The Agender Agenda
"Are you a boy or a girl?" "No."
After we chatted at one of the 'Introduction to Transgender' sessions, Bobbi asked me to write a little bit about the agender experience.
There's going to be a lot less science in this one than in some of the other transgender articles, primarily because while there is precious little research on transgender biology, there is even less on non-binary folks (probably a side effect of the research largely being carried out by binary individuals in general, so even if they have a concept of gender as a spectrum, they'll gravitate towards popping people into two buckets for the sake of ease.
Agender is a term used by a segment of the non-binary world who don't have a sense of internal gender identity. You commonly hear transgender people express that they have always been the gender that they identify with, it's just that people mistakenly thought that they were a different gender for a while. As an agender individual living in a world which features such a strong underlying assumption of gender, I frequently feel more as if I was mistakenly assigned as human at birth - an experience which seems fairly typical based on the handful of other agender individuals that I know!
It's worth noting here that not all non-binary people actually consider themselves to be transgender (and some people who are more 'typically' transgender also consider themselves non-binary), but a lot of the challenges that we face overlap so there is sense in lumping these things together.
What's it like to be agender? The only reason that I believe that anyone actually has a strong sense of their own gender is that there are people who transition, which is clearly not something that you would just do for fun. Extensive questioning has revealed that the majority of cisgendered people will also confirm that they also have a sense of their own gender (and also that you will get odd looks for asking). Joe Public deals with agender people about as well as other flavours of transgender people; that is to say, pretty unpredictably if you don't 'mask' well, but with a strong risk of extremely negative interactions.
Agender people, especially AFAB (assigned-female-at-birth) agender people, probably get away with things a bit easier as we generally drift towards more androgynous gender expressions, which tend to be better tolerated. We also get alienated by just about any form in the world ?, where you need to select from 'Male/Female', 'Mr/Ms/Mrs', etc.
How about transition and dysphoria? Pretty much all the agender people I know experience some degree of dysphoria in relation to their secondary sexual characteristics. As with anyone else, though, transition is very much an individual choice. Some of the agender people I know continue to present very much in their assigned gender, though may socially transition in terms of name and/or pronoun changes.
At the other end of the scale, people may opt for surgery or hormones, generally in order to achieve a more androgynous/intermediate appearance. Use of binders or top surgery seem to be reasonably popular in order to flatten chests, as is testosterone (though often on a lower dose than for trans men) to aim to deepen the voice or to redistribute fat deposits.
Hair removal procedures may also feature. Any degree of medical transition is complicated if you are agender, because if your desired end point isn't 100% male/female then it's challenging to meet the requirements of a strongly gatekept process - and hard to imagine what transition will even look like for you.
A quick bit on my personal experience of being agender: I don't have any memories of experiencing a gender. I conned my grandmother into letting me cut my hair short behind my mum's back age 4 and never looked back. I refused to wear skirts/dresses any more about age 5 after an epic battle of wills where my mum left me at home while taking my sister to a party, but then realised that she was being ridiculous and came back to get me (wearing trousers) (and subsequently got me an array of hideous tiny waistcoats for smarter occasions instead).
I've never felt I was a boy or wanted to be one, but always felt smug when people thought I was one because it meant that they didn't think I was a girl and that they weren't sure what I was (and even my mum stopped correcting people by the time I was 10).
This developed more negative side effects as I got older, and I spent the first two years of secondary school getting beaten up for being trans (which it ironically took me another decade or so to work out myself). I lean towards a generally androgynous presentation, where I feel most comfortable using a binder to flatten my chest and spending a lot of time in the gym to reduce fat percentage and muscle up - in particular to bulk out upper arms/shoulders (small details matter in perception, and shoulders wider than hips is one of the subconscious cues we use to assess masculinity).
I'm also gay and see no contradiction in being non-binary and gay, though I have had girlfriends who've had problems with the concept (generally because they assume that at some point I will want to transition to male, no matter how much I explain that this is not the case).
I'm neutral in view of pronouns, by which I mean that they all feel a bit awkward and I guess I would be happiest if people would just use my name - but also pronouns very rarely get used to one's face and so I don't feel strongly about it! I should also be completing my PhD this year, and one perk of this will definitely be to be able to use the prefix 'Dr' off drop-down lists and not have to mess about with wishing 'Mx' was a more common option before finally begrudgingly settling on Miss/Ms.
I've always been agender and so don't really have a point of comparison with how it would be to have a sense of gender, so I'm not certain what kind of questions people might want to ask, so feel free to pop questions here or over to me privately if you want! I'm pretty easy going so I'm not going to get offended by anything :)
Alix
June 2018
After we chatted at one of the 'Introduction to Transgender' sessions, Bobbi asked me to write a little bit about the agender experience.
There's going to be a lot less science in this one than in some of the other transgender articles, primarily because while there is precious little research on transgender biology, there is even less on non-binary folks (probably a side effect of the research largely being carried out by binary individuals in general, so even if they have a concept of gender as a spectrum, they'll gravitate towards popping people into two buckets for the sake of ease.
Agender is a term used by a segment of the non-binary world who don't have a sense of internal gender identity. You commonly hear transgender people express that they have always been the gender that they identify with, it's just that people mistakenly thought that they were a different gender for a while. As an agender individual living in a world which features such a strong underlying assumption of gender, I frequently feel more as if I was mistakenly assigned as human at birth - an experience which seems fairly typical based on the handful of other agender individuals that I know!
It's worth noting here that not all non-binary people actually consider themselves to be transgender (and some people who are more 'typically' transgender also consider themselves non-binary), but a lot of the challenges that we face overlap so there is sense in lumping these things together.
What's it like to be agender? The only reason that I believe that anyone actually has a strong sense of their own gender is that there are people who transition, which is clearly not something that you would just do for fun. Extensive questioning has revealed that the majority of cisgendered people will also confirm that they also have a sense of their own gender (and also that you will get odd looks for asking). Joe Public deals with agender people about as well as other flavours of transgender people; that is to say, pretty unpredictably if you don't 'mask' well, but with a strong risk of extremely negative interactions.
Agender people, especially AFAB (assigned-female-at-birth) agender people, probably get away with things a bit easier as we generally drift towards more androgynous gender expressions, which tend to be better tolerated. We also get alienated by just about any form in the world ?, where you need to select from 'Male/Female', 'Mr/Ms/Mrs', etc.
How about transition and dysphoria? Pretty much all the agender people I know experience some degree of dysphoria in relation to their secondary sexual characteristics. As with anyone else, though, transition is very much an individual choice. Some of the agender people I know continue to present very much in their assigned gender, though may socially transition in terms of name and/or pronoun changes.
At the other end of the scale, people may opt for surgery or hormones, generally in order to achieve a more androgynous/intermediate appearance. Use of binders or top surgery seem to be reasonably popular in order to flatten chests, as is testosterone (though often on a lower dose than for trans men) to aim to deepen the voice or to redistribute fat deposits.
Hair removal procedures may also feature. Any degree of medical transition is complicated if you are agender, because if your desired end point isn't 100% male/female then it's challenging to meet the requirements of a strongly gatekept process - and hard to imagine what transition will even look like for you.
A quick bit on my personal experience of being agender: I don't have any memories of experiencing a gender. I conned my grandmother into letting me cut my hair short behind my mum's back age 4 and never looked back. I refused to wear skirts/dresses any more about age 5 after an epic battle of wills where my mum left me at home while taking my sister to a party, but then realised that she was being ridiculous and came back to get me (wearing trousers) (and subsequently got me an array of hideous tiny waistcoats for smarter occasions instead).
I've never felt I was a boy or wanted to be one, but always felt smug when people thought I was one because it meant that they didn't think I was a girl and that they weren't sure what I was (and even my mum stopped correcting people by the time I was 10).
This developed more negative side effects as I got older, and I spent the first two years of secondary school getting beaten up for being trans (which it ironically took me another decade or so to work out myself). I lean towards a generally androgynous presentation, where I feel most comfortable using a binder to flatten my chest and spending a lot of time in the gym to reduce fat percentage and muscle up - in particular to bulk out upper arms/shoulders (small details matter in perception, and shoulders wider than hips is one of the subconscious cues we use to assess masculinity).
I'm also gay and see no contradiction in being non-binary and gay, though I have had girlfriends who've had problems with the concept (generally because they assume that at some point I will want to transition to male, no matter how much I explain that this is not the case).
I'm neutral in view of pronouns, by which I mean that they all feel a bit awkward and I guess I would be happiest if people would just use my name - but also pronouns very rarely get used to one's face and so I don't feel strongly about it! I should also be completing my PhD this year, and one perk of this will definitely be to be able to use the prefix 'Dr' off drop-down lists and not have to mess about with wishing 'Mx' was a more common option before finally begrudgingly settling on Miss/Ms.
I've always been agender and so don't really have a point of comparison with how it would be to have a sense of gender, so I'm not certain what kind of questions people might want to ask, so feel free to pop questions here or over to me privately if you want! I'm pretty easy going so I'm not going to get offended by anything :)
Alix
June 2018