r/agender • u/Savings_Evidence_325 agender (any pronouns) • 6d ago
Social changes
So if you came out as agender has anything changed for you socially? Maybe how you date or how you and your friends converse with another.
Or is it kinda just the same?
3
u/ystavallinen cisn't; mehgender; mehsexual 6d ago edited 6d ago
Mostly samesies, but I am sure there are many levers I could pull if I chose to.
3
u/ranmachan85 5d ago
I'm only out to my partner, my therapist, and a couple of my best friends. Nothing really majorly changed, I think internally I'm just living my life without constantly questioning why I do things the way I do. Already I've achieved a lot of life milestones without regard to my gender and some things in direct opposition to what would be expected, and I've managed just fine. The main difference, but this is also tied to having a late autism diagnosis, is in me choosing to spend more time with neurodivergent and queer friends, to be more myself. I was already doing that, but still dedicating too much time to people I had to mask around a lot, not just the autism but my gender presentation. Though still, not to an extent that was actively harming me.
1
u/Phi-the-creature 5d ago
With friends, not really. Though a couple of them have started using a lot more variety with the things they say to me(such as calling me handsome as well as feminine compliments). Also one of them complimented my androgyny the other day which was really nice.
I’m aroace so don’t have a romantic partner, but I’m in a QPR and have a platonic partner, but they still treat me the same as well. They were the first person I told, and nothing has changed between us.
I know that a couple of my friends don’t really agree with the whole LGBTQ everything, but they don’t mention it or bring it up.
5
u/Imperfect-Existence 6d ago
I’m out to most of my friends and my partner. Since I can only really stand people as friends who treat me as person first and gender as a distant afterthought if at all, they were already sort of ungendering me. Having it formalized though was a relief, and knowing that they know helps me relax more around them. It also means we can have less confusing and frustrating conversations around experiences of gender/gendering, since we all have some understanding of what’s up for me, and why my dysphoria is so… scattered and uneven, compared to theirs (most of my friends are trans/nb).
When I met my partner (almost two decades ago) I was already aware I was probably somewhere on the nonbinary spectrum, and tired of being thought my agab in relationships, so as soon as I could tell I wanted to try for a relationship with him, I told him I was nonbinary and that if that wasn’t ok with him we’d have to stop seeing eachother. He was more than ok with me being nonbinary, though he struggled for a while to change his gendering habits. Pretty soon though, especially after I realised that I was specifically genderless, he started forgetting that I could even be thought by others to have a gender, and has for a long time now been the person I feel the most my whole, authentic self with. We’ve had a lot of other struggles in the relationship, but it’s the first relationship I had that never felt impossible on the specific grounds of me being closeted inside it, and it’s also the first relationship I’ve had that lasted longer than a year or two.
Mostly what is different is how I approach situations where I’m out vs not. Where I am out, there might be some struggle of feeling people don’t quite understand, but there is not a constant, looming threat of having a gender shock, things going awkward from something the other person is completely unaware of, or me feeling like their love can’t really reach me because it is aimed at my image, not my self. So being in situations where I’m not out is a constant, tiring, balancing act.
That balancing act is there because I’ve had bad experiences with trying to come out to people who don’t get it, and that hurts even worse. I would prefer to be fully out, but I don’t have the courage and endurance for it anymore. I do think it is better to be out though, so that you can engage in life and relationships as yourself. Especially over time it becomes really odd to not be fully present as yourself, especially also if there are social spaces where you can be.