Binary Bodies

Along with expanding our emotional experience, queer people have made our full humanity more possible in many, many ways. Here’s another example in terms of gender, being gender expansive, or in my case, agender. For most of my life there was no real category for someone like me. I simply don’t experience gender. I have wanted to and tried to and thought a lot about it, but that is just something I don’t have – a feeling about, an internal experience of my gender. I never felt like the gender I was assigned at birth, female, nor have I felt male or any other gender experience on that beautiful continuum. Queer social movements have given me a term (agender) and a sense of normalness. It’s okay to have the experience I have.Allow me to offer one more instance, that is aging. None of us fit the binary gender frame perfectly and for those who identify as women, aging means having one’s value in the world drop radically. Billions of dollars are spent trying to reverse this natural process. Even if for some moments, some days, even months of one’s life, someone “fits” well as a woman – that means for example being young and thin - at some point she will age and in that aging begin to fit less and less well. If we’re lucky, we all age. The alternative is to die before we begin to grow old. Yet for women, aging is often considered ugly, something to hide. Queerness loosens the grip of binary culture on how our bodies “should be,” much as it opens range of the gender possibilities we might each experience.