Asexual and neutrois

Although there were about eight years between the time I started identifying as asexual and when I started identifying as neutrois, I don’t think I could separate my asexuality from my gender, now.

But first I have to talk about how being asexual tied into my identification as neutrois. And I can see this post getting rather sprawling, so I’m going to attempt to use headings. I’m also going to put a cut, because this is kind of a long post.

(Warning: I talk about physical sex and sex drive in here, though not in much detail.)

Pride

One of the things about being a very small and newly recognized sexuality and gender is that I do not have a lot of media to turn to, informational and otherwise. And when I find good media, I get very emotional and excited.

Before starting this blog and discovering Neutrois Nonsense, the only neutrois stories I had were a few very sad ones from the Experience Project. Before discovering the word neutrois and some information about it, all I had was a vague sense of being unhappy in my body and assuming that the reason I didn’t connect strongly with female characters was because I was asexual. And before I learned that other people used the word asexual, I thought that the descriptor I had come up with for my sexuality was a joke.

So media, especially positive media, is very important for me when it comes to exploring myself and my identity. Even when I was already sure of my identity (I was sure I was asexual, I just also thought I was a freak of nature), having positive media an act as a confirmation, or a sounding board, or just a sign that you’re not alone in the universe. Even if you choose not to interact with anyone (I went maybe 5 years without talking to any other asexual people after a less than a year at AVEN), it can be comforting to know they’re out there.

Pride symbols are great things. I don’t think, before I started exploring my identity more, and more importantly before I started trying to find some kind of community, that I really understood pride symbols. I knew people used them, but I didn’t understand how bolstering they could be, how reassuring.

For various reasons, I do not use AVEN’s flag. I don’t currently have an asexual symbol to identify with. I would really like one someday, but so far I haven’t found one, and haven’t thought of one myself. But I do have a genderqueer symbol to identify with. And before I found any other neutrois media, it was reassuring to have this to lean on, it was safe, it was something I could wrap myself up in, like a blanket.

[Image description: A genderqueer pride flag. It is a flag with five equal-sized horizontal stripes. From top to bottom: purple, blue, yellow, pink, and orange.]

I like graphic design

In the last five minutes of clearing out my Google Reader, I have actually forgotten where I got linked to this, but this is a cool poster from what appears to be the UC Davis LGBT resource center.

It’s kind of huge, so I put it under a cut (with a link to the source, and an image description). But it’s a poster talking about transphobic language and explaining why it’s transphobic, and I just like the idea of this sitting around and people getting exposed to the topic without having to bother a trans person or maybe before they even meet or realize they’ve met a trans person.