Gender trouble.

(Oh look, a "sneaky" allusion to the famous Judith Butler book of the same name! How many people would have got this reference without me pointing it out? It's too late now, your time to shine is over, yes my blog post is using the name of a book published four years before I was born. Think of it as inter-textuality. So post-modern!)

Gender sucks. This is an opinion but also kind of a fact. As my non-binary squeeze asked me a few days ago, "what is gender?" And I kind of floundered and offered a few responses - it's a set of social behaviours, it's to do with human conditioning, it's innate, it's learned, it's a spectrum, it's all performative actions - but none of them seemed to really work in the face of their gaze, their cool almond-shaped eyes looking up at me, ringed with delicate eyelashes and deep thought.

I have to have some notion of gender, right? It's something we all have, but not something that gets critically considered unless you or someone you know isn't cisgender - that is, having your gender identity and your physical sex match up. I am not cisgender. I am a demi-girl, which is one of those "tumblr genders" that people seem to think doesn't exist. But also being pansexual, I'm used to erasure.

Being a demi-girl, to me, means I have some level of detachment from being feminine or female. As much as I am female, I am also not-female. This element of not-female isn't male, either: it's just not really anything, maybe agender or genderqueer (i.e. having no gender, or being somewhere in the middle of the indiscrete mass of gender identities) but not specific. Being a demi-girl, for me, means some kind of disconnect between my XX-chromosone, supposedly 'female' body and the expectations placed upon me for being a girl.

For all my behaviours - my empathy, my need to please but also challenge authority figures, my rebellious streak, my wanderlust, the Maths papers I bailed on - I worry whether they were truly my choices or made by the environment I grew up in, which necessarily includes the patriarchy. I am good at remembering names, but is that because of the burden of femaleness impacting my thought processes and others' expectations of me since I was a kid to the extent that it's become part of my personality?

I have too many unanswered questions about this, so identifying as not-a-cis-girl helps me with it. Being demi- helps me feel more secure in my skin, helps me challenge notions, helps remind me that acting typically feminine does not make me a stereotype, that girly is not synonymous with weak, that internalised misogyny is not my fault but that of the system I was born into. (It's like one of my agender friends commenting how accepting her gender identity as agender helped her be more comfortable wearing dresses and skirts: to paraphrase, once she accepted she had no gender and thus nothing to lose from not being 'feminine enough', the act wearing feminine clothing didn't carry the same problems and was liberating.) I have no problems with the undeniable womanly curves of my body, as a binder would probably damage me too much without doing anything to sort out my hip-to-waist ratio that proves I endured female puberty - but being unhappy in your body is not a prerequisite of any gender identity whatsoever. Dysphoria is not essential to the trans or non-binary experience.

You may feel this exact way and yet still identify as cisgender, but guess what? That's your prerogative. Like not every person who is attracted to people of more than one gender has to identify as anything other than how they feel, nobody's going to try and make you have a gender that's not what you identify as. (Shout-out to all the straight guys in the back I've slept with! Guess what? You've fucked a non-binary person! If that makes you feel uncomfortable then that's your problem.) At the same time, there are options.

Gender isn't a fixed construct. We get to make up our minds ourselves. There are more words than there used to be, but there's also much more awareness and discussion of feeling like this. Feeling confused over my gender isn't a new phenomenon for humanity, and not for me - I've been a conflicted tomboy all my life, stealing my brother's girls but pretending not to like pink to keep my brand consistent - but I have the language now to express it. Technically I am trans, in that I am not-cis, but I don't see myself in that umbrella. Rather I am in the non-binary camp, of people whose gender is not either girl or boy, yes or no, pink or blue. How is increased language and awareness a bad thing?

And because of all this, and because of understanding gender as a spectrum before I even worked out where I was on it, I define as pansexual. I am attracted to people, and their gender is irrelevant. Call me bisexual and prepare for a long discussion about this.

I still don't know what gender is. For my enbie beauty (whose non-binary label they wear as a hesitant badge of pride), it's freedom to dress as they feel on any given day without giving a fuck. It's not worrying about not being served in Betty's for wearing a skirt and not having their identity questioned on the days they wear combats. It's something that makes them happy in a world full of insecurity and uncertainty: the knowledge that they are not boy or girl, and that it's okay and really most people don't care other than to compliment them on their banging Hello Kitty dress.

Dating my enbie (non-binary person) brings its own string of challenges: it's made me aware of how I use language so much more, the arbitrariness of gendered clothing, the constant weighing up of whether to confront catcallers or not, and the total shittiness of men in women's clothing being a "joke", like femininity is funny and shameful.

Wearing female clothing brings you into a female space regardless of biology, and on the streets that can mean harassment and danger as others feel entitled to look at you and make comments. My enbie happens to be 6'2" and wear stubble with their flowing red and brown locks, which raises even more confusion from passers-by. There's not been much actual street harassment, but there's so much whispering and confusion, comments to friends, wolf-whistling. I ignore it, burning to confront harassers and educate them about gender; I can't imagine how it makes my other half feel.

Neither of us are out to our parents, and there's something depressing about that. If we can't be who we really are round our families for fear of them not understanding - or worse, laughing about it, or reacting badly, or cutting us off - then living authentically gets that much harder,

Maybe we all have gender trouble. But if you learn anything from this, it's that your cheap laugh at the expense of a muscled dude in a red dress in the Fallout 4 E3 previews is a bullet shot to the hearts and souls of gender non-conformers around the world. Laughing at a man wearing a dress says you think women's clothing is embarrassing, and any feminist worth their salt can see why that's problematic. So, I will fight tooth and nail to keep my non-binary friends and kin safe, even if that sometimes means the best way to fight is through stony glares and silence as we walk on in our swishy blue skirts.

Bullshit Bell 3: Everyday sexism

Welcome to Bullshit Bell, the new semi-regular series of posts in which I call bullshit on various ridiculous things. How semi-regular, you ask? Whenever I feel like it. Whatever, schedules are bullshit.

If you don't know about the Everyday Sexism project, then you've clearly not been paying attention to the internet for the past few months (in which case, how did you find this blog? Go follow them! Go read through some of their tweets! It's okay, I'll wait, I'll still be here when you get back.)

It's such a simple idea, just collecting stories of the shit women have to deal with on a daily basis. Some of it seems relatively harmless - people shouting from across the street or honking as you walk down the road, or bosses just assuming a male colleague will do a better job. Some of it is genuinely horrifying - girls and women getting groped or masturbated over in public, for no reason other than their gender, and nobody stepping in to help out. All these actions, be they acts of violence or just microaggressions, add up to create a culture where women are taught we are to blame. That it was our fault for dressing like that. That it was our fault for being there at that time. That it was our fault for going into a sector where we are a minority. That our bodies are not ours.

Yup, you've got it. This is bullshit.

I was thinking about it today, trying to work out some of the things that have happened to me. At first I thought "I don't have any stories". Then I realised, "actually, I have a lot of stories", but I didn't realise at first. Because they just seemed so... normal. Like they were my fault, or else like they were too trivial to complain about.

1. Age 15. Camped out with a friend outside a venue so we could be first in line for a gig. A drunk guy came over to talk to us. I wanted him to leave, but my friend was busy being nice and polite. He ended up lying between us, his arms in our sleeping bags. He groped my stomach and my thighs, and undid my friend's belt. I told him to stop, and he went back to his hotel room. When we went to the police station, the officer told us we should have gone to the nearest CCTV camera and waved for attention. Since then, whenever I've been on my own late at night, I've always stood directly in front of a CCTV camera.

2. Age 15. Walked into the village to buy some bread for my mum. It was a hot day, so I was wearing shorts. A bloke honked at me from out a convertible and made blowjob motions as he drove past.

3. Age 14. Walking down the hill from school to my grandparents' house. Some construction workers yelled at me to "get your tits out, love". I was in school uniform.

4. Age 17. Sat on the platform at St Pancras waiting for a train home with my friend. A guy, maybe 50, sat next to me and asked if the next train went to Luton airport, so I said yes. He decided to ask my another question. To attact my attention, he stroked my thigh.

5. Age 16. Walking about two miles to get to a hotel with two friends. I lost count of the number of times we were honked at. My friend said she "took it as a compliment."

6. Age 18. Was groped in a club trying to find my friend. When I asked the guy what the fuck he thought he was doing, he told me to "chill out".

7. Age 17. Walking through Cambridge town centre at about 5pm in October, when it was still light. A drunk man yelled at me to take my top off, and called me a frigid bitch when I ignored him.

8. Age 17. On work experience, where I went along with my boss to interview a moderately-famous musician. He commented his phone in his pocket had unlocked itself in his pocket, and it must have rubbed against his leg. I suggested he take it out of his pocket for the rest of the interview, and he responded by asking me I wanted to come over there and rub it for him. Nobody else commented. I blushed very hard but didn't say anything. When I told the story to my friends back at school, they unanimously told me that I was "lucky".

So, there you have it. Everyday sexism is bullshit. Together though, maybe we can do something about it.