere to stereotypical expectations of femininity," and that I may never fully understand what it does mean, because it's not a thing I ever feel.

And it took me a while to come to terms with how real a socially constructed thing can be.

How a feeling of gender identity doesn't always mean either fitting stereotypes or wanting to change one's anatomy...

... but it CAN still be influenced by one's feelings and experiences regarding those things... and being influenced by those things DOESN'T make it fake or unimportant.

After all, pretty much everything about human minds is shaped by our environment. It's all real, and it's all relevant. And it can't be turned off just by realizing where it came from.

Our whole identities are in our heads, our intricately complex human minds and thoughts, built through their interaction with each other.

If we dismissed everything that's in our heads, everything that's shaped by society, and called it not real... we'd be disregarding humanity itself.

Yet, even while my mind expanded to recognize that this diversity of human thought could include things like gender identity...

...I still had trouble convincing myself, on an emotional level, how having an inner sense of one's gender was even possible.

And this was reinforced a few times, when a few people told me that the reason I didn't feel any gender identity was because I was cisgender so of course I couldn't.

Gender identity could only be felt if it was out of place, they said. If I didn't feel my gender, that just meant it fit perfectly into my body and didn't need to be felt, and I should be grateful.

I accepted this, because, after all, I WAS grateful not to feel dysphoria, and it didn't really matter to me what would happen in those hypothetical thought experiments where I got transferred into a male-assigned body.

I didn't think I would feel wrong if that happened. I couldn't imagine it feeling any more wrong or right than my current body. But I accepted it as unknowable and gave up on caring, because it wasn't going to happen and didn't really matter.

It still itched at my mind, though, when I saw the various posts online trying to help cis people imagine what being transgender was like.

There was one that encouraged cis women to picture themselves trans, not by imagining that they wanted to be men, but by imagining that everyone mistook them for men until they had no choice but to live as men.

Another post asked the readers to imagine that nothing had changed about them at all, except that everyone else saw them as a different person and attacked them if they said otherwise.

Imagining myself in these situations, I didn't think my life would be much different.

I would still have the same eclectic mixture of "masculine" and "feminine" interests that I personally refused to label with either of those words.

And I would hang out with people who liked me as I was, and I wouldn't care what they called me, as long as the feeling behind it was friendly.

And, if I was around people who called me male, who would fight me if I said I was a woman... I wouldn't care enough about it to challenge them anyway. Why would it matter what words they used?

The only thing I imagined being a problem was the fact that I like wearing jewelry and dresses occasionally. If I wore them on a body that people viewed as male, it would lead to conflict in many social settings.

But... I don't like wearing dresses and jewelry THAT much, not enough for that to be a huge loss for me. And in any case, that was a problem with society labeling jewelry and dresses as feminine-- not with my identity being feminine.

Because it wasn't. "Feminine" was a word that society meaninglessly stuck onto a bunch of different things that really didn't have much in common with each other. It meant nothing to me.

At least, those were the kinds of things my mind said, when I pushed it into these scenarios.

I didn't become less sympathetic for trans people, nor did I become more sympathetic.

I recognized, as before, that there are people who feel things I don't, and I may not be able to imagine how they feel, but I can still show them kindness and respect and courtesy even without fully understanding.

Only one thing changed... I started to question the assertion that cisgender people never had an inner sense of gender. If they didn't, how could any of them relate to these thought experiments?

There were replies, after all. There were people saying things like "Keep sharing this post because this is what got me to understand."

At least some folks, who had previously not understood trans identity, did figure something out about it just from doing those little exercises in empathy.

There was another post, which began with similar thought experiments, then went on to suggest that IF you don't relate to them--

--if you don't feel you have an innate gender that would stay the same no matter what your body was like--

--then you might consider the possibility that you have one of the other identities under the trans umbrella, such as "agender."

This wasn't exactly a realization for me either.

I had considered it before. There had been a moment when I said something like, "I have trouble imagining how a mind can have gender at all, and I don't know if that makes me agender or if it makes me a TERF."

I did not want to consider myself a TERF -- a trans-exclusionary radical feminist-- even though I had seen TERFs express some of the doubts I felt, doubts about how gender identity could be a real thing at all.

I still didn't want to align myself with them, because they expressed those doubts in senselessly cruel and hateful ways.

They took it to the conclusion that trans people should be denied all sorts of basic rights, just because the TERFs themselves used definitions of "woman" and "man" that did not align with how trans people defined themselves.

But, if they truly felt that minds didn't have genders, that genders were defined only by the body, with everything else being nothing but inaccurate stereotype...

...then why did they care at all how anyone else defined "man" or "woman"?

Agreeing on definitions was only important for segregating the sexes-- for regulating who had permission to do things and go places that were permitted only for one gender.

And if the genders were different only in anatomy, in superficial appearance of the body, then why would there be any need to segregate them?

I had never in my life really believed there was a need to segregate the sexes.

Even as a child in the restrooms of 80's and 90's elementary and middle school, I felt that every argument for dividing the boys' room from the girls' room depended on flimsy stereotypes of how boys and girls acted.

If the goal was to prevent violence and sexual assault, or even just sexual contact of any kind... it fell apart as soon as you realized those things could happen between people of the same sex.

And, of course, the problem of feeling uncomfortable or unsafe next to ANYONE in the restroom would be solved if you built stalls with real walls and doors, for proper privacy!

But TERFs tended not to agree with me on that. To them, separating the sexes was a big important deal.

And that was at odds with the very concept of the doubt I felt, the difficulty I had in grasping the concept of internal gender.

So that feeling couldn't possibly be anything for me to bond with TERFs over.

Yet I also shrank away from the idea of calling myself agender, nonbinary, or genderqueer. To me, words like those were for people who felt their identities strongly enough to need the support of the trans community.

The trope of a nonbinary person, or for that matter a bi or pansexual person, saying that they "don't care about labels"... is, from what I've seen, unpopular in much of the LGBTQ community.

To say anything of the sort is dangerously close to implying that labels are unimportant across the board.

It's close to disregarding the very real importance they have to those who need to find a community and express their identity in solidarity with it.

So, even if my identity seems to fit every part of the definitions of agender and pansexual, I'm very reluctant to use those labels, because... I AM a person who doesn't care about particular labels in regard to myself.

I respect the many valid reasons why other people find them important, but these reasons apply to me very little, if at all.

For someone like me, a double language major whose autistically obsessive fascination has always been linguistics... to say I don't care about words may sound a bit ridiculous.

But this ambivalence is happening BECAUSE of my fascination with language, not in spite of it.

I've been bilingual (English and German) since infancy, and trilingual (English, German and Spanish) since middle school.

I can't remember a time when I wasn't aware that words are symbols for concepts...

that different people can use different words for the same concept...

that the meaning of a word can encompass a range of different things...

...which may or may not overlap closely with the range encompassed by its closest equivalent in another language, or even the same word's usage in a different locality or social group.

Culturally, words are important, and using the correct one for the situation can make a world of difference. But the REASONS why a word is correct are so arbitrary. They can depend on so many different things.

No matter how much I think about the importance of a word, I can't FEEL its importance, on an emotional level.

I can't stop thinking that a few changes at crucial moments in history could have given the same word a completely different meaning, and the same meaning a completely different word.

It reduces my capacity to care, really care, which word is used.

And I worry that if I used the labels that others care about so much, it would feel like a mockery-- a mean and meaningless appropriation of a thing that has no value to me and immense value to others.

But, any time the topic arose with the trans and otherwise queer people in my life, this never seemed to be a concern.

Elle, in particular, has been encouraging me to identify openly with the labels that describe me. She feels it will help me connect with others in the community.

She shows no hint of fear that I'd be taking anything away from her, or from other trans people, by sharing this.

On the contrary-- she seems to feel that my embracing my own identity under the trans and queer umbrella would feel like a deeper acceptance of her.

And really, she has a point.

As important as labels are to many people, at the end of the day their purpose is to describe ourselves and the world around us.

By claiming a label, I would not be laying claim to any particular privileges or status. I wouldn't be expecting that everyone else who uses that label will accept everything I say as speaking for them.

I won't expect that anything I write about the genderqueer or pansexual experience is now automatically immune from criticism because I'm labeling myself OwnVoices.

And I certainly wouldn't claim that I've experienced the same oppression as any of the other groups in the LGBTQ+ community, or that I can speak about their issues with the authority they can.

I expect no more acceptance or respect from anyone than I expected before. All I'm doing is sharing information, using a label to describe who I am, for anyone who cares to know.

After all, that is the only way anyone can know. For those of us who respect how others self-identify, the only source we have for information on their identity is what they tell us.

Especially for a trans or genderqueer identity, because that's an identity fully within the person who feels it.

A sexual orientation can at least show in one's actions; for example, people can decide to label me bi or pan, even if I don't label myself, because I've been known to have partners of different gender identities.

But no one can know if I consider myself agender unless I say so.

It will probably always be that way, too. There can be no absolute outward proof of inner gender.

Yes, there are some measurable manifestations of it-- parts of the brain that tend to be one size in both cis and trans women, and a different size in both cis and trans men.

But I don't know of any study that has even applied this to agender or nonbinary brains. And anyway, it would be dangerous to place too much weight on any such studies as a scientific proof of trans identity.

Brains and minds are hugely complex and diverse. There's pretty much never a hundred-percent correlation between details of brain structure and details of emotion, thoughts, behavior.

Tendencies, that's all. Diversity is going to provide exceptions to rules. There will be some people who feel and express trans identity, and yet don't exhibit the correlated brain features.

Even if it someday became possible to test everyone for these cerebral indicators of transness, by some new brain scan that was as simple and cheap and harmless as, say, a pregnancy test--

--then what would we do with the exceptions, the people whose transness the test didn't validate?

Would we tell them their feelings weren't real? That they weren't really trans and didn't merit the respect that real trans people deserved?

Would it become nothing more than a new version of checking the genitalia to see who's a boy and who's a girl?

I don't know. But I do think that, no matter what scientific discoveries are made about gender identity, the truest information we'll get will always be from the words of the people experiencing it.

And that's why I've put this whole thing into as many words as it took me to get my thoughts across.

It's a lot, and thanks for reading through it.

It boils down to "I probably fit somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum, both in gender and in sexual orientation, and the words you use for me don't matter to me personally but I respect why they may still be important to you."

Tl;dr: My wife is a trans woman. You can call her Elle and refer to her with she/her pronouns. You can call me agender and pansexual, or not. You can call me she/her or they/them or whatever pronouns you were using before.

Just don't call me late to dinner.

Oh wait, you can call me that too, because I totally AM late to dinner when I spend my whole day writing long essays like this.

Goodnight everyone!

Section Break

Section Break