#amserpand writes

[amserblog]

Them vs Gender

The Them grow up into humanity and into themselves. As fate would have it, Pepper, Wensleydale, and Adam are all a different bit of queer. And Brian. Brian is just Brian. Always supportive, capital A, Ally. Hard not to be when your three best friends are or have been every letter in the LGBTQ+ acronym and then some. 

Pepper is the first of the Them to start dating proper. Her girlfriend is shy and sweet, a little aloof but, next to their tight knit group, most people come off that way. Pepper doesn’t announce anything, and no one is surprised, really, content in their assumptions. There are, however, some confused blinks when several years and several girlfriends later she does clarify that she’s bi, actually, but she refuses to go into further detail regarding past and present crushes aside from the fact that there were Some.

Adam comes out as genderfluid quite suddenly when they’re seventeen. It turns out, actually, that when you’re eleven and you suddenly have a weird sort of awareness of something resembling cosmic truths and your supposed place in the universe it’s pretty difficult to reconcile that with such nonsense as rigidly defined, immutable gender. All the same, Adam tucked that feeling away to deal with later, because there were more pressing matters at hand and then they promptly forgot about it for three years because there were still plenty of other things to do like being a Teenager, which was a brand new experience of its own. On most days they still maintain their usual boyish masc aesthetic, but they don’t see why they can’t just be a girl or a not girl or a not boy or all of the above at once some days if and when they want to. More fun that way. Adam’s never been one to let other people’s Ideas (particularly Grown-Ups so set in their ways) get in the way of their fun.

Wensleydale grows from a boy to a teenage boy absolutely as one would expect of him. He’s quite a bit closer to being an accountant than when he was eleven, and that’s probably the most notable development of the past nine years. Every few years, Wensleydale would try to switch to actually using his first name (Not Jeremy, as it turns out) but the name in question was something different and new with every attempt and as such he remained Wensleydale for simplicity’s sake (or just Wensley to friends). During some lazy reminiscing, the Them get around to asking what was the deal with that Jeremy rumor anyway, and it turns out that’s just the first name a six-and-a-half year old Wensley had blurted out one day when prompted, having quietly decided that his old name was rubbish, at which point the puzzled teacher spoke to his parents and his parents looked at each other and looked at their kid and soon the Wensleydales were all out on an adventure together navigating the joys and the trials of growing up transgender. Young Wensley never could settle on a name, and liked being Wensleydale fine enough (a daily reminder of his Family, who Loved him, though he wouldn’t realize this was why the name gave him such warm joy until later [1] ) and so it stuck and was firmly stuck by the time the Them were an established gang of mischief makers. Wensleydale and family were the private sort, and there just wasn’t much of an occasion to go announcing the exact details of the arrangement unprompted.

By 26, Adam has settled into a routine of picking his gender out for a given day with the same casual air of picking a pair of shoes (and has gone back to he/him pronouns in the end after several years of trying other pronouns on). Wensleydale always wears at least one transgender flag at all times, having gotten acquainted with the sin of Pride after realizing that he’d been in like company all along and in fact it was only more validating to experience the whole mess together. Pepper has separately dated each of the Them at some time or another and now all four are in an easy, relaxed, and mostly unspecified sort of Arrangement all their own devising. Pepper and Adam keep swapping clothes well into their teens until they can no longer fit so conveniently into the same sizes, and then they swap accessories instead. And Brian. Brian is just Brian. Always supportive, capital A, Ally. Hard not to be when your three best friends are or have been every letter in the LGBTQ+ acronym and then some. And maybe Brian is Gay, or Bi, but by the time that’s relevant it seems like an awfully small contribution to the collective queerness of the group. [2]

Brian had watched Adam, of course. And had been Supportive, of course, true to habit. Given that their two other friends had already had a go at deciding their own names, and Adam liked the idea of picking things for himself, he and Brian had spent some time brainstorming hypotheticals like “Ada” and “Breanna”, shallow mirror images of their given names that got increasingly outlandish as the night went on, and they devolved into giggles before concluding that Adam could only have ever been Adam and nothing else. Adam’s existence is not a question, but an answer, a loud proclamation against the universe.

Brian, on the other hand, finds no answers. Brian, over years and years sinks slow but steady into an endless cycle of Questioning. Brian tried on a dress and a different name and despite the momentary fun encounters a dull “sure?” of an emotional response, and Brian soon enough found that the idea of Brian the Boy elicited an identical, resounding mental shrug. Adam the Boy and Adam the Girl were equally tangible, believable concepts but Brian the Boy felt like trying to wear his father’s shoes and Brian the Girl was a thing of playacting at best. Brian knew Pepper, and knew what being a Girl was, even if Pepper was actively unconventional as far as Girls go. Adam always said that gender was nonsense but Brian wasn’t sure Adam had meant nonsense in the way of wanting to abandon the concept in its entirety.

Bits and pieces cherrypicked out of this and that gender seemed to fit but not quite pieces out of the same puzzle set. The whole mess became an altogether unnecessary bit of mental exercise that wore down on the soul in a way that defied words and boxes. After a frank discussion, the Them offered up a range of words to help Brian out--nonbinary for starters, genderless (maybe), androgyne (not really), agender--sure? How does one describe absence of a thing, not even a thing, but a perceived abstract feeling several rounds removed from realms of physical reality. 

Ineffable, perhaps

[1] Tangentially, Wensleydale is happily adopted. He didn’t know his birth parents very well but he did know them, was adopted age 4 and started out very suspicious about the whole adoption thing. As such, the Wensleydale parents are aggressively inclusive of him in all family activities. 

[2] I would at this point like to make it clear that queerness is not a contest and Brian’s concern is unfounded. If Brian were to come out as bi, his friends would 100% celebrate and support it as they would any coming out.