What are your thoughts on agender people?

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Hello mumset, I am brand new here and made an account because I'm curious about how GC women feel about agender people. This is purely for my own understanding as I've read several posts from GC women on this site saying they do not have a gender identity, and I wanted to explore further the reasons why this is.

From my understanding, there are two types of agender people:

1. gender apathetic i.e. people who don't have a gender identity and don't care (gender has no inherent value to them so they do not mind gendered language being applied to them)

2. gender averse i.e. people who don't have a gender identity and actively reject gendered language (they are distressed at the gendered aspect of their lives and are more likely to seek an androgynous appearance)

Do either of these concepts resonate with you, or do you still feel very connected to your female sex despite lacking a gender identity?

Sex has always existed. If forms needed to ask your sex, they asked your sex. A decade or two back some of them started using 'gender', a meaningless nonsense word instead, because they thought sex was rude.

I suspect it was the sheer volume of comedy ‘Yes please!’ answers that drove the change (although they could just’ve gone with the tick box Male Female option and only used the title of ‘sec’ as as header on the spreadsheet).

The device you typed this on is both real & invented.
The two are not mutually exclusive.

This is a bit like asking an atheist which God/religion they don't believe in.

I'm currently in bed with awful period symptoms. I don't 'feel connected to my female sex I just am, like it or not, good and bad.

If I decided I had a gender, I wouldn't magically start leaping around the house instead, full of the joys of spring.

"I have a biological sex and a personality. "

That be me too!

Too many people seem to use the gender thing as their personality these days, it seems to be the only thing that they have. It makes them into very boring, self obsessed people, that i wouldn't want to spend thirty seconds with. It'd be like going for a night out with a maudlin drunk, only they're sober!
No thanks, life is far too short for that game of soldiers!

Gender is stereotypes ascribed to the two biological sexes, often used in a sexist way to enforce patriarchal ideas about male power over women.

Gender identity is a politically fashionable new personal belief system which everyone in a free society should be free to believe in if they want to or just as equally should be free to reject, disagree with and laugh at. Because it’s a belief system based on faith with rules akin to a religion, it’s inappropriate for national bodies or institutions or businesses that serve everyone- like membership organisations, universities, schools or the NHS- to adopt that belief system corporately. It’s inappropriate to expect others to follow it too- let alone to chastise them or ostracise them if they are non believers.

Gender is stereotypes ascribed to the two biological sexes, often used in a sexist way to enforce patriarchal ideas about male power over women.

Gender identity is a politically fashionable idea, a new belief system which everyone in a free society should be free to believe in if they want to or equally should be free to reject, disagree with and laugh at. Because it’s a belief system based on faith with rules akin to a religion that’s why it’s inappropriate for national bodies or institutions or businesses that serve everyone to adopt that belief system globally and expect others

If you substitute "sex stereotypes" for "gender" you'll understand where I'm coming from.

I am sex stereotype critical.

Sex stereotypes are the culturally ascribed qualities associated with the two sexes. I think that in general sex stereotypes are a negative, limiting thing in society.

I recognise that sex stereotyping is very very strong in our culture so it's hard to not buy into it to some degree. I don't dress or act in a way entirely divorced from sex stereotypes. But I do resist some of the more harmful sex stereotypes.

I also recognise that some people have a different relationship to sex stereotypes to me. They might try to conform to the stereotypes associated with their sex, or they might make a particular effort not to conform.

Everyone has a sex (one of two). Everyone has a personality. Most people live in a culture where sex stereotypes are pervasive (although they change depending on place and time).

The end.

So my tablet is both real and invented, I can hold it in my hands and I find it very useful, just like gender....no wait!

(Agender is yet another gender identity I don't have.*

I have a biological sex and a personality.

^This.

would there ever be a possibility that other people could have a gender identity, even if you (and other GC women) do not?

No. People can describe themselves as 'having a gender identity' if they want, I can't stop them. But I think what they consider to be 'gender identity' is actually just the same old bunch of sexist stereotypes about clothing and personality traits which are somehow apparently cool, liberating and edgy instead of lame, restrictive and old-fashioned... just as long as you pick the set that don't go with your biological sex.

There is so 'ineffable essence of femaleness' common to all women. And even if there were, a man could never feel it or know what it was like, because he's never been a woman!

I was wondering, does it represent the expression "Pull the other one; it's got bells on" @Allthegoodnamesarechosen ?

I'm a woman. I don't 'identify with' or 'feel connected' to that fact any more than I 'identify with' or 'feel connected to' other facts about my physical being, like my height. I just am. I'm not 'agender', I just think the concept is incoherent nonsense.

Do I believe other people have a 'gender identity'? Never having heard a robust definition, that's hard to answer.

I do believe some people consider their identity to be gendered. I also belive some people feel profound discomfort with various aspects of their physical bodies - and in some cases that will include the sexed aspects. But neither of those are really the same as having a 'gender identity'.

An individual may use they/them pronouns in their personal life but not told their employer. If the person then has to declare their pronouns, they either have to face being misgendered (which causes distress to those with dysphoria) or come out as trans which may put them at risk of workplace harassment

Declaring their* not-out *pronouns won't actually change that, though. People will already be using pronouns for them, so they are already being 'misgendered'.

Well lets put it another way:
Without gender or electronic devices, human beings would continue to reproduce and our species would not die out.
Without biological sex humans would not reproduce and would die out - and in any case, wouldn't exist in the first place.
I mean we could always try putting some transwomen and men on an isolated island and seeing if the transwomen's gender helped them evolve ovaries and a womb due to the necessity of reproduction.

So something is only real if you can have sex with it to produce a baby? The rest is all “invention” and not real?

hear hear!!

Er….. you do know what an analogy is right?

You are talking to someone who claimed gender is akin to a smartphone, so I’m gonna go with, ‘No’.

I’m inventing a new gender…. Dumgender in honour of some of the posters on this thread 😂

You know that is an ableist slur right?

Are you confusing my new gender with the word “dumb”. Oh dear. Um….. bless your heart….

I do, but your analogy is incomprehensible. First you say that sex is real and gender is an invention. So I say that essentially things can be real + inventions so the binary of real vs invention is nonexistent, they are not mutually exclusive.

Then I get some sort of rambling parable about desert islands, genders and whether fucking would result in babies or would the species die out.

So I am not understanding how gender cannot be real because a) it is an invention or b) you can’t fuck and make babies on a desert island using gender

I mean where’s the logic to this? Last I looked we don’t define reality by whether something is natural or artificial (invented) nor do we define something as not real if it doesn’t produce human babies?

It seems a rather sex obsessed way of defining reality. Thinking with the ovaries…

Sorry @Happylittlechicken , I meant their analogy, not yours. My mistake as it wasn’t your desert island fuckery parable.

What @SmartHome said.

I am Female sex and that’s had a huge impact on my life. I don’t ‘feel connected’ to it, I am it, in the same way that you don’t identify as human because you are human.

I believe in biology

So are you saying you don’t understand the analogy @Onnabugeisha ? I’m not sure how to simplify it for you. I think the poster was saying gender is a useless invention and humans can live without it, like we could live without iPads, but biological sex is necessary to human life. Like cheese. Therefore gender is something humans have made up, but biological sex is not. Does that help?

This is true for me, too. I am a woman because I am female mostly the way I am a certain height and a certain age. They are facts about me, and not my identity in some abstract sense.

Though being a woman is different from being a certain height, mostly, because of some of the consequences, such as experiencing sexual harassment, an attempted rape, discriminatory treatment at work etc.

Because of this, I identify WITH other women and girls, but this is not the same thing as what the gender identity ideology describes.

It's possible that transgender people define the way they feel as being the same as some universal gender identity which may not always happen to coincide with the sex a person is, but I don't share that explanation, though I am willing to accept that they have feelings which they describe in such terms.

Whether the society should respect people's stated gender identities is not as simple a question as it might seem for those who wish to be kind or inclusive, because in other areas the society does not respect all identities when they cannot be externally verified.

For instance, we can't identify as some professional if we don't have the qualifications for that, and if we tried to identify as a different age than we are, others might find that exasperating and possibly refuse to respect that identity in situations where age would matter. So it's not necessarily true that the individual alone can determine how the rest of the society treats their stated identities.