Content note: This post discusses misgendering.
It’s been a little over a week since I came out to to the world as agender.
Since then, some moments have been joyous and lighthearted. My parents and chosen family have wrapped me in love. A dear friend knows me so well that after I came out to her, she immediately bought a spooky they/them pronoun pin for me, not knowing I had just bought the exact same one myself. I’ve found solidarity and deepened connections with trans friends.
Other moments have been trying. I expected people to slip up and continue to use she/her pronouns for me, but hearing someone at the coffee shop address me as “miss” was surprisingly gut-wrenching. Now that I’m out and able to fully share the gender feelings I’ve been mulling over for months and months, it’s a jarring experience to be called something you no longer identify with.
What I didn’t expect—naively, perhaps—were people’s comments about how they still see me as a woman; that being femme and agender are incompatible. Such comments show a fundamental misunderstanding of the differences between gender expression and gender identity, sure, but they also show a fundamental misunderstanding of me.
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been preparing myself to be “she”d by people I don’t know. I’m not clueless to the fact that femmes are often read as women, even if they’re non-binary. I just didn’t anticipate that people I know would place responsibility on me to appear more androgynous in order to fit with their assumptions about non-binary people, rather than reflecting on and revising their own misguided views of gender.
In the midst of dealing with misgendering, I came across a small two-tweet thread that perfectly encapsulated my feelings about this.
The tweets read:
“As a non-binary trans person, my pronouns matter but what matters more is how folks choose to view me. I know people who use they/them pronouns for me but still see me as a man. And I know people who slip up on my pronouns who know that I’m not a man.
“work on getting the pronouns right for me in your head and on your tongue, yes. but what’s more important (for me) is that you stop thinking of me in your imagination as a man. I’m not a man.”
I wanted to cry when I read those tweets. They capture my wants and needs so perfectly—and I need people to stop thinking of me as a woman.
I’m not a woman, which I’ve made exceedingly clear. I understand that people may have questions about how “femme” is different from “feminine,” or even how it’s different from being a woman, and how that gels with being agender. (And just for the record, femme is an explicitly queer identity. It’s not a synonym for “woman” or even necessarily for “feminine.” A person of any or no gender can be femme.) But this is different than a simple gender lesson.
When someone else purports to know more about my (lack of) gender than I do, they fundamentally disrespect me, my identities, and my lived experience. At that point, it’s no longer about education. It’s about upholding the rigid structures of the gender binary, only allowing room for a third option where all non-binary people must be homogeneous if they want to be recognized, addressed, and seen as who they are.
I know I’m fighting an uphill battle. Cisnormative societal and cultural ideas about how people of any given gender are “supposed” to look are programmed into us; they saturate the air we breathe, the advertising and marketing we see, the media we consume. I know that to most people, I look like a woman, because they’ve been taught that someone like me—someone who wears makeup, dresses, and keeps their hair long—is a woman.
The good news is that we can unlearn false programming. We can unlearn the automatic gendering of anyone we come across, and instead remember that you can’t tell someone’s gender just by looking at them. We can unlearn assigning pronouns that we think fit with a person’s gender presentation, and instead remember that expression and identity are two distinct things, and the only way we can know someone’s pronouns is by asking them. We can unlearn thinking that non-binary people always look androgynous, and instead remember that gender and the constellation of ways people express their gender (or lack thereof) is expansive and glorious.
That is what I want. I want strangers to look at me and not automatically assume that I am a woman. I want the people in my life to look at me and see that I am agender. I want everyone to understand that I can be femme and non-binary, and that these aren’t contradictory identities, but rather the heart of who I am.
I want you to unlearn the false programming that’s been fed to all of us. And I don’t want excuses: anyone can do this.
This is just my story. My lived experience does not reflect the lived experiences of all trans and non-binary people.
