On the Discomfort of Inhabiting Gender and Sexuality
1 – Transness
I am frequently assumed to be transgender. Or at the very least non-binary. I have been invited to a trans discussion group several times, by different people. People use they/them pronouns in relation to me (even though we have done the pronoun circle thing, and I always introduce myself with she/her pronouns). I think (possibly because of my hair) that I am just assumed to be something other than “woman.”
While I am not transgender, I am surrounded by transgender people. This is wonderful. These people are my friends, my enemies (or, at least, ambivalent acquaintances), my loved ones, and my role models. They are binary and non-binary trans people, people who use she/her, he/him, they/he they/them, she/they, and all of the above. They are actively transitioning and those who transitioned long ago. I spend a lot of time with these people. Transness, in its mundanity, is one of the delights of my life, reminding us that nothing is set in stone, even the mantles thrust upon us at birth.
I have been around trans people for long enough that I have of course questioned if I am transgender. While I have a complicated relationship with gender, my body has never been a source of stress, and I have never felt pulled towards any other gender. Rather, I find myself stuck in a vexed relationship with my own gender, bound up in a womanhood I am not particularly attached to that doesn’t quite know what to do with me.
2 – Womanhood and Gender Detachment
I am a woman. Not because of any particular body part I have, or the way other people perceive me, or even how I think about myself, but simply because my body and self take up a woman-shaped space in the world. While the declaration “I am a woman” feels true, it also feels contentious. Womanhood and I both know I belong to it, but this affiliation is disjointed, slightly incongruous.
It seems to me that other people (both trans and cis) inhabit their gender in a way that I do not: my declaration of “I am a woman” feels different from other women’s identification as “I am a woman,” as though they are able to inhabit it more fully, or seamlessly than I do; or it means something to them that it does not mean to me. [1] I feel quite alone in my ambivalent relationship to my womanhood; for me, “I am a woman” is not an easy identification. I am not all of (or many) of the things that womanhood says it is, but I am not anything else either. I have realized that I feel somewhat detached from womanhood, something that has perhaps been there since girlhood but has become more prominent as adulthood inches ever closer. [2]
This came into stark relief as I sat in the audience of Ela Przybyło’s 2024 National Women’s Studies Association paper presentation, “Gender Squatting, Squatting on Gender: Gender, Asexuality, and Ace Philosophy.” It was in this presentation that I was introduced to the concept of gender detachment, which sociologist Canton Winer, who coined the term, describes as “individually-held notions that gender presentation and/or identity as irrelevant, pointless, and/or overall not a topic of great personal concern” (Winer 2023, 2). In his blog post, “Does everyone ‘have’ a gender?”, Winer describes how his findings—that many asexual people feel detached from their gender—“complicate the (often unstated) assumption that everyone “has” a gender identity.” (Weiner 2022, n. p.)
I mulled it over in my head. And I thought. Huh. While I am not “detached from gender altogether,” (and find it neither “irrelevant” or “pointless”) I am certainly “ambivalent” and “indifferent” (Winer 2023, 2) to my gender (which I do feel is mine, even untenably). I know that for some people, their gender, the gender of others, and gender itself, remain on the forefront of their mind all of the time. This is not the case for me. For me, it doesn’t seem to matter much on a day-to-day basis. There are so many more important things to think about, such as what I will be eating or reading, how my day will be structured, or what the people in my life have to say in response to the thoughts constantly racing through my mind as I pace my apartment.
Compared to those who feel “genderless” (Red, n. p.) or completely detached from their gender, I find that in my detachment I remain quite attached to womanhood in a way that refutes my identification with existing labels. Ace Film Reviews’ introduction to their entry for the May/June 2024 Gender Exploration Blogging Carnival “‘Cis by Default’, ‘Cis-genderless’, and ‘Gender Detachment’: Three Terms You’ll Hopefully Be Hearing More Of” succinctly spells out some of what I feel about my gender.
My own experience of gender is one that, for a long time, has been difficult to put into words. I don’t have a gender identity, meaning that I can’t be thought of as cis-gender or trans-gender. But I also don’t think of myself as agender or non-binary. Rather, I avoid the framework of gender entirely by identifying with the labels and pronouns that correspond to my physical sex. (Ace Film Reviews 2024, n. p.)
While “cis-gender,” ‘trans-gender,” “agender,” and “non-binary” are all terms actively engaged with the notion of gender as a man/woman binary (and as such, cannot be taken out of the context of larger ideas about gender), I deeply resonate with the notion that I don’t personally “have” a gender identity. I wouldn’t say that I identify as a woman. I just sort of am. It is not a comfortable or harmonious state of being, nor would I want it to be, but womanhood remains contentiously a part of me. [3]
My encounter with gender detachment was the first time that I was able to put into words the relationship I have to my gender. As previously mentioned, it is not something I put much thought to on a day-to-day basis—every once in a while, I check in with myself that I am still a woman and not transgender. Even though there remains some disquieting skepticism that all is not well in gender-land, I move on, because I am attached to my pronouns and name and self and it seems, therefore, that nothing much would change regardless of sudden realizations.
Being confronted with one’s own gender is a strange and jarring experience. For the moment, I am okay living in the uncertainty with being in between a number of things that are supposed to remain unquestioned.
3 – Expectations
I’ll admit that I was quite surprised when I read the submission prompt’s request for work that “explor[es] the subject of gender expectations,” because it doesn’t feel like there are any expectations placed on my gender.
I then realized that, as a woman, there were of course innumerable expectations placed on “my gender.” Women are expected to be beautiful and attractive, to be thoughtful and caring, to be sexual but not too sexual (insert America Ferrera’s Barbie speech here). To be a woman is to have everything you do and are—from the way you dress and carry yourself and look and act and feel and treat others and understand yourself—exist in relation to men (or to other women, through the lens of patriarchal standards) (gender is also very racialized, such that the weight of womanhood is different, perhaps lighter, for white woman like myself).
These expectations do not seem very pertinent to me. I constantly think about what is expected of me as a friend, a daughter, a sister, a student, and a human in society, but never about what is expected of me as a “woman.” I do whatever I want with my body, with my face, with my time, with my life. This means that I have a lot of lovely body hair and wear very comfortable t-shirts and pants that tie at the waist and that I read a lot and study less.
For how much space questions of my own gender take up in my brain (very little), expectations of said gender take up even less. They simply don’t occur to me. And when gender expectations do cross my path, I stare at them, usually decide they’re irrelevant, and turn my back on them.
In sum, gender expectations have given up on me.
4 – Aro/Ace Spec
Whereas gender expectations mean nothing to me, I am hyperaware of romantic and sexual expectations—not as a “woman,” but as a person. It feels like amanormativity and compulsory sexuality are steeped into the air we breathe. If you do not date or look forward to a future with a partner, what is your life even going to be?
As I sorted through my identity in high school and college, there was plenty of media, education, and resources discussing attraction to the same gender. There was little to nothing on the potential for lives that did not focus on romantic and sexual partnerships (or even that made clear that romance and sex do not always go hand in hand). While I knew about asexuality, the term itself (and surrounding discourse) seemed to be overinvested in sex, and its horrors, in a way that did not resonate with me.
Additionally, I found it very difficult to explain my distress around gender and sexuality to others. I didn’t understand how romantic partners were different from friends and was upset as to why those relationships seemed to be prized over my friendship. [4] Inevitably, my blunt questioning and criticism of romantic relationships (I was young!) led to conflicts in my friends and in my family.
Rather than failing to live up to gender expectations, it felt as though being disinvested from romantic partnerships meant that I was unable to fulfill the basic requirements of adulthood. Moreover, I could not be what my friends expected of me—someone who could commiserate about romantic and sexual struggles and did not seem to understand why these were problems in the first place.
Perhaps this was more related to my personal experience of gender than I realized. The oft repeated idea that gender is about who you are, whereas sexual orientation is about who you are attracted to (Przybyło 2024, 5), is a vast oversimplification of the way that gender and sexuality relate to one another. I appreciated this model because I felt that I could set my gender, which felt settled, to the side, while I dealt with My Sexuality. However, especially considering the way that womanhood exists in relation to men and manhood, “through having low to no sexual attraction to others, a person might also be less “gender-y” to use Eve Sedgwick’s term” (Przybyło 2024, 2).
My relationship with the labels “aromatic” and “asexual” does resonate with one of Canton Winer’s respondents’ relationship with her gender.
[A respondent] told me that she identified as agender when I asked for her gender identity. However, when I later asked how attached she felt to that identity, she communicated gender detachment and noted that identifying as agender was mostly out of conversational convenience” (Winer 2023, 10)
I loosely identify as an aro/ace spec lesbian, less because these labels truly capture who I am and more because they help signal my orientation to and in the world. I orient myself towards other women and women-ish people and away from dating, marriage, and conventional relationships. While this at times has caused me significant consternation, it now feels like I have sunk more into myself and am at peace with the life I get to live.
I am also disengaged from the “aromantic” and “asexual” labels because discourse around them tends to be so focused on lack. While writers like Sherronda J. Brown, Ela Przybyło, and Michael Paramo are working to think beyond this framing, the larger community remains focused on it. I don’t wish to “identify” with these words because it feels like they pin me in place and put me into conversation with people and ideas with whom I do not want to be in conversation with. I study sex, and as such, think about it all of time. This interest is driven not by my personal desires but by fascination with people and bodies and how they interact.
Moreover, I’ve found that those words aren’t always necessary. I recently had lunch with a mentor, someone I’ve known for nearly a decade. We discussed jobs, graduation, comics, and books. Near the end of the conversation, I mentioned that I’d never dated anyone. Ever? He asked. Yes. Just not interested? Not interested. The word aromantic was bouncing around my head, but it didn’t feel necessary to voice. It doesn’t matter how I label myself; what matters is that dating and romance remain uninteresting such that they needn’t take up all that much space, in my life or in my conversations. The language isn’t totally there to describe me, so I will use other words, other ways of communication.
Nonetheless, asexuality and aromanticism remain a lifeline. I am only able to think the ideas presented in this piece because of the spaces and conversations that these communities have opened. For that, I am eternally grateful. These communities have also shown me that it is okay to remain in a liminal space of gender and sexuality that it not legible to the general population. By embracing this reality, I can better engage with the beautiful, fulfilling, and ultimately very generative space of gender and sexual flexibility. I love being friends with people all over the impossibly wide spectrum of gender and sexuality and engaging with their embodied experiences. I am content to forgo gender, sexual, and romantic expectations in favor of the expectations that I treat my friends, loved ones, and fellow humans with dignity, compassion, and respect. These are the expectations I will be holding myself to.
Notes
I remain uncertain about this as I do not often quiz other women about their own womanhood.
While I am technically an adult, I am definitely in the stage where adulthood still feels just out of reach.
I will add that I remain intellectually invested in womanhood in part because of how fascinating it is. “What is a woman?” has remained an open and contested question since Simone de Beauvoir proposed it in 1949, one whose entanglements remain captivating over seventy years later.
While I have not quizzed others on their womanhood, I have quizzed many friends on their romantic attraction. I have received such diverse answers as “picking me up from the airport” and “raising kids together,” which has done nothing to clarify their romantic inclinations.
References
Ace Film Reviews. 2024. “‘Cis by Default’, ‘Cis-genderless’, and ‘Gender Detachment’: Three Terms You’ll Hopefully Be Hearing More Of.” July 3. https://acefilmreviews.wordpress.com/2024/06/24/cis-by-default-cis-genderless-and-gender-detachment-three-terms-youll-hopefully-be-hearing-more-of/.
Przybyło, Ela. 2024. “Gender Squatting, Squatting on Gender: Gender, Asexuality, and Ace Philosophy.” Preprint. Presented at NWSA 2024.
Red. 2024. “(My Reaction to) ‘Cis by Default’, ‘Cis-genderless’, and ‘Gender Detachment’: Three Terms You’ll Hopefully Be Hearing More Of.” A3. August 8. https://acubedblog.wordpress.com/2024/08/05/my-reaction-to-cis-by-default-cis-genderless-and-gender-detachment-three-terms-youll-hopefully-be-hearing-more-of/.
Winer, Canton. 2022. “Does Everyone ‘Have’ a Gender?” The Sociologist Speaks. June 23. https://cantonwiner.substack.com/p/does-everyone-have-a-gender.
Winer, Canton. 2023. “’My Gender Is Like an Empty Lot:’ Gender Detachment and Ungendering Among Asexual Individuals.” OSF. July 21. Preprint. Doi: 10.17605/OSF.IO/CAG7U.
