Particularly if you are cis (as in your gender identity aligns with the sex you were assigned at birth) I actively invite you to question it.
I invite you to ask yourself how you know you are the gender you are.
What is it about your gender identity that, when you look into the core of yourself, makes you say ‘Yes. This is who I am.’?
I don’t need you to tell me – or anyone – the answer. I’m not asking you these questions because I’m seeking your answer. (But do feel free to share if you’re so inclined.)
I’m asking them of you so that you know it’s ok to ask them of yourself.
I’ve just spent a glorious couple of hours with a visiting Sarah Clein and – as often happens when we’re together – the conversation got deep, fast. And we found ourselves here.
I am agender.
I have spent an awful lot of time and energy thinking about gender and how it applies to me and my life. Every trans/nonbinary/gender diverse person has dedicated time and energy to their own exploration of these things.
Gender is only one aspect of this. Any and every person that consciously steps outside of what was expected of them – whether that be around gender, sexuality, relationships, career direction, life choices… at some point that person has stopped, looked at that normative expectation, questioned it and made a conscious choice to do or be something different.
But what if you’ve never been told that you can question those things?
We live in a society that is incredibly, profoundly gendered. From the moment we are born we are fed the story of who we are. You are a boy/girl. Boys/girls do this, they don’t do that, they look like this, they behave like that. This is who you are. Here are the things we expect of you.
We’ve all experienced this. But when the world we live in is so firmly set in its ways around gender, many of us don’t actually realise we can question it.
I didn’t until I was in my mid thirties, and I grew up with a trans family member and was actively on the LGBTQ scene from my mid teens. It took a long weekend sharing a flat with a couple if trans guys who lovingly and openly shared if themselves and invited me in, for me to realise I could question what I had assumed to be my truth.
So let me give you permission to ask that of yourself.
How do you know you are a [insert your gender identity]?
What is it about being [your gender identity] that makes you say ‘Yes. This is who I am.’?
I am very solidly grounded in my gender identity. I have explored deeply, over years, what it might mean to me to be a man, or to be a woman, or even to be genderfluid in a way that embodies aspects of both masculine and feminine. I have found my answers to these questions.
I now exist in a state of genuine bliss in my position outside of it all.
It really is a sense of absolute and utter contentment.
It’s quite beautiful.
And I have to imagine that other people feel a similar sense of deep and true rightness about other gender identities.
But you’re only going to have that real, deep, glorious sense of knowing about yourself if you have had the opportunity to explore it.
So this is my message to you.
You have permission to question the identity – or identities – that you have been given.
If the world has told you ‘You are this, and this means these rules apply to you’ and those rules don’t fit, you can question them.
Maybe the rules are wrong.
Maybe the label you’ve been assigned is wrong.
Maybe they’re both wrong.
Maybe they’re both right.
For you.
You won’t know if you don’t ask yourself the question.