Gender Negation: An Identity Separated From Gender
By: Evelyn
Tags: Identity, Gender, Sexuality, Feminism, Gender Identity

Gender is fake, gender is a social construct that holds relevance in the world. It becomes part of our identity, categorization, roles, perception, but yet despite its relevance, it remains purely an identity. It exists separate from sex. Gender holds no useful relevance outside of identity.

Gender categorization (And sex-based categorization) has lead to massive oppression, with people being stripped of rights, specifically, women have been degraded with ideas that they are weaker, less smart, and less able than men. This notion is a blatantly false one. Non-binary people's existence has been denied and denoted. Their pronouns have been refused to be used, and even some of those who accept nonbinary people use gender categorization to make identity a fixed construct, rather than the fluid one it should be used as. Ideas that you can’t label mix, or you can’t use other pronouns than they/them. This is making fixed walls that people can’t travel outside of.

What I consider is the expansion of gender identity (E.g nonbinary identities, agender, genderqueer, etc) was made to help those with incongruence feel at home in themselves, to provide liberation. Now it has served the opposite purpose, the very thing that they sought to escape is now being implemented into their own communities. We have made strict border walls in communities that wanted to escape that, this is not liberation from gender. It is a perpetuation of its oppression.

Despite the role gender plays, and the oppression with the idea, it's not real. And any categorization and forced conformity is merely a creation of humans based purely on fiction. This doesn’t mean people can’t identify with gender as it serves the utility of conformity, it's just not real. We can identify with fictional things for the sake of us feeling at home. This doesn’t entail disregarding identities and pronouns, because despite not being real, people still identify with the construct. Something does not need to hold reality to be useful and beneficial to us.

So what is gender negation? What gender negation as an identity does is it negates the concept and exists out of the idea of gender existence. It's not non-binary, it's not agender, not trans, nor cis, not boy, or girl. Gender negation is simply a term to be used to describe an absence of gender identity, an absence of the congruence with any identity or the enforced “rules” (which hold no validity yet are attempted to be prescribed anyway) that come with them, a negation of gender roles, gender negation is not a gender identity. Gender negation is not inherently cishet, gender negation is not inherently LGBTQ+, gender negation is not inherently queer. If somebody who negates gender decides to identify with those terms they are free to, but the identity itself can exist independent of either of the community or without a label to the community.

If gender is fake, there is no such thing as a birth gender, there is a gender that can be assigned and forced upon you by your parents, doctor, government but it's still fake. There is no real gender present in you, If you choose to conform to the idea of gender, whether you align with the one assigned or mix it up a little, then that is reasonable. Gender negation is not a transition from cisgender, it doesn’t entail a transition at all. If gender identity is fake then we also have to believe that gender was never present in us. It isn’t a shift, it’s just removing elements that provide its ‘value’ for lack of better words, it's removing the conformity to the identity and gender categorization. Instead of transitioning from gender, you’re negating aspects and the social rules/constructs that make up the concept of gender.

In short, gender negation is to ignore gender entirely, not define yourself with gender, gender roles, and the abolition of gender to a personal level.