When I asked Manisha to describe her gender identity, she gave me a simple answer: “Meh.”
“I don’t have a gender identity,” Manisha explained. “I understand that other people look at me and see a woman, but, for me, there is a blank space where my gender ‘should’ be. My gender is ‘none.'”
Manisha’s response did not surprise me. In my work as a sociologist, I had been interviewing asexual people—people who experience little or no sexual attraction—in the United States for months in 2020 and 2021. Like Manisha, more than a third of the 77 people I spoke to were uncomfortable defining themselves through the lens of gender. Gender was, as I came to describe it, separate from their sense of self.
This finding comes at a tumultuous time in gender politics. On the one hand, transgender and queer social movements seek to expand people’s ability to break the gender binary of male or female. On the other hand, the Trump administration is aggressively working to reaffirm the gender binary by law.
In my recently published research, I draw on interviews with 30 asexual people who, like Manisha, were uncomfortable adopting any gender identity. These people said they felt gender was irrelevant, unimportant, meaningless, and generally not a useful framework for understanding and defining themselves.
These feelings of gender non-identification highlight an unexpected belief shared by conservative politicians and many within the 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 in the US, ages 18 to 50. When I started, I planned to compare the gender experiences of three groups: asexual men, asexual women, and non-binary 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 to whom I found it impossible to assign a gender. “My genre is like an empty lot: there may have been a building there at one time, but it has long since collapsed and there is no need to rebuild it,” they explained. Space is best left empty.”
Many struggled to explain this feeling that they didn’t really 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 linguistic void, I finally coined a term to describe these distant and skeptical relationships with gender: gender detachment.
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Mandatory gender
Gender detachment may sound similar to being agender, that is, not having a gender. Researchers often view agender as a subset of nonbinary. However, most respondents made a distinction between gender non-attachment and being agender or non-binary.
For example, when I initially asked Brandy about her gender identity, they said they were agender. However, when I asked how accurate that label felt, Brandy explained that the term ultimately felt incorrect.
“A lot of people see gender as a spectrum that goes from pink to purple to blue… and I’m a green speck in the frame,” Brandy explained. “I just don’t see myself on that spectrum. While agender and nonbinary are useful terms, they still operate within a gender framework that I don’t place myself in.”
Brandy quietly pointed out something that seemed profound to me: the assumption that everyone has a gender is so pervasive that even the feeling that you don’t have a gender has become an identity: agender.
In other words, gender detachment poses a significant challenge to the way people often think about gender, namely the assumption that everyone has a gender identity. Gender detachment is not just about not identifying as male or female; it’s about not identifying with the genre at all.
Sociologists widely agree that gender is a social construct, meaning that its definition, norms, behaviors, and roles are created and shaped by society, not biology. This perspective implicitly understands that gender categories are also concepts created and shaped by cultural norms.
Western societies generally assume that everyone has, and should, have a gender identity. But what people who experience gender detachment show is that the very system of gender categorization is itself a social construct: an idea based on cultural norms rather than empirical reality. I call this assumption obligatory gender.
Resist mandatory categorization
Gender detachment represents one way in which people resist gender as an obligatory system of categorization.
Asexual people are in a unique position to question the conventions surrounding gender. Asexuality changes the belief that everyone experiences sexual attraction, an assumption often called obligatory sexuality. It made sense to me that as asexual people begin to question the universality of sexuality, some might also question the universality of gender. As obligatory sexuality crumbles, so does obligatory gender.
Sociologists often reinforce obligatory gender in the way they measure and ask questions about gender. In fact, that was initially the case in my own study. In each interview, I asked respondents about their gender identity. Almost everyone gave one. It was only when I asked them about their feelings about gender that I realized that the identity they gave me didn’t feel entirely accurate to them. Rather, they felt separate from the genre at large. My findings suggest that going beyond simply asking respondents to report their gender could help researchers better understand how people feel about the very concept of having a gender identity.
One way to understand the current gender tug-of-war in American culture is as a struggle over what gender identities people are allowed to claim. One field seeks to expand how many gender identities are available and allow people to choose what resonates most with them. The other camp seeks to force people to identify solely within a gender binary of male or female.
My findings on gender detachment suggest that, despite their consequential differences, both fields reinforce obligatory gender by assuming that gender is a universal element of who people are.
*Canton Winer is an assistant professor of Sociology at Northern Illinois University.
This article was originally published on The Conversation/Reuters
