Firstly, my obligatory "I hope this kind of post is acceptable here". Now with that out of the way.

For the last few years, I have been finally starting to address a lot of things about myself that I pushed down or away for a long time. Among those things was gender. But I'm also likely ADHD at least, and have been pretty burnt out for years now, so I've become a lot worse at research and looking into things than I used to be.

So only about two years ago, I finally looked up "non-binary" on Wikipedia, and felt like I was reading about myself. And since then it's been quite a journey (all internally because I basically never tell anyone irl what I'm going through). From imposter syndrome or feeling like I might be a fraud, to half assurance that I'm on the right track but still not fully comfortable or satisfied in the answers so far, to feeling or registering dysphoria for the first time and regularly since and thinking I might possibly be transfem. But I've always preferred and got along better with women and am extra angry with men in general these days, which might be playing a big part in me wishing I was afab these days.

And putting together my personal journey over the last few years, with what I've awakened to with regards to both mental health and gender identity, I remembered something about the hidden curriculum. And how it was my history teacher in school (one of the only teachers that 'got' me and who I wasn't constantly fighting with) who brought it up and looking back, he clearly knew that I was different in a number of ways. When he brought up the hidden curriculum, one of the sentences that he specifically used and that I've remembered since, was how it "teaches boys to be boys and girls to be girls" (I was outraged by this and the whole idea of the hidden curriculum btw).

Which brings me to why I am agender. I literally never learnt how to be one gender or the other. And it's not because I wasn't taught, it's because I rejected it every step of the way, or just didn't even notice that it was a lesson. I was raised by my mother and two sisters, who acknowledged me as a 'man', but didn't exactly push me into sportsball and shit. I was very much raised by sisters in particular because my mother means well, but has always been kinda vacant. And in school, I was too busy resisting and fighting every step of the way to learn how to be a 'man' there.

So yeah, that's it. I wrote an essay just to say: I am agender! I finally found the exact label that makes me feel like it's been so obvious all along. And 100% confident in saying that I belong to. I am agender.

Found this article on medium while scrolling through some comments in a post here. I recommend you go read the article, it's very insightful. It basically talks about how some cis people are likely Agender due to their lack of an internal sense of gender, or them not ever thinking about gender. I know that this isn't the only experience of being Agender. Agender experiences can be quite varied and different, and not all Agenders will relate to not experiencing or understanding gender, for some it's just a different feeling of gender, or a different type of feeling.

I do know that a lot of Agender people do though which is why I decided to post this here since I feel it could maybe help some people, or maybe just be an interesting article for people to read

Anyway what are your thoughts on this idea? If you have any thoughts or anything you'd like to add please share in the comments.

Hello and welcome to our community. This post is mainly to help explain things to people who first come across this community.

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What is Agender?

Agender is a gender identity in which people feel very little or lack of any gender identity. The term Agender comes from the greek prefix A- meaning without and gender.

Some Agender people may feel no gender, while others may feel a weaker sense of gender, and others still may feel a strong sense of connection to being Agender. It is very much a spectrum. I created a chart to better help visualize it:

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What is Gender modality, I saw it mentioned in the sidebar, so what is it?

Gender modality is complicated, and there's a bit of disagreement on what it is or isn't in the community, as well as whether or not gender modalities are valid.

The most common definition and the definition you'll see when you look up gender modality is:

Gender Modality refers to the correspondence (or lack thereof) between one's assigned gender at birth and one's actual gender and/or gender presentation.
- Gender Modality, on Gender Fandom

I don't disagree with that definition but it feels lacking. I think a good way to explain it that compliments the previous way is that modalities are like groups that can contain other gender identities. Like how on Lemmy there are communities contained in instances. Yeah I know a lot of people will hate that analogy but I think it works. It can be a bit confusing but in general it's just best to respect the way a person identifies, even if it's one of the non-standard gender modalities.

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Wait I thought that people were either cis or trans?

Yeah this is where a lot of the disagreement comes in around gender modality. There are some people who do believe that. While others believe that there are multiple gender modalities besides just the two. We here believe that the way a person identifies should be respected and not invalidated, and that means if they identify under one of these other gender modalities it needs to be respected.

What about if someone is in-denial about being trans?

Here we believe that self-discovery is a very important and personal process that should not be ham-fisted like it has been in the past on... certain user forums (egg_irl) this doesn't mean one can't help or support people, that's always encouraged, but they have to want the support. If it is forced or coercive it is not respectful and can even be harmful. Do not try and force people to identify a certain way against their will (This falls under Rule 2).

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About the community

This next section addresses various questions about the community, this part is a bit more meta.

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Why create this community?

I created this community because one of the communities I noticed that was lacking on Lemmy was an Agender one, there were plenty of Nonbinary ones but not a single Agender one or even aspec one. So I decided to create this one in hopes that it would allow Agender people to feel more at home in the Fediverse.

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Why did you choose this instance?

We wanted to choose an instance which has downvotes disabled due to the fact that trolls and bigots very often attack queer people by mass downvoting their posts to supress them and their content. We want to avoid this type of abuse. We originally chose Reddthat for this purpose because it fits that criteria while also being very stable, however we decided to abandon it due to their lack of agency around the threads federation issue, this is especially problematic due to the fact that threads has a severe queerphobia problem. So we moved to lemmy.blahaj.zone as it is our only real option.

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~~#### Why didn't you just choose blahaj.zone?~~

~~In the beginning we did consider it but in the end I ended up choosing this instance for a variety of reasons. One reason was when I initially planned this out lemmy.blahaj.zone was having frequent outages and pictrs (image server) issues. So for that reason I went with the next best one Reddthat.com. I may revisit that idea in the future but as is I'll stick with what I've already got set up and go from there.~~ We have migrated our community to blahaj.zone due to concerns regarding Reddthat's lack of agency around threads federation.

If you have any more questions or feedback you'd like to give me just leave a comment below and I'll get back to you. If you want you could also post in our Matrix Discussion Channel.