How has your relationship with the cisgender people in your life changed?
I didn’t find out “cisgender” was even a word until I found out agender was a thing and that I was agender. I’m actually really grateful to the cis folks I talked to because the “you just know” thing actually was what pointed me in the right direction. I don’t hate or feel hostility towards cisgender people. I feel hostility towards my cis friend and brother who I actually talked to about my gender and they kinda brushed it off. It wasn’t the cis gender thing that annoyed me, it’s their white male privilege that kind of irked me because they would have to actively, with great effort, try to understand my point of view (kind of like I would have trouble seeing their point of view without really trying) and there was no active participation on their part. I feel like I have to go further than half way to talk to them about the issue and I just don’t have the energy to do that. I need some active participation on their part if we’re going to have a conversation. They’re both younger than me so I’m hoping a little world experience will help with that.
Another consideration is I don’t really think about gender all the time. My gender is what it’s always been, even if I didn’t have a name for it. I’ll cringe when somebody misgenders me, but gender comes up so rarely in any conversation. Since I don’t think about my own gender that much I think about other people’s gender even less. I actively try to avoid pronouns, but that’s more from a writer’s habit than any consideration. Why use a pronoun when most people have a nifty one or two syllable name? Pronoun confusion is a writer’s petpeeve of mine. So, the short answer to the prompt would be that my relationships have changed very little because I’m only out to a few and don’t bother with pronouns. My name IS my pronoun.
A³ 