SPIRAL!

I’ve been thinking a lot about gender recently.

Well, I usually think about it a lot, but I also usually hit a wall, and only just a few days ago did I manage to catch a glimpse behind it.

I’ve been out as various different kinds of trans since I was about 13. I had a couple of friends who were trans men and that led me to read a book in the library at the middle school I went to called “GLBTQ Identities” or something or another like that. Not the best book about queerness ever, especially considering its outdated title, but obviously it got the job done. I was only a few pages in when I encountered the word “transgender” and its definition as someone who doesn’t identify with the sex they were assigned at birth. My thoughts were along the lines of “yeah, that sounds about right for me.” I didn’t even read the rest of the book.

That’s not to say it was easy for me to just accept that I was trans and move on. But at the time it felt like a very external experience. I’m not exactly sure how long this is going to end up being or whether this will be an important thing to define or not, but I’d like to make it clear what I mean when I say something feels “external” or “internal” to me.

The easiest way for me to tell the difference is the pointed lack of strong emotion coming from within when I feel something is external to me. External things feel smoky and heavy, I feel like I’m in a fog trying to navigate what’s going on. When it feels internal, it’s usually just as heavy, but it is also achingly clear and obvious.

No, that’s not right. At least not all of the time. I’m not really good at talking about my feelings. I guess that’s what I get for having dissociative issues.

Sometimes I worry that’s where all of this comes from. I’ve used so many different labels in the past but none of them felt “right.” Something still felt off, like something was left unexplained.

But then I came to the trinity of Aromantic, Asexual, and Agender.

Three things I’ve come across in my journeys down queer paths and vehemently denied were a part of me.

I can’t be aromantic! For most of my life (even my fucking childhood) I was almost always in some sort of romantic entanglement. But they never lasted because, especially as I got older, I would get these feelings like something wasn’t right. Even though most of those people were good to me and I could tell we would make a good match if there just wasn’t this /thing/ that was wrong with me, I couldn’t shake that I just didn’t feel right about it. So I would dig myself into a hole of lies that would end up hurting both me and the other person once I couldn’t take the pressure anymore and they found out about this /thing/. One time I even used being aromantic as an excuse to get out of one of these relationships even if I didn’t really feel that way at the time.

Was all of that just because I have commitment issues? Is it something that’s wrong with me or is it just who I am?

And what about asexuality? I’ve been having such a hard time with this one because for most of my life (even my childhood, which is considerably more fucked up in the lens of sex than romantics) sex has been something that makes me valuable. I’ve always wanted to want it SO badly that I put myself in terrible situations with disgusting people when I was very very young just to feel that sense of worth. Sex has been purely transactional to me when it comes to other people. “If I just give them this thing that they want really badly for some reason then maybe afterwards they’ll consider keeping me around and getting to know me.” But I don’t really want it. It either doesn’t make me feel anything or it makes me feel bad. Very rarely it can make me feel a sense of satisfaction but only if the other person doesn’t touch me and even then it usually doesn’t make feel much in terms of satisfaction. I want these things that I hear people explain, that sexual pleasure is the highest form of knowing that you can have with somebody and I /crave/ that knowing. That’s what I want. I want deep emotional and intellectual intimacy but it seems like a lot of people need sex in order to achieve that.

Someone who I have a relationship with and love deeply recently made a comment about my asexuality that confirmed this deep root of insecurity I have about this inevitable piece of me. We first met on a dating app, before I made (accepted) these discoveries about myself. And we had a LOT of sex. Mostly initiated by me. Because I knew she wanted it. She told me she /needed/ it. Not in a weird coercive way. She wasn’t saying she needed it from me specifically, but that she needed a lot of it in her life in order to feel grounded. And my codependent ass was like “I can do that for you!” And I really thought I could. I tried to convince myself over and over for a few months that I could keep going on like this, doing this thing nearly every day, multiple times. But it wore me down and I was forced to confront this part of me that I always knew existed but refused to acknowledge. And she was really good to me about it once I finally confessed to her. She’s never pressured me into having sex when I didn’t want to and completely accepted going from having sex every day to not really having any at all with me. We broke up a couple months after that for a lot of reasons but it was sort of a formality, based almost purely on definitions as I realized that I experience aromanticism too. Our love and care for one another hasn’t changed a bit, however, and we’ve been functionally having a queerplatonic relationship since.

Which is amazing, to have found somebody who loves and accepts me to the point that we can have two separate sets of feelings for each other and still have such a good relationship (I think it’s the relationship anarchy lol, monogamy could never). But, at some point, she said something to me that I played off in the moment but has been on repeat in my brain since. We were talking about how we met as related to our current circumstances, and she casually told me that she wouldn’t have even bothered to meet me if she (and I) had known I was asexual before we met.

I know that’s fair. My being asexual is a glaring incompatibility with her needs so it makes total sense that she wouldn’t see getting to know me as a worthy use of her time, especially on a dating app where most conversations lead nowhere. It takes emotional energy and /time/ to get to know somebody, and if somebody is obviously not compatible then why bother when you could just keep swiping and find someone with more potential? I probably wouldn’t bother trying to converse with someone who just wanted to hook up because that’s not what I want.

But still. Even though I know she wasn’t meaning to imply that I wasn’t worth her time, or that she regretted the effort she’s put into our relationship, it still hurts because of the precedent it sets. I love her so much, I love knowing her and having her in my life. But all of that was hinged on the fact that I was willing to have sex with her. I wouldn’t know her if I had ruled out that possibility from the start. And there are so many people out who would feel the same way, so many missed connections because of how I experience attraction.

I know there’s other fish in the sea. I live in a city of well over 2 million people, I know I’ll find other people out there that don’t want/need to to have sex with me in order to give me a chance. But just knowing that I would have missed out on this relationship that means so much to me puts a deep sense of fear in me, especially with the way I’ve been taught that sex gives me value. I know that’s not true, but my body still feels it, that nobody will find my presence worthy without the sex attached.

I went on a much longer explanation about that than I did with the aromantic bit. I guess I’ve been thinking about it (and unfortunately crying a fucking river about it) a lot more recently. And I didn’t even breach the topic of being agender yet even though that was the original thing I wanted to talk about.

Oh well, maybe another day. It’s 1:38AM and I’m tired so that’s it for now. Thanks for reading all of this.