When I asked Manisha to describe her gender identity, she gave a simple answer: “Meh.”
“I don’t have a gender identity,” Manisha explained. “I get that other people look at me and see a woman but, for myself, there’s a blank space where my gender ‘should’ be. My gender is ‘none.’”
Manisha’s response didn’t shock me. In my work as a sociologist, I had been interviewing asexual individuals – people who experience low to no sexual attraction – across the United States for months from 2020 to 2021. Like Manisha, more than a third of the 77 people I talked to were uncomfortable with defining themselves through the lens of gender. Gender was, as I came to describe it, detached from their sense of self.
This finding comes at a tumultuous time in the politics of gender. On the one hand, transgender and queer social movements have sought to expand people’s ability to break out of the gender binary of man or woman. On the other, the Trump administration has aggressively worked to reassert the gender binary by law.
In my recently published research, I draw on interviews with 30 asexual people who, like Manisha, felt uncomfortable adopting any gender identity. These individuals said they felt that gender was irrelevant, unimportant, pointless and, overall, not a helpful framework for understanding and defining themselves.
These feelings of not identifying with gender highlight an unexpected belief shared by conservative politicians and by many within transgender and queer communities: the assumption that everyone has a gender identity.
Gender detachment
During this research, I spoke with asexual people from a variety of backgrounds across the U.S., ranging from ages 18 to 50. When I began, I planned on comparing the gendered experiences of three groups: asexual men, asexual women and nonbinary asexuals. I quickly had to abandon that plan as I repeatedly encountered interviewees who did not fit into any gender category.
Ollia was the first person who struck me as impossible to assign a gender to. “My gender is like an empty lot: There may have been a building there at some point, but it’s long since fallen away, and there’s no need to rebuild it,” they explained. “The space is better for being left empty.”
Some people don’t consider gender a part of their sense of self.
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Many struggled to explain this sense that they did not truly have a gender identity. “There really isn’t a specific term that can be used to describe how uninterested I am in the concept of gender as a whole,” said a respondent named Faye.
Faced with a language vacuum, I eventually coined a term to describe these distant and skeptical relationships with gender: gender detachment.
Compulsory gender
Gender detachment might sound similar to being agender – that is, not having a gender. Researchers often see agender as a subset of nonbinary….
