If you ask me my pronouns, I’ll say they/them, because that’s the easiest to understand. People who aren’t assholes understand they/them for someone who is not a he/him or a she/her. If you ask me my gender, I’ll probably say I’m nonbinary. I’m not a girl or a boy. I’m not a man or a woman. It gets the point across. If you keep asking, I might tell you I’m agender. I don’t have a gender in the traditional sense, I don’t really identify with the idea of gender. If you’re really curious, if you keep your mouth shut and your ears open, you’ll get my real answer. “I don’t know. I’m just a Clarke.”
What does it mean to be “just a Clarke”? Well, I’m not quite sure myself. I’m still figuring that out. A Clarke is a person who likes making things, who likes learning and baking snickerdoodles and wearing fun outfits. A Clarke likes warm sweaters and cold weather. A Clarke likes its coffee with fun flavors in it. A Clarke likes laughing and hearing stories and being happy. A Clarke is just a Clarke.
A Clarke will tell you to use they/them pronouns, unless you’re a close friend, then a Clarke might say you can use they/he. ‘He’ in an ungendered sense. When you use “he” to refer to a Clarke, you do not mean “he” like a man, but “he” like a Clarke. A very small group of people will be told they can use they/he/it pronouns for a Clarke. A Clarke likes the “it” because it feels like nothing. In math, there are a few kinds of nothings. 0 is nothing in addition and subtraction because nothing happens when you add or subtract a 0. In division and multiplication 1 is nothing for the same reason. “It” feels like the nothing of gender, of pronouns. A Clarke feels comfort in the nothing. It likes to feel so separate. It could examine this more, maybe think about how it relates to the idea of humanity, how gender relates, how all of that makes it feel, but perhaps it will not. The “it” is cozy, like sitting in a warm shower with the bathtub stopped, in the dark.
Now why don’t we take a second. I’d say close your eyes, but it’s hard to read with your eyes closed. You could read this paragraph, then pause, close your eyes, and do what I’ve asked. Or you can just do it now. Your choice. Take a breath, a big one, through your nose, and hold it. Hold it for the count of six. Now let it out. All of it. Now. Do that again. Feel your body, feel your toes move, your knees, your hips, your stomach, your chest, your shoulders, your throat, your fingers, your nose, feel it all. Feel your body.
How do you feel?
Can I tell you a secret?
I don’t like it.
Bodies are weird. They’re heavy and hot and squishy and sticky and don’t always do what you want them to. They need to be fed and cleaned. You have to take care of them and that takes so much time and effort. They don’t thank you for the work you put into them. They just develop a new pain, get sticky again, and you’re back at square one.
Maybe this is just me hiding behind an annoyance at bodies to cope with my gender dysphoria, but I don’t think that’s all. I will never be fully comfortable in a body. Even if I transformed it into the perfect Clarke shape, even if my body worked exactly the way it was supposed to, I don’t think I would be comfortable in a body.
Maybe it’s a remnant from my Christian upbringing (it all leads back to there, doesn’t it?), where the physical doesn’t really matter because we’ll all get new bodies when Jesus comes back. Maybe I’m just stuck in the concept of “I think therefore I am.” Maybe I’m just a nihilist and if nothing matters, why would my body be any different? Maybe I’m really just a brain in a jar in some lab and nothing around me is real and this is how my brain deals with the fact that it knows something is wrong but can’t tell me what.
But, yeah, I guess I’m nonbinary. That’s close enough, right? I think the yellow and the purple look nice together. The flag’s not bad. The four stripes are nice. Besides, it’s not like all that philosophical catastrophizing matters. That’s not what gender is.
But isn’t it?
What else could it be? What is gender if not something tied so deeply to your personhood? Did I miss a lesson on “How to Person” again? Gender, gender, gender. Everything is gendered. Why does my soap, my food, my clothing, my bed, have a gender? What does it mean when deodorant is “for men”? Why do we gender? How do we gender? What even is gender?
No thanks. I’ll step back. I don’t want to participate. I missed the lesson, so I just won’t participate in this aspect of life. I guess that makes me “agender”. I know the “a” in agender comes from the Latin root that means “not” but labeling a genderless label as agender, a gender, is such a strange conundrum. I’m not a gender, I am agender, but I am not a gender. I said no, I will not participate. I stepped outside and here I am.
I’ve never really used the label agender, even though it can fairly accurately describe my feelings. It’s a box that I sort of fit in. Boxes. Humans sure do love their boxes. Nonbinary is a bigger box, with lots of little boxes in it. I guess that’s why it’s the label I tell people. The box is big enough that I sort of fit. It gets the point across. People get an idea of what I mean when I use that word.
Another word, another mask to wear, another part to play. Gender isn’t real, not anymore than money or speed limits. It’s only real because we are told it is. Who decided on that? Why did I miss that vote? People are weird. There’s a whole societal rulebook that no one gave me and gender seems to be one part of it.
Nonbinary. Agender. I’m not really either of those things. I’m just me. I’m just a Clarke. Somehow though, people don’t seem to get that. And that’s not to say that there aren’t people with gender, who like their gender, who know how to gender, who get gender. I’m just not one of them. It’s been two decades. I feel like if I was going to get it, I would have an inkling by now.
I wanted to talk about another label here, another word, but I feel like I’ve done so much of that. I wanted to talk about genderqueer, which is another label that has crossed my mind but not really been one I’ve labeled myself as. I don’t think I like the word genderqueer as a label, as a noun. I think of it, rather, as a verb. I am not a genderqueer person, but a person who queers gender. It’s active. I like to think of it like that, but I don’t know how much that idea fits me either.
I don’t feel very active in my gender, in the idea of queering it. Sure, I let people know the words they should use to describe me. That doesn’t necessarily match up with the clothing I wear, not always, but sometimes it does. I’m not actively doing anything though. I’m just being myself. I’m just existing as a Clarke. Not a man or a woman or a nonbinary person or anything else, just a Clarke.
Language is useful to communicate ideas to others. I have often forgotten a word I wanted to use and instead used the closest synonym I could think of. One time I forgot the phrase “assembly line production” and proceeded to just explain the historical context (Henry Ford and his cars. That thing that he did where you just did one part). It got the point across. Language can communicate ideas, but it isn’t perfect, especially when it comes to a sense of self.
Gender identity is a funny thing to me. The idea that a gender is something you can pinpoint and identify makes me cock my head and spin through my mind, trying to tack down anything that might be that gender. Sometimes it goes the way of gender expression with silly outfits and a new haircut. Sometimes I describe my gender as some vague concept that isn’t really what people mean when they ask (It is drinking a cup of tea on a window sill. Rain pelting the glass. A large wool sweater and candle light with a CD playing softly in another room. It is the smell of an herb garden that has gone unchecked, climbing up a castle wall, the feeling of linen and silk against bare skin. It is the taste of bread.)
I have had two gender crises in my life. During the first, I figured out that I wasn’t a girl. I don’t remember a lot of it, just a slow shift away from femininity, from names and roles and she/her. I wasn’t a girl, I wasn’t a boy, so I must have been that third option I’d been hearing about.
During my second gender crisis, I realized I wasn’t. I took Intro to Sociology my freshman year of college. Sociology is the study of societies, of groups of people. We talked about the sociology of gender. It’s all a performance. In order to be a gender, you have to perform. If you perform in one way, you get perceived as such, but in another way, you are perceived differently. I don’t want to be perceived as any gender. Gender is all an act. At least, that’s how I understood it. Gender is a societal construct. It’s a box. Do you want to know something interesting about boxes?
They’re all man-made.
Language is about boxes. As I said, humans love their boxes. People get uncomfortable when they don’t know what box to put you in. I think there might be some thought that people have, whether they know it or not, about these boxes. If someone doesn’t fit into a box, they must not be human, at least not fully human.
That’s an interesting thought, but I’m not quite sure what to do with it. Does this mean then that humanity, or the perception of humanity, is directly tied to gender? Maybe? I don’t know. Gender is weird. It will continue to be weird, probably for the rest of my life. The language around it is weird too. The societal expectations of gender are weird. It’s all weird. We live in a weird world.