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.
Thank you for sharing! It's really helpful--and rewarding--to hear directly from folks about how my research resonates with them (or not). I appreciate it.
I really, really resonate with what you've written here! With the additional layer of having been raised in a gender essentialist evangelical environment where I was *constantly* being told that men-are-this or women-do-this and that anyone who deviates from that is not just abnormal but sinful. Because of this, I am skeptical--no, honestly, I'm hostile--to people perpetuating these gender roles/labels. It's really helpful for me to know that this is probably because I experience gender differently than other people do. I will join your gender-apathetic club!
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?
Thank you for sharing this! I'm so sorry you had negative experiences with health professionals. Unfortunately, that appears to be a common experience for folks under the asexuality umbrella. But it sounds like you've found a more affirming therapist, and I'm glad to hear it.
I currently only share my work here and on Twitter. I figure Substack is pretty accessible, since I can share my work for free and it's easy to subscribe. But I'm open to suggestions, if you have any.
Thanks for your reply. Have you perused the Reddit fora? There are several ace subs - but most are not very friendly to s*x-adverse/repulsed/uninterested people like me (and bully us off their subs, but, there are subs that would greatly benefit from seeing/hearing from someone like you.
I tried googling (without your name) to see if your stuff comes up - I don’t see anything - perhaps Substack doesn’t share their stuff with google.
(I’ve worked in research so I can usually suss out words to product search results - and I have never even heard of Substack until my psychologist sent me your tweet!)
Just wanted to say Hi as someone who has always been uninterested in sex. For a voracious and eclectic reader, I haven't even bothered to find out the mechanics of how it's done. Obviously, I know what goes where, but am still not sure of how it gets there. And I'm a 60 year old tenured professor. I'm in a very abstruse mathematical discipline - so these broader questions of identity weren't concepts I've even encountered in an academic setting.
I know that asexuality covers a large umbrella of micro- identities. I'm guessing each of these - at least the more common ones - would lead to a wealth of data on psychological profiles, etc.
In my case, I cannot point out to any plausible "provenance" for my disinterest in sex. I blend very well into a crowd of my demographic peers, and don't fit any of the presumed stereotypes of a socially stunted, unappealing woman.
Hello, Canton! I'm one of the many AFAB ace individuals who really resonated with your Twitter thread describing gender detachment and is hugely looking forward to reading the published piece.
I agree with everything you stated here. I did, however, have one additional thought in regards to your statement about how gendered detachment being a gendered phenomenon "suggests gender detachment may be a strategy for survival or resistance in a patriarchal, misogynistic world." I don't disagree! But I also have another hypothesis for a second potential cause, based on my own experiences. I don't mean to be presumptuous, but in case it's something you hadn't considered and it might be helpful to any further research you do, I wanted to offer my thoughts.
At least from an American/Western perspective, society has made greater strides in the gender allowances given to women than to men. Presumably because men and masculinity are more highly valued, and women and femininity are still looked down upon, women are actually given more freedom to adopt traditionally masculine behaviors and fashions. Whereas men are still socialized not to have anything to do with femininity. Especially outward expressions of it (i.e., clothing, make-up, etc.).
Therefore, I expect that when you take an AFAB person, who has greater freedom to tread on both "sides" of the gender divide, then add asexuality (which has the effect you mentioned: "the unraveling of compulsory sexuality could lead to the unraveling of compulsory gender"), you get someone with a more highly developed sense that gender is meaningless to them. I believe this likely accounts for at least some of the gendered relation to gender detachment, because AMAB persons have less room to experiment with gender or to live in in-between gender spaces, and thus are less likely to detach from the notion as easily. That's my theory, at least!
Thank you for your research on this topic! I'm looking forward to reading more of your work.
Thank you for sharing these thoughts! That's a really interesting explanation for why gender detachment might be more common for AFAB folks. I'll have to ponder that and see how it fits with my interviews.
This is amazing. As an asexual person, I relate to this so much! I never understood what it was like to feel like your gender inside. I just always felt like...myself? This makes me feel validated and normal. Thank you!
Hello! I saw your tweets on Tumblr today and had to look you up. I'm AFAB and asexual and since I started exploring my gender I've felt that I'm much more comfortable with the idea of not having a gender at all. Thank you for giving me some context on that feeling and the knowledge that it is a shared feeling. I also resonate with your thought that "This suggests gender detachment may be a strategy for survival or resistance in a patriarchal, misogynistic world." For years I've struggled to determine whether my gender detachment was due to the fact that I'm non-binary in some way or because I was uncomfortable with the way my AGAB was treated in our current world. I've come to the decision that it's both and I'm excited that you're discussing this academically. I'm looking forward to hearing more from you in this newsletter.
Okay I was just on my usual annual insecurity trip of reading about asexuality to confirm I still feel like I fit in that group as a demisexual who has only ever experienced sexual attraction once ... this is fascinating! While I am fairly confident in calling myself a cis-woman, I know I don't resonate with 'being a woman' the same way others seem to. As someone who wears baggy high-vis for half my working time I get misgendered frequently and it's more funny than anything. And yes, also safer to be seen as a man (or amorphous orange blob) than a woman.
More to the point, this is making me wonder more about all the people who were concerned for ME when my partner of 7 years came out as non-binary leaning towards feminine and I was just like 'yeah this actually wasn't super surprising on reflection, also they're way happier now'. Like, it just doesn't matter that much to me that my partner wanted to publicly present nearly opposite how they had before? Not to say that whole experience has been easy on my partner but just not a huge deal to me the way a lot of people assumed it would be. They're visibly happier to be themself, I'm not attached to any label but ace, so please be more worried about the assholes out in the universe than the intimate details of our relationship please and thank you.
I saw the screenshots of your tweets on tumblr and immediately scrambled to find out more about your research. I think the work youre doing is really significant and hopefully more people will begin paying attention to the asexual experience. Also, I want to thank you for the term "gender detachment." What you described is exactly how I feel about gender but I've never had the words to express it before.
Hi! I came across your twitter thread a few weeks ago and it got me thinking a lot about my own experience. I'm aroace AFAB, and I never really questioned my gender, but I did always feel like I didn't really "align" with the idea of "being a woman" that society has, and the words 'gender detachment' really resonated with me. I don't feel like I have any "gender" beyond my body being physically what it is, if that makes sense.
I wonder if it having something to do with being aro and/or ace is because we do not experience attraction to any gender, and thus it becomes something devoid of importance, both in other people and in ourselves.
Anyway, thank you so much for your work, for helping me understand myself a bit better, and congrats on the award! Can't wait to read the full paper!
Thank you for sharing! I'm so glad the work resonated with you. I think you're right that because asexuality decenters gender in how sexuality is conceptualized, this might make ace folks more likely to question commonsense notions about gender.
I was just linked to your research by a friend I was talking to about my recent discovery (literally yesterday), that most people feel gender to be inherent, whereas I have also experienced gender as something that was imparted to me by culture. I am a woman because when I was born, someone made the decision based on certain arbitrary physical traits that I was a girl; then I was treated for many years as a girl; then I was treated for years as a woman. These experiences have completely shaped who I am, thus rendering me Female. If I had been raised by aliens, I would have no sense of gender at all.
I am 36 years old, and I did not know that most people don't feel this way until literally yesterday when I was talking to a trans friend who was kind enough to explain their inherent sense of gender to me. It was eye-opening, in the same way it was in my mid-20s when I realized that people weren't just exaggerating when they talked about sexual attraction. Turns out, 20-something-me discovered, I am wired differently than most people and do not experience this sexual attraction thing. Well, as of yesterday, I know that I am wired differently with gender too.
Apparently, other people really, truly have some inner, inherent experience of gender that is separate from and pre-exists how society treats them and would be the same no matter how they were raised. I did not know this.
As when I figured out about my asexuality, I feel kind of dumb for not taking people literally about things I thought were metaphorical. But at least I'm still learning! I think that I am inherently agender, but I identify and feel like a woman because of my experiences. Those experiences are completely a part of me now--they can't be ignored--so I'm not...currently agender. I am a woman, she/her/ella pronouns, etc. But it is super interesting that, unlike many other women, both trans and cis, I am missing some inner mechanism that most(?) people have.
This changes nothing about my own life, how I want to be treated, etc. But it does significantly change how I will interpret other people's experiences, and so it is a good thing to learn. It's also helpful because it means I can stop worrying about what gender *is*, something I've been fretting over for a long time. It's something I don't experience, like, I don't know, some animals seeing different colors that we can't see because of their rod/cone configuration. I am gender-feeling-blind. It's freeing to know!
All that to say: I am excited you are doing this work. The term "gender detachment" does resonate with me, and yes, I am a cis asexual woman, so you can consider me another data point. It's comforting and exciting to know that there are other people like me and that there's probably some sort of correlation between my asexuality and my a-gender-ness. Best of luck to you in your research and I am excited to see what else you discover!
I'm AFAB aroace. I was a kid in the 90s, and back then the only discourse about any non-cishet identities was "gay". So, until my twenties, I had no idea I was aroace, nor that there's options other than "woman" available to me.
However, even if the discourse about queer and nonbinary identities became more common, I could never really relate to it. I actually identified as "questioning my gender and content with never finding the answer" for years. I didn't see the point in "finding my gender" nor I felt like it was really even possible. Ever since I was a kid, I didn't identify with the female main characters nor with the male main characters on any series or movie or cartoon. Rather I identified with the "insignificant comic relief side characters" - the ones that still most commonly were male, but very androgynous and "non-macho" - like being _the male_ was not the main point with those characters. And I related to that, that being what you were assigned at birth was not the point, but being androgynous while doing your own (weird) thing felt more like me. And that's how I still feel about gender today - just completely pointless, to the point that it may as well not exist. Also, I'm indifferent about the pronouns people use for me - even though it could be because there's no any gendered pronouns in my native, I feel like it's also because it simply doesn't matter to me, just like how I feel about my gender as a whole.
When it comes to my body and gender assigned at birth, I'd love to have a physically more androgynous body, with less sex-related characteristics (of either genders) but I don't feel like I experienced gender incongruence as intense & disabling that major medical procedures were worth it. I just fix what I can with my outfits and I'm fine with it. Most people recognize me as a tomboy or lesbian based on my appearance, neither of which are quite right, but I'm not too bothered about it either.
It really did! It's surprising but great to hear my experiences are very common on the ace community, since I've felt my whole life weird and alone and like I couldn't relate to anyone and no-one could relate to me. I'm happy you're making this work on research, it's so valuable!
As an Asexual AFAB I came across your article and reading the words Gender disconnected really just clicked in me in a way most other labels haven't I played with the idea of being gender fluid or non binary, but realised that they still put weight on actually caring about gender so never really felt like they were my labels to claim. Then there's Agendered and truthfully Agendered and gender disconnected... they're pretty much the same thing, and yet still that term didn't sit right. I can't put my finger on why Agendered doesn't work for me in the way Gender Disconnected does. Is it perhaps that being disconnected means there's a potential there to re-connect? For me personally it wasn't a willful choice to be gender disconnected. Just I don't really see myself as female or male, im just me.
Glad to hear the work resonated with you. The possibility of re-connection is really interesting! I haven't quite thought of it that way before. Thanks for the food for thought.
Hi! I just wanted to say thank you for doing this research. I'm definitely ***not*** on the asexuality spectrum, but I resonate deeply with the gender detachment you describe—so much so that reading about it brought tears to my eyes. I've always been very uncomfortable with gender (I remember being confused by it as early as kindergarden) but I've never been able to adequately articulate the feeling, so your research means a lot to me. Thank you. I look forward to reading your future work.
When the title of this newsletter post popped up in my inbox, I got SO excited and clicked right away, because this addresses EXACTLY what I've been exploring/struggling with the past month or so. I was questioning my gender, and — I KID YOU NOT — I kept using the exact same term ('gender detachment') when I was explaining how I felt to myself or when I posted about my thoughts/feelings about gender online: I just kept thinking 'I feel detached from my gender' over and over. But 'gender detachment' is not a mainstream concept the way that being nonbinary or cisgender is, so I felt unsatisfied with it, because I didn't see my experience as 'legit.' But now you're saying that it's a real thing that many/most ace people experience!! I feel so validated right now. :D
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.
Thank you for sharing! It's really helpful--and rewarding--to hear directly from folks about how my research resonates with them (or not). I appreciate it.
I really, really resonate with what you've written here! With the additional layer of having been raised in a gender essentialist evangelical environment where I was *constantly* being told that men-are-this or women-do-this and that anyone who deviates from that is not just abnormal but sinful. Because of this, I am skeptical--no, honestly, I'm hostile--to people perpetuating these gender roles/labels. It's really helpful for me to know that this is probably because I experience gender differently than other people do. I will join your gender-apathetic club!
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?
Thank you for sharing this! I'm so sorry you had negative experiences with health professionals. Unfortunately, that appears to be a common experience for folks under the asexuality umbrella. But it sounds like you've found a more affirming therapist, and I'm glad to hear it.
I currently only share my work here and on Twitter. I figure Substack is pretty accessible, since I can share my work for free and it's easy to subscribe. But I'm open to suggestions, if you have any.
Thanks for your reply. Have you perused the Reddit fora? There are several ace subs - but most are not very friendly to s*x-adverse/repulsed/uninterested people like me (and bully us off their subs, but, there are subs that would greatly benefit from seeing/hearing from someone like you.
I tried googling (without your name) to see if your stuff comes up - I don’t see anything - perhaps Substack doesn’t share their stuff with google.
(I’ve worked in research so I can usually suss out words to product search results - and I have never even heard of Substack until my psychologist sent me your tweet!)
Reddit makes a lot of sense. I'm sorry to hear about the divisions you mentioned happening there!
Just wanted to say Hi as someone who has always been uninterested in sex. For a voracious and eclectic reader, I haven't even bothered to find out the mechanics of how it's done. Obviously, I know what goes where, but am still not sure of how it gets there. And I'm a 60 year old tenured professor. I'm in a very abstruse mathematical discipline - so these broader questions of identity weren't concepts I've even encountered in an academic setting.
I know that asexuality covers a large umbrella of micro- identities. I'm guessing each of these - at least the more common ones - would lead to a wealth of data on psychological profiles, etc.
In my case, I cannot point out to any plausible "provenance" for my disinterest in sex. I blend very well into a crowd of my demographic peers, and don't fit any of the presumed stereotypes of a socially stunted, unappealing woman.
Hello, Canton! I'm one of the many AFAB ace individuals who really resonated with your Twitter thread describing gender detachment and is hugely looking forward to reading the published piece.
I agree with everything you stated here. I did, however, have one additional thought in regards to your statement about how gendered detachment being a gendered phenomenon "suggests gender detachment may be a strategy for survival or resistance in a patriarchal, misogynistic world." I don't disagree! But I also have another hypothesis for a second potential cause, based on my own experiences. I don't mean to be presumptuous, but in case it's something you hadn't considered and it might be helpful to any further research you do, I wanted to offer my thoughts.
At least from an American/Western perspective, society has made greater strides in the gender allowances given to women than to men. Presumably because men and masculinity are more highly valued, and women and femininity are still looked down upon, women are actually given more freedom to adopt traditionally masculine behaviors and fashions. Whereas men are still socialized not to have anything to do with femininity. Especially outward expressions of it (i.e., clothing, make-up, etc.).
Therefore, I expect that when you take an AFAB person, who has greater freedom to tread on both "sides" of the gender divide, then add asexuality (which has the effect you mentioned: "the unraveling of compulsory sexuality could lead to the unraveling of compulsory gender"), you get someone with a more highly developed sense that gender is meaningless to them. I believe this likely accounts for at least some of the gendered relation to gender detachment, because AMAB persons have less room to experiment with gender or to live in in-between gender spaces, and thus are less likely to detach from the notion as easily. That's my theory, at least!
Thank you for your research on this topic! I'm looking forward to reading more of your work.
Thank you for sharing these thoughts! That's a really interesting explanation for why gender detachment might be more common for AFAB folks. I'll have to ponder that and see how it fits with my interviews.
This is amazing. As an asexual person, I relate to this so much! I never understood what it was like to feel like your gender inside. I just always felt like...myself? This makes me feel validated and normal. Thank you!
Hello! I saw your tweets on Tumblr today and had to look you up. I'm AFAB and asexual and since I started exploring my gender I've felt that I'm much more comfortable with the idea of not having a gender at all. Thank you for giving me some context on that feeling and the knowledge that it is a shared feeling. I also resonate with your thought that "This suggests gender detachment may be a strategy for survival or resistance in a patriarchal, misogynistic world." For years I've struggled to determine whether my gender detachment was due to the fact that I'm non-binary in some way or because I was uncomfortable with the way my AGAB was treated in our current world. I've come to the decision that it's both and I'm excited that you're discussing this academically. I'm looking forward to hearing more from you in this newsletter.
Okay I was just on my usual annual insecurity trip of reading about asexuality to confirm I still feel like I fit in that group as a demisexual who has only ever experienced sexual attraction once ... this is fascinating! While I am fairly confident in calling myself a cis-woman, I know I don't resonate with 'being a woman' the same way others seem to. As someone who wears baggy high-vis for half my working time I get misgendered frequently and it's more funny than anything. And yes, also safer to be seen as a man (or amorphous orange blob) than a woman.
More to the point, this is making me wonder more about all the people who were concerned for ME when my partner of 7 years came out as non-binary leaning towards feminine and I was just like 'yeah this actually wasn't super surprising on reflection, also they're way happier now'. Like, it just doesn't matter that much to me that my partner wanted to publicly present nearly opposite how they had before? Not to say that whole experience has been easy on my partner but just not a huge deal to me the way a lot of people assumed it would be. They're visibly happier to be themself, I'm not attached to any label but ace, so please be more worried about the assholes out in the universe than the intimate details of our relationship please and thank you.
I saw the screenshots of your tweets on tumblr and immediately scrambled to find out more about your research. I think the work youre doing is really significant and hopefully more people will begin paying attention to the asexual experience. Also, I want to thank you for the term "gender detachment." What you described is exactly how I feel about gender but I've never had the words to express it before.
Thank you so much for the feedback! It truly means a lot to me when I hear that my work resonates outside of academia. Glad the work spoke to you.
Hi! I came across your twitter thread a few weeks ago and it got me thinking a lot about my own experience. I'm aroace AFAB, and I never really questioned my gender, but I did always feel like I didn't really "align" with the idea of "being a woman" that society has, and the words 'gender detachment' really resonated with me. I don't feel like I have any "gender" beyond my body being physically what it is, if that makes sense.
I wonder if it having something to do with being aro and/or ace is because we do not experience attraction to any gender, and thus it becomes something devoid of importance, both in other people and in ourselves.
Anyway, thank you so much for your work, for helping me understand myself a bit better, and congrats on the award! Can't wait to read the full paper!
Thank you for sharing! I'm so glad the work resonated with you. I think you're right that because asexuality decenters gender in how sexuality is conceptualized, this might make ace folks more likely to question commonsense notions about gender.
Love this, looking forward to the paper :)
Thank you! I'll share the full paper on Substack and Twitter once it's out.
This is great news! I look forward to links to the podcast and Sojourners article when they come out!
I'll be sure to share them on Substack and on my Twitter!
I was just linked to your research by a friend I was talking to about my recent discovery (literally yesterday), that most people feel gender to be inherent, whereas I have also experienced gender as something that was imparted to me by culture. I am a woman because when I was born, someone made the decision based on certain arbitrary physical traits that I was a girl; then I was treated for many years as a girl; then I was treated for years as a woman. These experiences have completely shaped who I am, thus rendering me Female. If I had been raised by aliens, I would have no sense of gender at all.
I am 36 years old, and I did not know that most people don't feel this way until literally yesterday when I was talking to a trans friend who was kind enough to explain their inherent sense of gender to me. It was eye-opening, in the same way it was in my mid-20s when I realized that people weren't just exaggerating when they talked about sexual attraction. Turns out, 20-something-me discovered, I am wired differently than most people and do not experience this sexual attraction thing. Well, as of yesterday, I know that I am wired differently with gender too.
Apparently, other people really, truly have some inner, inherent experience of gender that is separate from and pre-exists how society treats them and would be the same no matter how they were raised. I did not know this.
As when I figured out about my asexuality, I feel kind of dumb for not taking people literally about things I thought were metaphorical. But at least I'm still learning! I think that I am inherently agender, but I identify and feel like a woman because of my experiences. Those experiences are completely a part of me now--they can't be ignored--so I'm not...currently agender. I am a woman, she/her/ella pronouns, etc. But it is super interesting that, unlike many other women, both trans and cis, I am missing some inner mechanism that most(?) people have.
This changes nothing about my own life, how I want to be treated, etc. But it does significantly change how I will interpret other people's experiences, and so it is a good thing to learn. It's also helpful because it means I can stop worrying about what gender *is*, something I've been fretting over for a long time. It's something I don't experience, like, I don't know, some animals seeing different colors that we can't see because of their rod/cone configuration. I am gender-feeling-blind. It's freeing to know!
All that to say: I am excited you are doing this work. The term "gender detachment" does resonate with me, and yes, I am a cis asexual woman, so you can consider me another data point. It's comforting and exciting to know that there are other people like me and that there's probably some sort of correlation between my asexuality and my a-gender-ness. Best of luck to you in your research and I am excited to see what else you discover!
I really resonate with this! looking forward to the final paper
I'm AFAB aroace. I was a kid in the 90s, and back then the only discourse about any non-cishet identities was "gay". So, until my twenties, I had no idea I was aroace, nor that there's options other than "woman" available to me.
However, even if the discourse about queer and nonbinary identities became more common, I could never really relate to it. I actually identified as "questioning my gender and content with never finding the answer" for years. I didn't see the point in "finding my gender" nor I felt like it was really even possible. Ever since I was a kid, I didn't identify with the female main characters nor with the male main characters on any series or movie or cartoon. Rather I identified with the "insignificant comic relief side characters" - the ones that still most commonly were male, but very androgynous and "non-macho" - like being _the male_ was not the main point with those characters. And I related to that, that being what you were assigned at birth was not the point, but being androgynous while doing your own (weird) thing felt more like me. And that's how I still feel about gender today - just completely pointless, to the point that it may as well not exist. Also, I'm indifferent about the pronouns people use for me - even though it could be because there's no any gendered pronouns in my native, I feel like it's also because it simply doesn't matter to me, just like how I feel about my gender as a whole.
When it comes to my body and gender assigned at birth, I'd love to have a physically more androgynous body, with less sex-related characteristics (of either genders) but I don't feel like I experienced gender incongruence as intense & disabling that major medical procedures were worth it. I just fix what I can with my outfits and I'm fine with it. Most people recognize me as a tomboy or lesbian based on my appearance, neither of which are quite right, but I'm not too bothered about it either.
Thank you for sharing this! It's so helpful to hear about experiences like this. I'm glad the work seems to have resonated with you.
It really did! It's surprising but great to hear my experiences are very common on the ace community, since I've felt my whole life weird and alone and like I couldn't relate to anyone and no-one could relate to me. I'm happy you're making this work on research, it's so valuable!
<i>And that's how I still feel about gender today - just completely pointless, to the point that it may as well not exist. </i>
YES!
As an Asexual AFAB I came across your article and reading the words Gender disconnected really just clicked in me in a way most other labels haven't I played with the idea of being gender fluid or non binary, but realised that they still put weight on actually caring about gender so never really felt like they were my labels to claim. Then there's Agendered and truthfully Agendered and gender disconnected... they're pretty much the same thing, and yet still that term didn't sit right. I can't put my finger on why Agendered doesn't work for me in the way Gender Disconnected does. Is it perhaps that being disconnected means there's a potential there to re-connect? For me personally it wasn't a willful choice to be gender disconnected. Just I don't really see myself as female or male, im just me.
Glad to hear the work resonated with you. The possibility of re-connection is really interesting! I haven't quite thought of it that way before. Thanks for the food for thought.
Hi! I just wanted to say thank you for doing this research. I'm definitely ***not*** on the asexuality spectrum, but I resonate deeply with the gender detachment you describe—so much so that reading about it brought tears to my eyes. I've always been very uncomfortable with gender (I remember being confused by it as early as kindergarden) but I've never been able to adequately articulate the feeling, so your research means a lot to me. Thank you. I look forward to reading your future work.
Thank you so much for sharing. It means so much to hear that my work connects with folks.
When the title of this newsletter post popped up in my inbox, I got SO excited and clicked right away, because this addresses EXACTLY what I've been exploring/struggling with the past month or so. I was questioning my gender, and — I KID YOU NOT — I kept using the exact same term ('gender detachment') when I was explaining how I felt to myself or when I posted about my thoughts/feelings about gender online: I just kept thinking 'I feel detached from my gender' over and over. But 'gender detachment' is not a mainstream concept the way that being nonbinary or cisgender is, so I felt unsatisfied with it, because I didn't see my experience as 'legit.' But now you're saying that it's a real thing that many/most ace people experience!! I feel so validated right now. :D
I'm so glad! Getting feedback like this means so much to me, and it helps drive the work forward. Thank you for sharing!