I was looking at my Facebook profile today and noticed that, at some point, I’d labelled myself agender.
I stopped and looked at it again.
Agender.
Yep. That still feels right.
I’m biologically male, and I’m perfectly comfortable with that. But biological sex and gender aren’t the same thing. When I ask myself whether I feel like a man or a woman, my truthful answer is neither, really.
There’s another part of this that matters. I’ve spent much more of my life around women than men. Inevitably, I think that has influenced how I think, talk, and behave. I recognise in myself characteristics that our culture have traditionally been stereotyped as feminine rather than masculine.
I’m not suggesting women think one way and men another. That’s exactly the sort of simplification I’m questioning. But if gender is partly social and cultural, then surely the people we spend our lives with, and the ways we learn to relate, become part of how we experience our own gender.
Perhaps that’s one reason why calling myself a man has never quite described me. Male describes my biology. Man carries a whole collection of social expectations and assumptions that don’t necessarily describe how I experience myself.
At the same time, I’m sexually attracted to men. I often find women easier to relate to socially, while sometimes finding straight men easier to relate to than gay men. And, inconveniently enough, I’m often attracted to straight men too.
None of this particularly bothers me. I don’t feel a great need to resolve it.
What interests me more is how much faith we put in labels.
Labels can be useful. They give us ways to communicate, sometimes to find each other, and sometimes to feel less alone. But a label isn’t an identity, and an identity isn’t the entirety of a person.
And then there’s this other strand of my life.
I live with an impairment, but over the last few years I’ve created a world around me that doesn’t disable me.
That’s an important distinction.
I have people, resources, routines, technology and an environment around me that allow me, most of the time, simply to get on with my life. I’m not pretending my impairment has disappeared. It hasn’t. I’ve changed the relationship between myself and the environment around me.
Perhaps I’ve been doing something similar with identity.
I no longer need to be anything in particular.
I am.
I can look at my life and remain curious about what’s happening around me without becoming caught up in every dialogue and paradigm.
What I do want is straightforward: to get on with my day without a running translation of who I am. That might mean making plans without a seminar about labels, choosing clothes without a debate, or moving through spaces without feeling that I need a disclaimer.
It’s belonging by presence, not by passing a test.
Thinking differently doesn’t mean convincing everybody else to think as I do. Acting courageously doesn’t require me to become an activist for every aspect of who I am. Sometimes courage is simply being curious enough to question an assumption and have a conversation about what I find.
As for lasting change, we rarely know what will last. Perhaps all we can really do is create the conditions for change in the world immediately around us and see what happens.
This isn’t a manifesto.
It’s a small practice:
Build a world that lets you be.
