However, how do you deal with the social aspect of being agendered? As far as my experience goes in the real world, you can tell people all you want that you’re without gender but if you look like a boy you’ll be treated like one. Whether you play that role or not.
You actually answer this yourself.
I simply stopped trying to play into any specific gender role and did what comes naturally.
I wouldn’t really proclaim my lack of gender identity in any case, unless the subject came up specifically. If the body you have is going to affect how people treat you, I feel that wanting a different body for the role it comes with isn’t addressing the problem so much as dodging it.
What I mean is, if I’m going to be treated a certain way just because of the body I have, it doesn’t matter to me (on the meta level) what that treatment is. I’m treated like a boy because I look like one, but to me, that isn’t any better or worse than being treated like anything else because I look like one. It’s a much deeper and more general problem than a person’s personality not meshing well with the role socially associated with their sex.
Granted, the body I have isn’t the body I would choose to have, but to me that now feels like something entirely unrelated to issues of identity. With the conscious recognition and isolation of the role, all possible bodies are equal so far as my identity is concerned.
I would never want to go back to having a male shell however, the female body is by far the closest to my gender identity. Is that sort of what you’re aiming at?
Not quite; I don’t believe gender identity should exist at all. Rather, what I’m aiming at is the separation of preference-of-body and preference-of-role from each other as well as from identity. A question I once posed to myself was, if all the social connotations attached to each of the sexes were perfectly reversed, swapped, would that change what body you would choose to have? And I found that I could not give a simple answer. The question of body seemed straightforward, but my mind kept trying to attach something else that confused the answer, and that something turned out to be the question of role. Suddenly it was clear to me, on a gut level, that they really were separate questions, and that the question of role was effectively a question of environmental preference that just happened to be tangled up with this “gender” concept in our own society.
You actually answer this yourself.
I wouldn’t really proclaim my lack of gender identity in any case, unless the subject came up specifically. If the body you have is going to affect how people treat you, I feel that wanting a different body for the role it comes with isn’t addressing the problem so much as dodging it.
What I mean is, if I’m going to be treated a certain way just because of the body I have, it doesn’t matter to me (on the meta level) what that treatment is. I’m treated like a boy because I look like one, but to me, that isn’t any better or worse than being treated like anything else because I look like one. It’s a much deeper and more general problem than a person’s personality not meshing well with the role socially associated with their sex.
Granted, the body I have isn’t the body I would choose to have, but to me that now feels like something entirely unrelated to issues of identity. With the conscious recognition and isolation of the role, all possible bodies are equal so far as my identity is concerned.
Not quite; I don’t believe gender identity should exist at all. Rather, what I’m aiming at is the separation of preference-of-body and preference-of-role from each other as well as from identity. A question I once posed to myself was, if all the social connotations attached to each of the sexes were perfectly reversed, swapped, would that change what body you would choose to have? And I found that I could not give a simple answer. The question of body seemed straightforward, but my mind kept trying to attach something else that confused the answer, and that something turned out to be the question of role. Suddenly it was clear to me, on a gut level, that they really were separate questions, and that the question of role was effectively a question of environmental preference that just happened to be tangled up with this “gender” concept in our own society.