@rabia_elizabeth @actuallyautistic thank you for linking that, it was a most interesting read!

it also jives with a thought i’ve been nurturing for a while now. i suspected that i am locating ‘identity’ at a different epistemological layer than neurotypicals: where it is common to see the self as one thing in a world of things, i always erred on the side of feeling the self as the point opposite the world of things, as the stage on which the phenomena describing the world happen. and the self-as-a-part-of-the-world only happens in the phenomena on that stage. they enter stage right, so to say, and speak of things, some of which affect me. and i do like some of those described things more than others (and am super duper into some of them!), but at the end of the day, my self is more the stage on which that happens rather than the play performed on it.

hence i always struggled a bit with gender as well – not in terms of understanding it as a varied spectrum, or which parts of that spectrum i find more likeable, but in terms of not getting the importance of putting my ‘me’ on a spot on that spectrum where it reads as ‘is like this’ and ‘is not like that’ – when what i feel to be my true self exists only as itself, and all those axes of differentiation can only happen within the play, between characters, but not on the stage. i have only me. and even saying ‘ah, i must be agender’ places me too much inside the play to describe my true, inner me-ness.

@gekitsu @rabia_elizabeth@mefi.social @actuallyautistic

My unsolicited two cents:

Gender roles, being artificial constructs, serve the purpose of restricting/limiting/controlling how we present ourselves to the world. Given that as a foundation, I have no respect for the idea of "gender presentation". I present me to the world. I may or may not fit neatly into a category they have in their head, but that has nothing to do with me - that's all them.