My Work on Gender Detachment and Asexuality Strikes a Nerve
But in a good way
As I shared on Twitter a few weeks ago, my paper on the relationship between asexuality and feelings of detachment from gender recently won the 2023 Graduate Student Paper award from Sociologist for Women in Society-South.
I’m thrilled to see this work—and work on asexuality in general—recognized by a feminist organization. It was also thrilling to see the outpouring of interest and enthusiasm in my work on asexuality and gender detachment.
In addition to the many replies, likes, DMs, and retweets on Twitter, my work was also shared widely on Tumblr, gathering over 17,000 notes from a screenshot of my tweets. In the days since, I’ve also been asked to appear on a podcast to talk about my research, received a request to translate a summary of my work into Chinese, received a request to present on asexuality to an audience in Sweden, and asked to give an interview for Sojourners.
For me, this solidifies a theme I’ve noticed when I share my work on gender detachment and asexuality: my findings and analysis are resonant with many, many people.
Maybe you’re one of those people. Maybe that’s why you’re one of the nearly 800 people (!) who subscribe to this Substack.
Where does “gender detachment” come from?
Gender detachment is a term I coined to describe a pattern of feelings I noticed while interviewing 77 people under the asexuality umbrella. My findings are based on those interviews.
At first, I planned to compare the experiences of asexual men, women, and “beyond the binary” asexuals. I had to scrap that plan. Why? About 1/3 of interviewees felt detached from gender altogether.
These respondents often gave a gender identity when I initially asked. But as we talked, I learned that they felt uncomfortable with being interpreted through the lens of gender. They found gender presentation/identity to be irrelevant, pointless, or even oppressive. (And as the response to this research shows, many other people feel this way too!)
My respondents explained that it’s hard to communicate this experience of feeling distant from gender because there isn’t a term for it. So I created one: ‘gender detachment.’ This term resonated with my respondents. After I shared it, many used the term for the rest of the interview.
As some of you helpfully pointed out on Twitter, there are other terms that describe similar ideas, such as cassgender, gender apathetic, and xenogender. However, the people I interviewed didn’t raise these terms. Still, it’s important to note that people have been trying to explain the desire to detach from gender for years now.
With that caveat in mind, this finding is fairly unprecedented in academic research. Feminist scholars have written for decades about the radical potential of “ungendering” for resisting gender inequality. But that work has mostly been theoretical. My findings offer an empirical window into ungendering.
My findings of gender detachment pose several implications for gender scholarship. 1) Maybe ungendering is moving from the realm of the theoretical to the realm of the empirical. 2) My findings complicate the (often unstated) assumption that everyone “has” a gender identity.
Questions like “what is your gender?” are thus more complicated than they appear. They indicate that gender is compulsory—we assume that everyone does (and should) have a gender.
But is gender detachment specific to people on the asexuality spectrum?
I suspect not.
But because sexuality and gender are so deeply intertwined, it makes sense that the unraveling of compulsory sexuality could lead to the unraveling of compulsory gender.
It’s also worth noting that I find a gendered relationship to gender detachment. Almost all of my gender detached respondents were assigned female at birth. This suggests gender detachment may be a strategy for survival or resistance in a patriarchal, misogynistic world.
I’ll share more both here on Substack and on my Twitter (@CantonWiner) once this research is published. Stay tuned.
Hey, I'm so happy to hear this is getting attention in academic circles. As an AMAB asexual person, I very much fall into being described as gender-detached as well, as far as I can tell from my self-analysis. I actually arrived at the label gender-apathetic in my own exploration of my self because I'm fine with going as a man for simplicity, but most gender focused competitions and assumptions have rubbed me the wrong way. Because of that, I was surprised to hear it hadn't already gotten attention in research. Just one of those times you have an idea and assume anything you could think of has obviously already been studied rigorously.
My main thought on why this mentality rose in myself is the essentializing and demonizing that people do along gendered lines. So often people talk in very generalized ways about genders: Women are like this, Men are like that, All women are this, All men are that. Even when it's positive, it creates a very rigid presentation of those labels. And when it's negative I feel pushed away from wanting to associate with them at all. Even though consciously I know the labels aren't nearly so well-defined, the presentation of the labels as if they are still persists and doesn't let me feel comfortable settling in under them.
Anyway, thanks for reading my ramble, and thank you more specifically for approaching this topic to bring it before academic circles. It sounds like you have a lot of opportunities coming up and I hope they go well for you.
I’m so glad that you are doing this work.
Back in 1983, I wrote something down that I now very much resonate with: that I don’t want to be seen as a girl, but as a human being, that just happens to look like a girl.
However, I did not realize until four years ago, that I am very much asexual. I was told for decades how abnormal I was - by mental health professionals - and I am now working to undo the consequences of weaponized counseling techniques (like exposure therapy, and group therapy - where peers point out how abnormal you are, for example).
I’m older, so looking like/being female is not a huge issue - I have extreme discomfort with my femaleness - but in the larger scheme of life, this discomfort not a central theme. I address my discomfort when it arises - and move on.
I would not have known about your or your work had my psychologist not forwarded me screenshots of your Twitter posts. Are there any other social platforms that you share your work on? There’s a good amount of people like me that are not on Twitter open parentheses for several reasons) and I’m sure they would greatly benefit from hearing about your work.
Do people really need to be categorized by gender for this research? Can we not be just ”human?”
I’m sure there are billions of different ways that humans categorize their perceived gender based on the environmental and societal influences that they’ve experienced in their lifetimes.
I go back to what I wrote as a young human in 1983 - why can’t we just be humans - and not forced into a definitive box?