how do you know if you are agender?

[scarletlatitude]

Biologically, I am female. I know for sure that I am asexual, leaning toward demisexual a bit. I know that I am mostly attracted to males, but only aesthetically usually. I know that I am not transgender. But, I don't know if I really identify with female either.

I'll tell you how this got started. I had to chaperone a dance. I kind of got into the conversation with coworkers as to why I disliked the situation so much. Most of it had to do with me being an introvert and asexual, and that griding that they call "dancing" was just too much for me. Several people were talking about the girls and the boys there and it just kind of got me thinking. (I was bored out of my mind so I started to wander mentally. ;) ) I don't really understand anything about women or females.... and yeah I kind of always feel like an outsider everywhere I go... but again part of that is the introversion and the asexuality...

So here's my question -- for those of you who are agender, how did you come to that decision? How did you know that you were different?

I do realize that there are varying levels of gender, just like there are varying levels of sexuality. I'm just curious how you all came to that decision about yourselves. I may be among you and not even know it yet.

[Palovana]

To me, it feels like being neither a boy or a girl - it's more like "neither" or "other". My personality tends to be more masculine (if personality can be "masculine" or "feminine") and I tend to get along better with guys. I don't really get a lot of things that women do or their interests. At the same time, I don't want to be on T, I don't want male anatomy, I don't want facial hair, and I don't think of myself as "man" any more than I think of myself as "woman". There are a lot of terms to describe me - agender, neutrois, androgynous, genderqueer, possibly genderfluid(?) - all with different but similar meanings but none of which describes me perfectly.

[Philip027]

I know for a fact that I don't identify with my assigned gender, but then when I tried to picture myself as the opposite sex that didn't really seem right either. I have more feminine qualities than masculine ones, and I relate better to females, but that's really as far as it goes.

Personally speaking, I never really recognized gender as a thing. I used to think of sex/gender as meaning the exact same thing (it didn't help that tests and surveys that ask whether you're male/female usually used the terms sex and gender interchangeably) and even once I realized that wasn't the case (which only happened once I discovered asexuality and AVEN) I looked back on my experiences and it always seemed to be that society cared far more about sex than gender, anyway. Starting from a very young age, school kids are often separated into two groups (boys and girls) based on their generally-clearly-visible sexual characteristics. (most) Heterosexual males seeking a relationship partner aren't going to care whether or not you think of yourself as "female"; they're only going to care whether or not you have boobs and a vagina. The list goes on and on. The overwhelming impression that I got from society: your gender is not important. So I guess I just settled along with that.

I've settled with agender, partly due to not knowing, and partly due to not caring.

[Ancient Ooze]

I simply never understood the difference male and female other than biologically obvious features. What makes a man? What makes a woman? Why is it different in other cultures? Why would anyone think that I should, by any chance, do whatever meets their own definition of male or female?

I mean there's boys dressing and behaving like girls, girls indistinguishable from boys and people jumping back on forth depending on what they feel like. Clinging to specific behaviour sets seems so forced and brainwashed to me - I simply can't except beeing part of it. No, I just don't give a damn about what genders are supposed to mean. It's an antiquated concept based on sexism and stereotypes. Don't want.

[The Void Walker]

I've started to question myself as well. I mean, I identify as male because that is what I am biologically. I'm not in distress about it, nor do I wish to be female.

At the same time, I was never into the "manly" things, nor was I off put by something just because it was girly. I get along better with girls than guys, but I think that is because I grew up with more sisters than brothers.

So I know that I am male, I just don't know if I am a man.

[WünderBâhr]

Moved to the Gender Discussion forum.

Bipolar Bear

Asexual Q&A Mod

[the bumbling rotifer]

I used to get irrationally angry at certain things that people said, and looking back at it now, I realise that I was angry because people were indirectly telling me that I was a woman.

For example, I was chatting to a friend one day while out on a walk, and I was explaining that I didn't like wearing skirts because they reduce your mobility: for instance, if you were being followed, you wouldn't be able to run away from the person following you. My friend then made a joke in bad taste, about how, as a female, I shouldn't be able to run away from anyone who is following me. I got really angry, not because he was suggesting that women shouldn't be able to escape from a man who is following them, but because he was lumping me in with the women. This, needless to say, confused me greatly.

I started to question my gender a little under 2 years ago (I'd have been 26 then). I was presenting a scientific poster at work, and one of the senior management came to chat to me. He asked me how I felt, as a woman, about the lack of women in the senior management of our organisation. I quite honestly answered that, when I am at work, I never consider myself to be a woman, so I find the lack of women higher in an organisation to be of little relevance to me. Later on in the day, I was relating this to a group of female colleagues, and I hit them with the punchline "and of course, when I'm at work, I don't even consider myself to be female!". I was expecting them to all laugh and agree with me, but all I got was looks of confusion; they then explained that they do consider themselves to be female while at work. I then realised that it wasn't just at work that I didn't consider myself to be female, it was all the time.

So, after that incident, I started googling "lack of gender". I got bogged down in the difference between genderless and agender, and while googling the distinction between these two terms, stumbled across AVEN. The rest is history!

I apologise for the long and rambly story. I didn't know that I needed to get that off my chest, but apparently I did!

[nerdperson777]

I may not be the best source of information because I don't identify as agender but for a brief time I wondered if I was. In that sense, I'd probably be confusing agender with androgynous a bit even though I know they're different. I feel distressed with having a female body and was often excluded from certain activities because I was female, especially in early schooling. I didn't really like being called female, but I didn't want to stand out by saying I was a boy either. I didn't know about transgender people at the time so I just thought I was stuck with being female regardless of how I felt. But at the same time I didn't fully identify with male because I got trapped with a feminine personality because I was adapting to be considered "normal" or as normal as I could be, since I didn't realize I was acting abnormal anyway. My MtF friend on the other hand, became more feminine, like the gender she wants to be, while I became more feminine not to act weird. So with agender and androgynous, I kind of thought, I just wanted my gender to not matter. Despite what my biological sex says, I shouldn't be limited to what I can do just because of that. Maybe I'm actually trigender, androgynous, transmasculine, with a hint of agender, I sometimes thought. At the same time, my mannerisms are a bit feminine. But you could be agender. In the past term, I met a DMAB who identified as third gender, but I haven't really looked into what qualifies as an entirely new gender rather than not having a gender or something in between.

[BusTotem]

A big part of it was when I realized I was looking at a form and reading it as "What is your gender: A: Lie; B: Obvious Lie". You don't want to go to the trouble of changing your gender, but you're not comfortable being the one people see you as. Someone shows you something stereotypically associated with your gender and you stare at it bewildered, because you simply cannot comprehend the thought process involved. Someone shows you something associated with the OPPOSITE gender and your reaction is similar. You imagine someone magically transforming you into the opposite gender, and you're more concerned with it being annoying to get different clothes than anything else. Now and then, some event, activity, or reference that's feminine/masculine comes down the pipe at you, you completely miss it obliviously, and aren't quite sure why you were expected to notice. You might even have a little bit of glamour failure now and then.

You have some stuff between your legs that might be fun, but when you think about it it tends to be external to you in your thinking. Like a randomly assigned peripheral. Something that's sort've an afterthought bolted onto you.

[Kappamaki]

I mentally self-identified for years, unofficially, as "cisgender, but." The "but" was necessary, and usually was followed by "... bad at it." Looking back, that was probably the most obvious sign of me being agender. The one I should have picked up on as a teenager.

I've also got the whole "I have no idea what this mental gender thing people keep talking about is, and when it's brought up it kind of irritates me" with a hefty dash of "besides, my sex ought to be private information, and it's gross that people can look at me and think I'm this or that," and some body dysphoria, so there's all that.

The only way I really KNEW, though, was that when I started identifying as agender to myself - not even saying it out loud, but really accepting that I'm agender instead of worrying over it - it pretty much instantly made me feel way better about myself.

[Fire & Rain]

I asked my brain one simple question. "Which gender are you?" It said "What the hell is gender? You don't have one." :D

[Hunter James]

What started my wheels turning was watching a male celebrity I admired and realizing that throughout my life - despite being designated female - I had always had males I looked up to as role models who were all a very specific "not very masculine type". Never any women, all these artsy, usually long-haired, intellectual men. So one day while watching one of them, I asked myself, instead of continuing to try to be feminine, which has always turned my stomach and made me feel like I was hiding something, why don't I try to be like these guys I so admire? It was a revelation, and I felt like I was "being myself" for the first time in my life. No need to actually change my body and become *male*, but a very solid shift away from being female, leaving me in this cool neutral agender zone.

Just this past week I finally stumbled upon a gender neutral name I really love (going to see about changing my user name here to get used to it) and it really helped me feel even more free of the trappings of being brought up as a woman. So I'm whistling in the shower this morning celebrating my new name (which includes a masculine middle name in honor of all the men who have helped show the way to my true self) while at the same time I'm shaving my legs - not because it feels feminine, but simply because I like how it feels better than hairy legs!

And that's how I know I'm agender. =)