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[personal profile] bookhobbit
Hi everybody I am being a terrible correspondent right now because the semester started this week, but what's up?

I did get an appointment about HRT and I will....very probably be on T before the end of the month. And my insurance has changed policies this year to cover all trans-related health care, although the doctor I spoke to said even if they didn't, the prescription from the university health center wouldn't be more than $50 a month at the absolute highest (it would be lower as I'm not likely to be starting off on the maximum dose). I have to go get some other appointments and stuff but it's unlikely there will be any issues. Also, they now pay for top surgery, and the health center can do me the letters required, and there are multiple surgeons in the metro area, so....I might have top surgery over with before I leave grad school.

Weirdly, I spent most of today crying, dissociating, and depressed seemingly as a direct consequence of this news, even though it's really good news. I don't know. Bowman thinks it's just that going from "I'm not going to be able to transition at all until I'm done with grad school" to "actually you could be done with the most major aspects in the space of the next two years with luck and a following wind" is emotionally major and my brain punches down the sad button when major changes happen.

Anyway...the real point of this post is actually Gender Theoretics.

I think a lot about the fact that there is no real historical precedent for being agender. That is, probably there have been agender people in history, but we have no way of distinguishing them from other people. We can't even pick binary trans people out reliably, because "transgender" is an internal identity, like most queer identities, which means it's impossible to know how any given historical figure would identify. So when I look back in history, there are no people who certainly had my gender experience. This is difficult, and is something which I have no doubt many nonbinary people deal with. Maybe not all of them care, but I am probably not the only person who finds it alienating.

What it comes down to, I think, what bothers me, is....stories are gendered, or genders are stories, or maybe most accurately both. I think that humans create stories around a lot of experiences, in order to understand them and to give them meaning, and there are a lot of gender-stories. Ummm, so like, archetypes. Archetypes are heavily gendered. They shouldn't be, but they are. And we construct our Selves through the use of stories and archetypes.

I'm...struggling to put words on this. 

Um...most narratives have some aspect of gender to them. They have characters who are gendered, and that matters to the people in the story and outside of the story. It matters a very great deal. There are some stories and archetypes that are not gendered, but not very many.

But, I do not have a gender. Gender-neutral narratives can apply to me, but they can't describe me because they are general. There are no expressly agender narratives involving actual human beings. Not on what you might call a large scale. There are no archetypes about being agender, and no stories people tell themselves about what makes you agender. These stories can be limiting as much as they can be helpful, but they are a huge part of how society talks about personhood.

And therefore, I often feel like I lack a foothold on humanity, because I do not have a story to call my own. I cannot look back in history and see myself, I cannot look around me and see myself, I can only look forward, or at aliens, or at robots, or, whatever. It's less that there are no stories with agender characters -- although there aren't very many, obviously -- and more that there is no prevailing cultural idea of agenderness, and therefore I have no ideas to help shape myself around, which I struggle with because my identity is already difficult for other reasons.

I think this is probably the case for many nonbinary people generally. I think it is most difficult to subvert if you do not have a connection to a binary gender, because those are the genders that we have cultural narratives about. 

I guess all this sounds like "representation matters" and it does matter, but I don't really just mean it in the sense of "I need to see myself on screen" (that's important but not really all of what I'm thinking about), more......I don't know...it's tough to just not have a part of your identity that society at large considers a fundamental part of the human experience, to the point where about 40% of languages make you specify which one you are at some point during pronoun use. Not to be Sapir-Whorfian about this, it's just when it's that basic a category for most people it's hard to feel like you are allowed to exist. So many of the stories people tell themselves involve gender, and I don't have one, so I don't feel I belong in them. Or something.

I don't know if I've actually made my point or if any of this is actually making sense and I don't really know what to do about it.

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