Anonymous Submission for March 2021

Someone who currently wishes to remain anonymous sent an email with a submission for the March 2021 theme “Surveys” (dated: 13 March 2021). Main content warning: Transphobia. The conflation of sex and gender and the inability to tolerate “third options” for gender questions may also, for some readers, get into enbyphobia and intersexism.

Submission:

I am not out at school as agender, though my classmates are very open about sexual and gender diversity, but teachers are a horse of a different color. In a subject we had to make a market study and the instructions stated clearly that we had to segment the consumers by sex “not gender” and age. This teacher later wasted all the explanation time by explaining what she understood as sex, the legal marker in your passport, and how she wouldn’t tolerate any question about gender or any third option in the surveys.

Not only was she blatantly transphobic, but she also tried to make up her discourse by stating that she accepts “sex changes”, only when your passport marker is changed. I felt so defenseless before the transphobic teacher that I can only report it anonymously here.

Roundup: February 2021

The theme for the Gender Exploration Carnival for February 2021 was “Questioning.” I received submissions from the following participants:

Coy – “Vacant Rooms & Stagnation in the Process of Assembly”

When questioning depends on pulling together a basis of comparison, and when stories to compare against are few and far between, it’s hard to really get anywhere. That’s what this post is about, essentially: gender questioning that remains patchy and inconclusive in part because of a culture of definitions over stories.

Em – “Rambling Gender Musings” [Content Warning: Gender invalidation.]

Still, I worry that I might just be making it all up a lot, but then when I actually talk about what I want and don’t want […] a lot of the stuff I say sounds very nonbinary, which honestly just makes things more confusing. What do I trust? The part of me that says that I have to be making it up because people like me can’t be nonbinary or the part of me that’s pretty sure that people like me aren’t women?

KaeS – “Gender as Inquiry”

My approach is to treat genderqueer not as an answer but as a theory. A theory explains the body of evidence (dysphoria, euphoria, experiences of abuse, ideals). Just as importantly, a theory provides a framework for future questions and revolutions. Queerness for me includes a profound skepticism that the answers will be essential or “natural” rather than self-constructed.

Laura – “Questioning as coercion” [Content Warning: Misgendering.]

The only thing I care about, in relation to gender, is that it is something I am permitted to not care about. And it feels like that is the only thing I’m not allowed to do.

raavenb2619 – “More Than One Kind of Question”

Realizing that I’m still questioning is humbling, in a way. There are lots of questions about identity where I can guide (or at least, try to guide) people in a direction that’ll be helpful for them, but there are still times where I could use a guide myself.

My post – “Semi-Permanent Questioning”

The process of realizing I’m nonbinary, multigender, and genderfluid has made it hard to know if I’ve hit the gender-saturation limit (and can ‘stop’ questioning). Other life factors have made it hard to determine specific labels.

If you tried to submit something but don’t see your submission here, please let me know, and I’ll update the post. You can email genderexplorationcarnival@pm.me, comment on this post, or reach out via the Contact page. The theme for March 2021 has been announced: Surveys.

Call For Submissions: March 2021

The Gender Exploration Carnival is one of several blogging carnivals – an event where a host blog puts out a theme for the month, participants create content and share the links with the host, and the host posts a round-up at the end of the month. For more information, you can check out the FAQ page.

For March 2021, the theme I have chosen to self-host on the Gender Exploration Carnival WordPress is “Surveys.” In past years, the Gender Census has started in February and gone through at least the end of March, so I thought it would be an appropriate time to ask survey related questions. (Clarification: This year the survey is currently slated to close on 10 March 2021.) I’d like to remind participants that the following prompts are suggestions, and you are not required to answer one question (or all of them) in order to participate as long as your submission is connected to the theme. You are also not required to fill out and take part in the Gender Census in order to participate.

Suggested prompts:

• What do you do when a survey doesn’t include an option for your gender?
• How do you answer when questions assume a gender that remains unchanged as a genderfluid, genderflux, and/or multigender person?
• Have you heard of the Gender Census already?
• Would you like to share your thoughts on some of that survey’s questions or past results? (Identity words, titles, pronouns, and the like.)
• The matter of age and where you hear about a survey when sharing something like this online. Do you have ideas for how to spread a survey, not necessarily restricted to the Gender Census, to more places and people who aren’t already on certain sites (like tumblr)?
• For those familiar with making and analyzing surveys: Do you have any experience you’d like to share about being on the other end compared to those of us who solely fill them out?

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The deadline for submissions is midnight EST [UTC-5] on 1 April 2021. I will post the round-up around 2:30 am EST on 1 April 2021 and will accept late submissions until then. You can submit an anonymous entry for this month by emailing genderexplorationcarnival@pm.me (the post will be self-hosted here on WordPress), or you can leave a link to your submission in a comment on this post. There is a corresponding Call for Submissions on Tumblr [here], and when Pillowfort is available, a link to its Call for Submissions will be added to this post. If you have an idea for a theme and would like to host, please leave a comment on Volunteer As Host.