I think of gender as a tradition.

Humans are social creatures that try to understand their world and build and create social meaning. As we're a sexually reproducing species, it makes complete sense to me that we'd create traditions and motifs to help us understand and identify the ways different people contribute to reproduction.

Of course, to many of us agender folks this "creating an understanding" business is more like "creating a whole lot of pointless faff."

When people ask me to identify my gender, I find this annoying. To me gender is a tradition -- I am not a tradition, I am a human who follows various traditions to greater and lesser extents. I'd rather be asked what gender I "follow" 😂.

In addition, different communities and cultures create different traditions. I genuinely think there are thousands of genders within what most people call cis gender people, because each person creates and shares their own meaning/s, their own tradition/s.

As a kid I assumed no-one had gender. They have motifs and traditions gender, and then adorned themselves with motifs and did the gendered traditions, but the gender was always external, existing in the motifs, not within the person.

It means I'm often vexed when people say "clothing has no gender, people have gender!" To me, the opposite makes more sense!

One of the reasons I don't strongly identify as agender is because my beliefs about not having a gender came from viewing gender as a tradition. Because my genderlessness operated at the level of worldview, not individual identity, it was not a statement about who I was. Nowdays I see worldview as part of identity. People have a worldview and define themselves within the schema that makes sense to them. agender is a clumsy attempt to translate from my worldview to others'.

In order to learn someone else's gender for real, I think I need to learn their worldview/their concept of gender. I think different gender models and concepts are important to queerness and gender diversity and should be celebrated.

So how are you different from me? What type of worldview does your gender most naturally sit within, when you're not trying to translate and accomodate others?