agender – Kara Jorgensen

If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you know I’m nonbinary. Gender makes little sense to me as a social construct because, to me, people are people, but the moment I’m perceived as a woman (along with all the assumptions that come with that), I understand how heavily others rely on gender and how much I don’t like it. I would feel like I was in drag against my will when I was forced to dress femininely growing up. Dysphoria hits me hard the moment I have to wear a dress or skirt or put my hair a certain way.

The problem is that my gender is like Goldilocks. Feminine things set off my dysphoria hard, but if I go too far into masculinity, my brain rebels as well. I don’t want facial or body hair beyond what I already have or a deeper masculine voice. I tend to just say I’m agender because I would like to put gender as a social construct in the trash like moldy leftovers. Still, I find myself on the masc side but lightly. Can fop be a gender? I want to wear saturated colors, wear my hair long but pulled back, and occasionally indulge in frothy lace. Wearing a frock coat and breeches like Anne Hathaway in Twelfth Night is gender goals, even now.

As someone who struggles with changes, I have sort of eased into being a little more masc. This has mostly been because gender is complicated, and as I mentioned earlier, I get dysphoria in either direction. I also don’t want to take hormones or have surgery at this point. Instead, I’ve been stepping back and started thinking, what do you already have or do that’s a little masc that you want to make more obvious?

I have always thought my very square, straight shoulders look masculine, so I decided that I would work out my arms and shoulders to make them a little more sturdy. I do not want to be swole as the kids say, but I would like to be stronger and have more defined arms. For the past few weeks, I’ve been working out my arms, back, and shoulders nearly every day, and I’ve been enjoying it. In the past, I’ve struggled to exercise due to my asthma reacting very poorly to cardio despite being on stronger meds, but weight lifting doesn’t bother my asthma or inflammatory issues at all. I’m already seeing a little progress, which has been gratifying. The workouts should also help to strengthen my muscles and help control the hypermobility in my shoulders. In the past, I’ve shied away from other exercise because it’s mostly about weight loss or looking more feminine, which I’m not interested in.

For a while, I had been toying with buying a compression bra or binder to squash down my chest a bit. I put it off because a “real” binder might compress my ribs too much, and sometimes, due to hypermobility, they slide out of place, which is very painful. I ended up buying a compression bra from a trans-affirming company, and it has been really nice. I’ve never really liked my chest because it’s oversized, and when people register its presence, they see it as feminine, which I don’t really want. Squashing them down but not completely removing them has been enough to make me happy. It also makes working out my arms, back, and shoulders much easier. While these changes might seem small, they have made me very happy.

When I think of what my gender means to me or what it feels like, it’s masculine softness. I tend to think of characters like Stede Bonnet from Our Flag Means Death or Lestat from Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles or even Zorro’s brother from Zorro the Gay Blade. I often joke that my gender is “weird little guy” like Gomez Addams or basically any character Nathan Lane has ever played, which amounts to queer and slightly silly. My gender is tender and loving with an edge of morbidity and strangeness (and probably a few startled yelp-screams as they are the cry of the weird little guy).

My partner is also embarking on a gender journey that will probably look different from mine, and I’m very grateful to be along for the ride to support them along the way. As we get closer to the new administration taking over, I want everyone to remember that bodily autonomy extended to gender expression. We should all be allowed to be the people we want to be or feel we are without government interference, and that includes children. I had dysphoria as a tween, even if I didn’t have the words for it, and if I had been able, I would have loved to have gotten hormone blockers to avoid the dysphoria that came with early puberty. I guess I’ll just end this by saying trans rights are human rights, and children deserve the same right to live as themselves as I and my partner do. Please bug your reps and senators to not throw trans people under the bus.

The other day I was listening to the audiobook of Threads of Life by Clare Hunter, and there were several instances in her book where she discusses the synergy of cis women working together and relating to each other in a space all their own. Listening to it, I was puzzled that people experience that kind of synergy or easy relation. I often chocked up my discomfort to being autistic. By nature, I’m not particularly good at “blending” with neurotypical people. As Hannah Gadsby talks about in their comedy shows, being autistic is like being the one sober person in a room of drunks; you constantly feel like you stick out.

But it runs deeper than the autism. I’ve never felt like a woman. People would talk about womanhood or what women want or feel, and I would feel my eyes glaze over. Cannot relate. At an abstract level, I get it. I can see and understand what other people in the same way I can say people can be the same gender and be very different people. The problem is woman has always fit like an outfit two sizes two big. It just sort of hung around me with no shape, and the shape people tried to give it didn’t make me feel good about myself or make sense in terms of how I see myself.

That has always been the bigger issue for me: how people perceive me. The lack of control over other people’s assumptions is a burden I constantly struggle to deal with. Any time I get hit with “ma’am” or “miss,” I can feel my soul curl like a shrimp. I’m lucky in that I’m an adjunct college professor, so most of the time, I get called “professor,” which is blessedly neutral. There are assumptions that come with being a woman or man, none of which I want or live up to. If I tried to ascribe to either, I would always be failing, falling short of someone’s idea of what I should be.

The best way I can describe my gender is neither or none or femininely masculine. One of the reasons I gravitated toward Stede Bonnet in Our Flag Means Death is because he hits the right gender buttons for me. He is a queer, autistic man, but he’s quite feminine and fussy compared to the other male characters. He wears bright colors, loves a luxury fabric, and isn’t clinging to traditional masculinity. I look at him and see gender inspiration. Same with Lestat de Lioncourt in Interview with the Vampire, though I’m far too silly to embody that fully.

I joke with my partner that “weird little guy” is my gender. Can a gender be queer? Not genderqueer, per se, but slightly masculine in a queer way, not a cis het guy way. Mostly, I use agender or nonbinary as the closest labels I can get. I add lightly masc because if I wear anything too feminine, I get dysphoric. Truthfully, I’d rather toss gender out the window as an unnecessary nuisance. The people I tend to vibe with most tend to be neurodivergent nonbinary people because I think we look at gender differently than neurotypicals. Autistic people are more likely than the general population to be trans or nonbinary, and that’s probably because gender is made up. We hate when people make arbitrary rules or try to create hierarchy, so why would we let made up gender rules get in the way of living our best lives?

While in the past it may have bothered me that I didn’t vibe fully with cis men or cis women, I’m more than happy to vibe in the agender autistic/ADHD club with the rest of my friends. I may never feel the synergy people talk about, but I feel at peace and at home where I can talk about my special interests, not be chastised for a verbal fumble, and not be judged for the parts I came with. For those people, I am eternally grateful.

Tag: agender

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