Last year, I released a book called The Qinali Virus, featuring an asexual aromantic character, because I wanted to see people like me represented in fiction. In this future society, gender isn’t assumed or assigned at birth. Children use neutral pronouns unless they express a desire to be otherwise. In one of the scenes, my main character Amber says she wishes she’d kept her neutral pronouns. It’s a passing thought for her, but this character was very much a reflection of me and I started looking at my own relationship with my gender.
I’ve been “cis-apathetic” for much of my life. I never felt like a girl, but I also knew for sure I wasn’t a boy. The nuance of nonbinary identity wasn’t part of my vocabulary, so apathy set in. I dissociated from my body. I remember feeling very out of place as a woman in science, because ‘woman’ wasn’t part of my identity. It was just a happenstance.
After writing The Qinali Virus, I figured out I was agender. I was very insistent on that label, because other labels seemed to imply the existence of gender, and I have none. It took time to accept that “not cisgender” means trans, because I didn’t feel trans either. I think it’s partly because society trains us to think and recognize trans along a binary. If you’re not girl, you must transition to boy. So it’s very confusing for the nonbinary, genderqueer, gender fluid, agender, and everyone else whose resting point is not on the binary or even on the so-called spectrum. I also felt that if I were going to be trans, then I had to do something to prove it, like change my name and pronouns.
Which brings me to Ship Whisperer – the story of a nonbinary explorer who discovers she has the ability to talk to spaceships. It’s mentioned a few times that she is nonbinary, and early beta-readers even commented that it was easy to forget, because she’s not using neutral pronouns. But you know what? That’s just fine. She doesn’t have to change her pronouns to prove she fits the category. The phases she went through to find her pronouns aren’t part of this book, but she found them.
I’m not a woman. I often think of changing my name and my pronouns, but whether I do or not, it won’t prove or disprove my trans-ness. I’m agender, and saying it is enough.
Ship Whisperer comes out October 14! Pre-order now!
