DECONFORMING
Just a genderless person trying to be myself in a gendered society
Recent articles
I’m taking a break.
Hi.About a week from now is the one-year anniversary of this site. Happy birthday, site. I didn't bake you a cake. Maybe I should. You've been through a lot this first year of your life. In the past year, this site has been visited by ~18,000 people. 18,000 people...
Are new gender labels just silly fads?
There are loads of labels for gender identity, and more keep emerging. Each label provides a way of grouping people by some sort of shared attribute. Some people are really into labels, and how they provide conceptual "bins" to sort ideas into. Others aren't fans of...
Why are we confusing kids with gender labels?
A lot of people tell me that it’s confusing for kids to learn about different labels for gender outside of just “boy” and “girl.” I agree that gender labels are confusing kids, but not in the way that many adults think. When I was born, I was given a label that...
The tricky process of figuring out I was transgender
It took me a long time to figure out that I was transgender and admit it was true. But why did it take me so long? When you’re trans, you should just know, right? Well, kind of. It’s complicated. I did know—but I didn’t know how to interpret what I knew. I'll do...
7 reasons I pretended to be a woman
For the first three decades of my life, everyone who knew me thought I was a woman. I never was. I'm agender. But I didn't correct their misunderstandings until I was 30 years old. The whole time, being treated like I was a woman made me miserable. So why did I let...
I’m just doing what it takes to be me
When I first learned the word “agender,” I immediately recognized myself in it. I never expected to find a word for my experience—I just figured I was different in a way that nobody could perceive or understand, so it would never really count. I just needed to be a...
What does “deadname” mean?
Deadname is a word used in the transgender community to reference the given name that a trans person has rejected, because it misrepresented their gender. This is in contrast to a person's chosen name, which is the name they selected to more accurately reflect who...
The mind-bending weirdness of social dysphoria
There’s this experience I'm all too familiar with that goes by the jargony name "social dysphoria." It happens when people treat you according to a role—and that role is in conflict with who you are. (It's part of the experience of gender dysphoria, which can also be...
Why do people see me as either a man or a woman?
As an agender person, I don’t know what having gender feels like. The only real experience I have with gender is that almost everyone I've met takes for granted that all people are one of two genders, including me. This has improved a lot in the last year or so since...
Offensive terms to trans people: an ally’s guide
Our words have power to create and perpetuate ways of perceiving the world, whether for good or for bad. Transgender folks deal with a lot of complex forms of discrimination, and the language we use can play a big role in either lessening that or promoting it. Today,...