selenicseas

Once upon a time, I was asexual. And aromantic. And transgender. But not anymore.

I learned about asexuality all the way back in 2008, and it fit really well back then. It still does in the present day, so long as the definition means "zero attraction", with zero specifications or clarifications or categories of attraction. It doesn't, for reasons I have absolutely no care to look into because I've rejected the label for years.

I was never involved with the LGBT community (as I was asexual, and had nothing in common with them), so all the discourse about validity and microlabels and identity were completely foreign to me until I created a Tumblr account in 2014. The more and more I saw of that stuff, the less I wanted to do with it, and the people who wrote about it. The deeply unpleasant people I saw expose LGBT identity opinions did a lot to turn me off from interacting with the LGBT community as a whole.

I've always leaned heavily anarchist (seriously, I learned about libertarian socialism at age 12 and wondered why everyone wasn't doing it). As I've gotten older, I've started to think more and more that identity itself is something that inevitably leads to the creation of hierarchy – even gender and sexual identity.

Being that anarchism is a process we use to abolish hierarchy, it seems pretty antithetical to want to be an anarchist and then also want to engage in the sort of thing I'm supposed to work toward destroying.

Like, I believe in gender abolition and everything! I don’t think I can ethically be transgender while also working toward that. Maybe if I was solely able to think of it as a medical condition I need to treat I'd feel less like I was being counter-revolutionary.

Back in 2018, I started looking into Buddhism as a lot of it seemed to fit my own existing beliefs. That was about the same time I started deconstructing my old identities. Did they fit me? Did they serve me? Did they make me feel seen, or comfortable, or understood?

The answer to all of those questions was no. After ten years searching for a place in the LGBT community I could fit in, I'd found nothing. I was the same alien I'd always been.

On the other hand, Buddhism felt like being welcome into a home I didn't even know I had. I didn't have to contort myself into weird shapes just to pretend I could relate to people. I could just exist as I was, with no additional work. For the first time in my life, I felt like I actually belonged somewhere.

And that really was enough for me to abandon what was remaining of my already dwindling connections to those queer identities. They were never really mine to have. If they were, I would have felt some sense of belonging. I never did, and I don't think I would have been able to no matter how hard I tried. I mean, I'd already been trying for ten years. Some things just aren't meant to be.