Tuesday, October 11, 2016

National Coming Out Day

I live in the USA, so it's national coming out day for me, today.

The short version: I'm queer.

Slightly longer version: I'm nonbinary, genderfluid, gendervague, bi/panromantic, and repulsed asexual.

Longest version (thus far): If you ask me whether I'm a man or a woman, my answer is "no."  The genders I vary around  are agender, androgyne, and "no, really, autism is my gender." That means that my neurodivergence is pretty thoroughly intertwined with how I (often don't) do gender. Since I am not a man or a woman and clothing tends to be marketed to one of those two genders, either everything is drag for me or nothing is. I go with everything. There are a few different pronoun sets I'm good with. Describing myself, I'll use they/them/theirs or sie/sier/siers. In text I go either way, in speech it's they because sie sounds too much like she for my taste. Xe, ze, and other sets created to be gender-neutral are all fine with me too. I will be amused by he/him/his because that's not the assumption people usually make. I tolerate she/her/hers from people I'm not out to. I do not tolerate "it."

When I do crushes or romantic attraction, the gender of the person is something I am aware of, but it's not particularly relevant. I have liked nonbinary people. There are too many different ways of defining biromantic and panromantic, and too many often conflicting explanations of the difference, for me to tell you with any certainty that I am one and not the other. I'm fine being described by either. I don't do sexual attraction, at all. Or libido, for that matter. Disabled people as a whole cover the full range of human sexuality, and I sit at the "no thanks" part of that range.

You can trace my journey, or pieces of it, along with more academic musings that relate to queerness, on my Queer Stuff tag, generally from less firm on my queerness (mostly I don't want to have sex) to stronger blatant statements (I'm repulsed asexual.)

Now, I'm fairly safe being out. (And there's not much in this post that you couldn't pick up on from having read other stuff on my blog anyways.) And I have a policy of being pretty out when it's safe for me to do so, to hopefully make it safer for others to be out in the future. Which wouldn't be necessary if I thought it was currently safe for everyone. It's not. I know it's not. Shout out to everyone who can't be out, who weighs the costs and benefits of being out and decides the closet is safer. You matter. Protecting yourself matters.




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