Gender-Fluid in a Gender-Solid World

This blog is turning out to be as much about gender as it is about asexuality. Not what I was planning, entirely, but hey, who am I to complain? An idea is an idea.

This week is orientation week at my University and I signed up to be an orientation leader because I'm crazy and masochistic. (Our dorms have no air conditioning, so I'm melting this week.) I'm having fun anyway.

One thing we did, during Orientation Leader training, was play a huge 120 person game of "trainwreck". This consists of sitting in a huge circle with one person standing in the middle. That person says their name and a fact about themselves and then anyone for whom that fact is true stands up and runs to find a new seat. The catch being, of course, that there is one more person than there are chairs and someone is left standing to begin the next round.

One of the facts someone used was "I am a girl" and later, "I am a guy". Of course, I stood up for "I am a girl", but because it's me and I think about my gender so frequently, I wondered- how would I have felt standing up for "I am a girl" if I felt more like a boy that day? Sometimes I do. It depends on a lot of different factors, none of which I'm going to detail here because I already did so in a very long series of earlier posts. As I'm sure we're all aware, it would have been all kinds of not fun if I had stood up for "I am a guy". People would have been very confused, probably would have corrected me and I would have been embarassed.
My gender identity has to do with my everyday life, but not really very much. I'm content with people reading me as female and treating me accordingly. It's just that sometimes I don't feel like a female. Honestly is not a requirement for playing "trainwreck", but what if my gender identity had really mattered to me, enough that I stood up and, in running around like a chicken with it's head cut off, implied that I'm not a girl?

"Don't Dress So Asexually" pt. 3

The thought I left off with at the end of Part Two was that the way I dress sometimes affects my gender identity as it exists that day as much as my gender identity affects the way I dress. A situation can do the same thing.
When I dress up for church, for example, part of the way I make the decision what to wear is based on how my gender identity feels when I wake up that morning. If I feel boyish, I put on pants (still women's pants, mind you) and look around for a button-down shirt. If I'm feeling feminine, I have a couple of cute dresses to choose from. (Somehow, no matter what my gender identity is, I'm stuck with high heels, because I own no other nice shoes.)
Similarly, when I wake up in the morning I choose between a t-shirt, a button-down shirt or a tank top based pretty heavily on whether I feel boyish or girly that day. It doesn't take a drastic change in what I'm wearing to make me feel comfortable on an average day. I can fulfill the need to feel boyish by pulling my hair back tight and wearing a button-down shirt and sneakers. If I feel girly, I can wear a tank top and wear my hair down. Easy stuff.
A little more complicated is when I can't really choose what to wear- some situations, I'm just expected to wear a dress. Let me be clearer about this: I am never in a situation where I'm forced to look more masculine than I want to. I'm often in situations where I'm expected to look more feminine than that day's gender identity would have me feeling comfortable with. I often compensate by acting more manly than is really necessary and I have to be careful to "sit like a lady" in any case, if I'm in a dress. Still, I can usually adapt pretty easily. My flexible gender identity/expression isn't really a cause of any emotional turmoil for me.
More interesting, to me, are the situations where my clothing affects my gender identity. This is usually when I'm in a dress, or when I'm the only girl in jeans and a t-shirt. I start to feel more masculine when I'm with a group of girls who are all dressed more nicely than I- this was a common thing when I was younger and it was in vogue in my age group for girls to hang out at the mall. Frequently, the other girls would dress up, so as to look cute for any boys who might be there, and I would just be in a t-shirt with my hair in a ponytail. Talk about being the token guy!
The other place this happens in when I reenact (Yeah, I'm one of those nerds!) and where, of course, I'm wearing a very lovely, old-fashioned dress. And petticoats. And a corset. There's just something about this that makes me feel very feminine- I like the idea of being a lady in that situation and I never have gender issues while I'm reenacting. It's very easy for me to be just straight-up female. The other thing that probably contributes to my feminine identity in that situation is the fact that the men in those situations treat me as a lady- just like men are supposed to have done in the 19th century. All this works together to make me feel like a lady, just as I'm expected to be. And I really don't mind it. Unlike a real 19th century lady, though, I'm not lacking in rights and opportunities and I think that's what makes the difference. For the most part, I am still thought of as an equal, though I'm treated differently, so I'm not putting up with any of the male-dominated culture stuff that women then did. So I can enjoy being treated nicely, I can enjoy not having to pitch in- although actually I feel guilty about not doing more work, which I know I'm capable of. But last time I tried to help pack up the Unit's gear after an event one of the guys looked at me like I was crazy and said "hand me that". When I did, He said to the guy who'd asked me to pick the stuff up and said, "She's in a dress" as though that explained the whole thing. I actually found it pretty funny. But then, as a good buddy of mine says, "With chivalry comes chauvenism" and I think he's right. But still, in this instance, I can feel female and enjoy it because it doesn't feel like real life. I don't have the experience the downside of being female at that time and it's all playacting- my gender doesn't matter because for the whole weekend I'm living the life of somebody other than me.
I think that may, in fact, be about everything I want to say about my gender. Wow. I'm sure I'll come back to it, possibly in a more explicit fashion, having worked out in my mind what I want to say, and talk about the ase community and gender in general, but I think that covers the specifics.
Having talked so much about my hobby, I think it deserves a picture. Let me figure out how to post one...

"Don't dress so asexually" pt. 2

So this time I promised to explain how being asexual makes me mentally androgynous (a word I can't spell without looking it up).
I think it works like this: Because I'm not interested in 'coupling off' in the traditional sense, I don't need to be particularly female. I don't need to do any of the things that women typically do to find a male partner. I have a really hard time explaining to people without some background in the LGBTA community what that means, because they don't see it in themselves. To them, acting gendered is just a very natural way of being and because they see the obvious differences between themselves and other people who act in a way specific to their gender, they don't see the difference when someone is not gendered. It doesn't help that I look like a very average girl, though I feel like your typical amoeba.
So, when I say that I don't need to do the things women do to find a partner, what do I mean by that? I'm not referring to wearing miniskirts or makeup. Although I think you'll find that sexual women do that much more often than asexual women, there are plenty of sexual women who wear no makeup at all and there are probably plenty of asexy women who wear lots of makeup. I think it's more often the little things- they way a woman walks, the way she looks at a man she's attracted to, the way she behaves around him, and men do the same thing- they walk a certain way, look at women a certain way and behave a different way towards attractive women than they do towards guys.
I often say that I give out 'ase vibes', because I rarely get any attention from men (I mean that kind of attention) and with most guys I find it very easy to be myself, in contrast to sexual women who, more often than asexys, get silly and giggly about men. I think I told a story in an earlier post about an outing with my Girl Scout troop, several years ago, in which these budding teen mothers decided to 'pick up boys'... who then spent the evening talking to me, since I was the only girl who was willing to act like she had a brain in her head.
And while I don't act like a woman, I don't actually act mannish either, leaving me somewhere smack dab in the middle of the gender spectrum. In a group of girls, I feel like the token guy. In a group of guys, I am very definitely the woman. How gendered I feel, and in what way, is affected by the setting I'm in because with my female friends I notice all the little things they do that make them feminine and which I don't also do. With guys, I notice all the little things they do that make them masculine, which of course I also don't do.
You know what? I have a lot more to say about this. Stay tuned for part three, in which the title becomes very relevant indeed and I continue to ramble on about my gender. I'll update sooner this time, I promise.

"Don't dress so asexually"

The quote is from a friend of mine, when we once ended up at the mall. The point of it is that he was equating the words "asexual" and "androgynous" and while the two terms aren't the same thing, they seem to show up in some of the same people.
In this discussion on AVEN, http://http//www.asexuality.org/en/index.php?showtopic=40530, GoAllyGoGo says, "Actually, I think my asexuality affected my gender identity. I'm mentally pretty androgynous, and I really think asexuality has been a major factor in that."

I couldn't have said it better myself. I'm not even going to try, though I am going to elaborate on what that means to me.

This is something I've told very few people: As a teenager, I thought briefly that I might be transgender. I didn't feel like a girl and it was very obvious to me that the other people around me did, in some unfathomable way, feel gendered. People must feel gendered and proof of it exists all around us. I wanted to wear a suit to the Homecoming dance my senior year and go with a friend. I figured that if one of us wore a suit and the other a dress, we'd be able to dance together, and that we'd fit better than if we both wore dresses. Oddly, nobody else saw this.
Further proof of gender- it occured to me that the fact that people feel gendered is what makes the drag show at my school possible. There has to be an opposite to dress up as, if you're going to be in the drag show. So yeah, there's proof everywhere. Gender, social construct or not, exists as a very real thing for the vast majority of people. There's your gender, and the opposite gender.

For me, there's no opposite. Dressing up in a suit feels just as right as wearing a dress. Sometimes one feels better than the other, frequently I'm equally happy with either choice. For Halloween, again, my senior year of High School, I dressed up for a party as (no, I'm not kidding here) a Midshipman of the Royal Navy, Napoleanic War era. I'd been reading too many Patrick O'Brian novels, and I thought that would be really fun. It was; if I ever find a picture of it again, I'll post it here. Anyway, I went all out trying to look as authentic as possible. I pinned my hair like crazy and wore a top hat that covered it all and a big shirt, because I'm girl shaped at least, and I actually tea-stained a pair of white tights, for stockings, and a pair of white gaucho pants which I then cut up and sewed into knee breeches. It looked great. I showed a friend a picture, much later, and she said, "Who's that guy?" I guess some people might have been offended, but I was pleased. It proved that my costume had looked good.

So I finally decided that I'm not actually transgender. I'm... not anything, really. I'm okay with female pronouns and wearing dresses and using my given name, which I'm attached to after all these years. But I still don't feel like a girl should feel. But I'm okay with that, now. I've learned to understand it and how it fits into my life. In my next post, I'll explain how that fits into my identity as an asexual person and what GoAllyGoGo's quote has to do with any of this.

By the way, if anyone knows how to get make a word a link, like making it so people can click on the phrase "this thread" and that's the link, can you tell me? Thanks!