Boil Me, Mash Me, Stick Me In A Stew

The first thing that struck me about this research on gender was the person who supplied her gender as “meh”, because I once toyed with listing my pronouns as “meh/meh” but I was afraid people would misconstrue it as a pointed, wrongheaded criticism of providing your pronouns.

As the article details, researchers landed on the term “gender detachment” to describe a phenomenon wherein subjects “were essentially articulating […] a lack of gender identity”. My aborted pronoun hack in essence was me thinking aloud about the fact that I simply don’t think a lot about myself in terms of gender, although my homepage dutifully designates me as a cisgender, straight, and male, which I imagine is certainly true.

In this particular research, most of those identified as “gender detached” also happened to be asexual. I am not, although I am celibate (and what I’ve termed “sexually agnostic”) and aromantic, the latter of which especially I wish I’d known a long time ago as it would have saved me a lot of headaches.

At any rate, over the decades since the early days of the new millennium, I’ve mostly realized that my natural state tends toward just not caring one way or the other whether or not I had access to sex, and that what access I’d had tended to be because it was quite evidently there before me, and (cue that background radiation of conformity I’ve discussed so often in other contexts) so at such times I simply did what and as other people did.

Anyway, this is about gender, not about sex, so let’s return to the issue at hand.

Mostly, while I somewhat identify with this idea of just not thinking about gender all that much, I think it’s worth questioning how much of that would qualify as so-called “gender detachment” and how much would be the fact that people like me, who presumptively represent one or more of the various identities considered to be normative defaults, simply don’t have to think about these things, because for them they are just a societal given.

(For instance, I also don’t have any particular allegiance to the race identity of “white”, but in the normative social constructs of race and racial privilege, I certainly am precisely that. The fact that I don’t think about it doesn’t mean it isn’t true, and certainly implicates this idea that whomever society deems to be of its default identities simply doesn’t need to think about their identities.)

In the end, I neither have any particular impetus to challenge or question the normative defaults I’ve lived within for just shy of fifty-six years and which my homepage designates as being true, nor really any particular sense of identity surrounding the idea of being “male”.

It’s all something for which I don’t especially have a particular answer, although I did once in passing suggest my gender was “potato”.