Gender

I know that this has been covered in a lot more depth and with much more eloquence before; but today I'd like to talk about aces and their gender.

I can only really speak for myself and from the experiences I have seen of those on AVEN, tumblr and the yadas, but from what I have seen, a lot of asexuals (and other people who don't use gender to define their orientation, like pan or bisexuals, though that's really only something I have personally observed and is a tenous thing at best) seem to have a much higher of instances of people identifying as in some way being trans(whatever, sometime) or genderqueer in any myriad of ways.

Personally, I have been spending more and more time in the last few months interacting with a set of people on and off of AVEN, and naturally have sort of been sitting back and looking at how I feel about gender. And I really think that in my case at least, it is/was a case of convenience and assumption. Society said that I was a heterosexual girl, a girl who liked boys, the opposite gender.

It's why I was also invisibly told that 'Hey, you like the opposite gender, so you have to be different, and like *insert stereotypically feminine thing here* as opposed to *insert stereotypically masculine thing here*', and I internalised it, the same way that I have heard about so often than gay teens internalise the heteronormative message that they are wrong.

Of course, in your conscious mind you don't want to think that there is something wrong with you, or that social constructs dictate something as personal as your gender, but humans are social creatures. We like to be validated, whether or not the validation is a kind or true one.

On AVEN I likened the feeling to having gender as being two rafts in a river, one cisfemale and one cismale, which the majority of people are tied and/or clinging onto; with other people crossing between the two, or swimming different places in the river between the two or even drifting on the river in their own little vessels. I was saying how I seem to have recently realised that I'm not actually tied to the 'cisfemale' raft, and have rather been clinging on for convenience rather than necessity; as I've taken more and more time to think about it, I seem to be drifting away from the relative safety of the raft and am now at the mercy of the current, a bit.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, because my Internet isn't safe anymore. Please excuse typos, but feel free to point them out for correction.