I was recently discussing the concept of "asexuality as gender" with some other aspec people.
As it turns out, there's actually a lot written on this topic. Canton Winer coined the term "gender detachment" in the paper "Does Everyone Have a Gender? Compulsory Gender, Gender Detachment, and Asexuality" and defined it as "individually held notions that gender is irrelevant, unimportant, pointless, and/or overall not a helpful framework for understanding and defining the self."
A few more posts on this go into detail on this from the lay perspective:
- "Growing up cis-genderless without a word"
- "Cis by default"
- "‘Cis by Default’, ‘Cis-genderless’, and ‘Gender Detachment’: Three Terms You’ll Hopefully Be Hearing More Of"
These concepts have given a lot of aspec people a very useful set of ways to explain their understanding and relation to gender.
That having been said: wow, I don't relate to that at all. I have a gender: it's transmasculine. I have a lot of the experiences you might expect from that, such as a long-standing sense of dysphoria from being misgendered specifically as female, euphoria from the changes I've gotten out of T and surgery, and a clear and specific connection to the transmasculine community.
So why am I writing about any of this? Here's a cool experience that some people have, it's important to talk about, it's not my experience, and every single article I've linked to explains it better than I do.
Well, I had the realization recently that I relate to asexuality in a similar way that I relate to my gender.
I experience dysphoria from being misidentified as allo. The experience of this is qualitatively, although not always quantitatively, the same as the experience I have of misgendering. I have euphoria from being recognized as ace or as part of the ace community, which is qualitatively and quantitatively similar to my experiences of euphoria from being part of the trans and transmasc community. Behaving in an asexual way is, well, normally just going on about my life not experiencing sexual attraction or desire, but when my attention is called to it, it feels euphoric as though seeing myself in the mirror and seeing that my body looks legible as male. I also disidentified as ace for several years (due to manipulation and compulsory sexuality) and that was a profoundly dysphoric experience, comparable to trying to suppress my gender identity.
I'm not the only person who I know feels ace euphoria comparable to gender euphoria. I have also talked to both cis and trans queer people who feel a similar euphoria/dysphoria component to their orientation, so this is not an ace-exclusive phenomenon. Nor is this a universal phenomenon among allo queer people: most respondents —cis or trans—in an extremely informal survey of my friends were "no, I don't feel like that."
I don't know how to tie this together. I don't think they're separate things. I'm not sure that I actually do have a split between gender and sexuality to me. I have a sense of myself as being an asexual man even though that I don't feel like just a man, and as an asexual trans man in a way that I don't feel like just a trans man.
I've been thinking of this as the flip side of the coin of gender detachment. Asexuality, instead of detaching me from gender, became an experience of gender, one of multiple experiences of gender that I have.