Does Everyone Have a Gender? Compulsory Gender, Gender Detachment, and Asexuality

When I asked Manisha to describe her gender identity, she gave a simple answer: “meh.”

“I don’t have a gender identity,” Manisha explained. “I get that other people look at me and see a woman, but, for myself, there’s a blank space where my gender ‘should’ be. My gender is ‘none.’”

By this time, I had been interviewing asexual individuals from across the United States for months, so Manisha’s response didn’t shock me. Like more than a third of the 77 people I interviewed in 2020 and 2021, Manisha was uncomfortable with defining herself through the lens of gender. She was, as I came to describe it, detached from gender as a framework for defining herself.

Discovering Gender Detachment

When I first began interviewing asexual people for my doctoral dissertation, I planned to compare the experiences of asexual men, women, and “beyond the binary” asexuals.

I quickly had to scrap that plan.

Why? Because about a third of the people I interviewed didn’t really fall into any gender category. They explained that, to them, gender felt irrelevant, unimportant, pointless, and/or overall not a helpful framework for understanding and defining the self. I came up with the term gender detachment to describe these feelings.

Some people are apathetic about identifying with any gender identity.

This finding surprised and excited me—and it excited many of you too.

My research on gender detachment has won awards from both the Sexualities and Sex and Gender sections of the American Sociological Association. It also won an award from Sociologists for Women in Society and several internal awards at the University of California, Irvine.

My social media and Substack posts about gender detachment have also led to speaking requests across the United States and Europe and explosive interest in online groups. One post on Tumblr featuring screenshots of my tweets about gender detachment has gathered over 55,000 notes.

But until now, my research on gender detachment hadn’t been published.

Read the Full Paper

I’m thrilled to share that my full article on gender detachment is finally published in Socius. You can read the entire article for free.

I’ll write more in the coming weeks about specific ideas in the paper (like compulsory gender, or the idea that everyone does/should have a gender) and how my interviewees push us to think more deeply about the nature of gender itself.

For now, I want to share the full article so you can read it for yourself. I know that many of you have been eagerly awaiting the full manuscript.

Canton Winer is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northern Illinois University. His research focuses on the relationships between gender and sexuality, with specific focus on the experiences and perspectives of people on the asexuality spectrum. You can keep up with his research on Bluesky.

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