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Asexuality

Some ALGBTQ Internet Finds

Tuesday, November 23, 2010 by Tse Moana Leave a Comment

November 20 was Transgender Day of Remembrance.

Science has discovered that by turning off one single gene, the ovaries of mice turned into testes. If this is something they can eventually use in/with/for humans as well it would pave the way for easier gender reassignment than the surgeries that are now needed. Read the article here.

About gender identity, how about identifying as Fabulous? šŸ™‚

In an interview, Project Runway’s Tim Gunn recently came out as asexual, sort of. He doesn’t seem to fully see it as an/his orientation, but it is nice to have an asexual famous face. Quotes from the interview he did to be found here.

ā€œIn my twenties, I was madly in love with the same man for almost a decade. It was fabulous. [Then] one night he told me he’d been sleeping around. I could hardly breathe from grief, humiliation and despair. Much of my boyfriend’s ā€œI’m over thisā€ was about sex. I’ve always been kind of asexual. That breakup was a cold shower to last a lifetime.ā€

ā€œWhen people hear I haven’t had a boyfriend since 1982, they often whisper, ā€œDoes he not have sex?ā€ That’s right! Could I get Psychiatric help? Probably. It’s a little late.ā€

He’s also written a book, Gunn’s Golden Rules, which Gray Lady reviews here. Here’s another quote, this one from his book. I’m getting really curious about it now, I might have to go and read it.

“Sometimes people ask me when I figured out that I was gay. Well, for a very long time, I didn’t know what I was. I knew what I wasn’t: I wasn’t interested in boys, but I really wasn’t interested in girls. A lot of it was denial, but it was also that I didn’t feel unsatisfied. I’ve always loved working and have made that my priority. For many years, I described myself as asexual, and that’s probably still closest to the truth.”

Some videos to end with:

When Did You Choose To Be Straight?

The Trevor Project has been making a lot of It Gets Better videos as shout outs to LGBTQ youth who are getting bullied and harassed on a daily basis, to let them know that it will get better. Pixar has made a heartwarming video of their employees talking about their struggles, and how it does get better.

Posted in: General Tagged: Asexuality, Gender, Homosexuality, Internet, Link Dump, QUILTBAG, Videos

More Quotage, of the Asexy Variety This Time

Wednesday, July 7, 2010 by Tse Moana 6 Comments

Reading Google Reader this morning, I saw this post from Asexy Beast, it describes the moment she discovered she was different from hetero/homonormative people.

A guy had asked me out (I think my friends were more excited than I was) and I found my thoughts wandering to: “Would I ever want to have sex with him?” My answer was an emphatic “no”. If I’d just stopped there, I wouldn’t have dug up anything unusual. But I continued on with, “Who would I have sex with?” Away from my familiar routine, I felt free to answer: No one.
At that moment, I had a realization. It wasn’t that I was asexual (yet), but that I hadn’t been separating sex in practice from sex in theory. Sex in theory sounded well and good, something I would do when I was “in love” with someone (which still hasn’t happened). But sex in practice was something I never had any interest in. And in that moment, I knew that meeting “the right guy” wouldn’t change that
.

THIS. This is, almost word for word, how I came to the same realisation. It can feel so good, sometimes, to find someone out there who gets that stuff in the same way I do.

The post continues with a list of things she has learned since, some more serious than others, but I want to spotlight a few of ’em

  • …that I was a normal asexual, not a “failed” heterosexual.
  • The gender binary is silly, and some people fall outside of it.
  • Being married, or in a romantic relationship, is not an instant cure for loneliness. Plenty of people feel alone, regardless of orientation, and being asexual doesn’t mean you’ll be lonely.
  • Heteronormativity is a problem.
  • The language we use to talk about sex and romance, from “just friends” to “in a relationship”, could do with some updating.
  • It’s okay to not be “in love” with anyone. And the love I do feel is just as valid as romantic love is.

Finally, she ends with a question:

Whether you came out as asexual yesterday or 20 years ago, I want to ask…what have you learned? And if you’re not asexual (or if you like this question better), what are some of the most important things you’ve learned in the past 5 years?

So… what I’ve learned in the past five years, not specifically asexy related…

  • Just because I’m now working as a customer service agent after trying a couple different studies and instead of continuing in the field I graduated in does not mean I failed.
  • I’m fine by myself as long as I have my friends, my family and my cat
  • Playing videogames, World of Warcraft specifically, is a perfectly valid hobby
  • Sometimes people you like/respect let you down, and that is okay, because nobody is perfect. It just takes a moment to deal.
  • One can never have enough books. Or Billys.
  • I don’t need to be in ‘a relationship’ with someone. but should it ever happen, I really don’t give a rat’s ass whether that person is a he, a she, or something else entirely, as long as they and I want to be together.
  • There’s a gigantic list of things that are better than sex
  • I don’t like being touched, but sometimes a hug feels very good
  • Toe socks are awesome
  • Do what you want to do, even if you’re not very good at it, as long as it makes you happy
Posted in: General Tagged: Asexuality, List, Quotes

Let’s Talk About…

Thursday, November 12, 2009 by Tse Moana 6 Comments

…gender today. And we’ll touch on sexuality too. (And I’ll follow this post with one containing the promised book update (although it might have to wait until I get home again, not sure if I have the up to date reading list with me) and a little something about the job process.)

I don’t think I have, on any of the platforms I use to communicate, actually talked about the topic. My facebook page has an infobox on it with my gender identity and sexual orientation in it, but I’ve never really talked about it (except for two of my friends). Not that I don’t want to talk about it, it’s just that it never seems to come up really, and it seems weird to just get up and go: “let’s talk about my gender identity today” in personal communication. If asked about either (gender and/or sexuality) I’ll gladly answer.

A quick little bit of background. I’ve always known, growing up, I was ‘different’. I barely have any memories of my elementary school periods, just flashes here and there. This, I suspect, is mostly due to suppression on account of the many medical procedures I had to undergo as a kid (what with being born with hip dysplasia). The last one of these was when I was ten. So when I say I’ve always known, I mean starting from ten, eleven on.

I was never interested in boys, or girls for that matter, and other matters dealing with the physical form. I came across something yesterday that nicely describes my general feeling growing up, and now still most of the time. It comes from a post on the genderkid blog:

I didn’t grow up with any body image problems because, for most of my teen life, I’ve done a good job of ignoring my body. Whenever I did look at myself, I didn’t see anything wrong: my body fits pretty well into society’s standards of ā€œnormalā€. I just didn’t identify with what I was seeing. I avoided mirrors because I was better off thinking of myself as a floating brain.

But while I was growing up, I never questioned the basic stereotypes, took them as something that just happened: I was going to get married a husband, have a couple kids, the whole shebang. Of course, as I got older and stayed not interested, I sometimes wondered but mostly put it to being a late bloomer. I also never gave any thought to other possibilities, like that I might be a lesbian or bisexual and would end up with a woman, let alone considering that there were more ‘types’ besides men and women.

This was partly due to where I grew up: a very small, rural town where not a lot of people were different in those ways. There was, as I knew it during my teens, one lesbian couple in my town, and a transwoman a town over. I never interacted with the transwoman, I only knew about her because she was the neighbour of one of my friends. I on occasion met half of the lesbian couple but due to the age difference (she was near my mother’s age) we’d never interact on an equal enough base that I’d ask about it, and even if I had, it most likely would’ve been considered impolite.

Combined with my continued disinterest in all these matters, I never investigated my own difference. Not until I graduated high school and went on to university. There I befriended Gert. And after about a year or so, he came out to me as being gay. I was completely accepting of it from the start, I think being exposed to the couple in my hometown did really drive home the normality of being gay. We discussed it on occasion, being gay, and him being the first non-heterosexual person I was close too was the catalyst that got me thinking about myself and started me on this whole journey of self-discovery and such. Starting with my sexual orientation, but, a year or two later, also including my gender identity.

So, since sexuality came first, let’s start with it here too.

I’d already realised that I had no particular attraction to anyone. Sure, I found some people pretty or cute, but that was about it. I didn’t, and still don’t, have any desires to get physical with someone, be they male, female or something else. This confused me, what did this make me? Apparently not straight since I’d make no distinction between sexes in finding people cute or pretty. But then again apparently not a lesbian either because of previous argument. Was I then bisexual? I labelled myself as such since it seemed to fit best at that moment.

I kept wondering though, surely there must be more people feeling as I did. Or was it just a hormonal thing? In any case, life kept me occupied, school, friends, hobbies etc… and I didn’t give it all that much thought. Kinda using the bisexuality conclusion as a temporary end point. A while after, not sure how long, I was watching Discovery Channel one night and saw a re-run of an episode of Sex Sense (which in the USA was called Sex Files and which happens to be on YouTube in its entirety here) about asexuality. I’d seen the original a while before (a year or so i think?) and found many things familiar even back then but didn’t give it much more thought. This time however, the similarities with my own situation hit me squarely in the face. Next day I immediately started doing research and pretty soon I found AVEN (Asexuality Visibility and Education Network). And all the information and stories of other people I found on there made me realise that I was, in fact, asexual.

Since this post is getting way out of hand as it is already I’ll just point readers towards the AVEN site for more information about what it is and isn’t. But in short, it’s basically not having a sexual attraction towards other people. Finding this out was a bloody epiphany for me and for the next few years, whenever I went on self-discovering journeys of varying length it mostly focused on the sexuality part. It wasn’t until about a year, year-and-a-half ago that gender started coming back into the picture.

When I started to figure out that I didn’t feel I was a woman, I at first assumed that must mean I was a man. But that didn’t fit either, which confused the hell out of me; what else was there? Eventually the name, or label really, that I picked (for myself anyway, not in public) for my gender identity was gender neutral. Then the whole sexuality thing took center stage and when I came back to gender issues, in part fueled by some things one of my friends told me, I approached it the same way I had done with the sexual information seeking: I dived into Google :D.

A whole lot of research later I learned that gender was not nearly so binary, so simple, as I had always thought. I learned there’s way more options and, accompanying that, a plethora of names out there that people use to indicate they identify as something other than male or female. I figured out that I did indeed identify as neither male or female. But whether something outside of it or something in between… I didn’t know. So I kept the gender neutral as a sort of ‘posh term’ but mostly when I thought about what my gender was, it went something like neither? both? all? I’m still not exactly sure how to call it, but by now I have figured out that fluctuating seems to be most appropriate. Most of the time I have no particular gender identity and just go as a neutral. But I have periods, ranging from something as short as a few hours, up until a few days where I balance a little more towards male or female. It’s like one of those trend graphs that usually follow a straight line but sometimes have peaks below or above. Same with my gender identity. Usually it follows the straight neutral line but sometimes it peaks towards male for a bit and sometimes towards female for a bit.

It’s kinda funny, actually, (and quite stereotypical too :S) but I can often tell if I have entered a male or female period when I’m getting dressed (my brain needs a little startup time in the morning so not a lot of coherent thinking and reflection takes place then :D) since the type of clothing I pick to wear is different then. In female periods I’m more inclined to pick a skirt or otherwise more female oriented clothes (like more figure hugging stuff that shows that I do in fact have teh boobies). In male periods I tend to pick my cargo pants and hooded sweatshirts to hide my female parts. And in the neutral periods I mix and match from both sides.

I think I’m getting towards the end now, I can’t really think about anything more to add at this point. And in any case, I’ve rambled on long enough now šŸ˜€ I’ll get back to this topic in later posts, after all, I have a pretty icon for it, I might as well use it šŸ˜›

Posted in: General Tagged: Asexuality, Gender, Gert, Self-Discovery, Thoughts

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