People have always had the tendency to fit our behaviour, beliefs, and states of being into boxes. We’re easier to understand that way. Gender is one of them. As the only part of the gender-sex-orientation triad that is generally agreed to be within our control, we choose to be regarded as more or less male or female with varying degrees of consciousness, and enjoy or suffer the effects accordingly. In the middle the spectrum of gender lies an ever-growing list of nonbinary positions; gender fluid, gender bending, pangender, gender neutral, and agender to name a few. These days, the question of “What is your gender identity?” is not so simple.

For the purposes of fair representation, let’s talk about those people outside the spectrum (if such a place exists), who, through lack of consideration, don’t take any position. The gender-apathetic. You wouldn’t have heard of them because they don’t care enough to make their presence known. They are neither loud, proud, nor out. When asked to define their gender identity, they’d probably default to their sex with a questionmark inflection before quickly changing the subject.

The gender apathetic cannot be said to be gender neutral, agender, or genderless. Where agender is like bald as a hair color, gender apathy is more like the floating teapot in space; maybe it’s there, but they’re not thinking about it. Not only is gender totally uninformative to who they are, but the question of how their gender influences any part of their hobbies, choices, interactions, is not even raised in the minds. The gender-apathetic don’t go to any lengths to show their genderlessness either, but may do something gender-bending for other personal reasons.

Says one cis-male who “guesses” would describe himself as gender-apathetic, “I don’t really think about it. Maybe that’s a function of me wearing nailpolish. It makes me happy, so I do it. And if I had the option of growing long, luxurious hair, I’d want to explore that.”

People who are gender apathetic tend to be unphased by gendered comments (insofar as they are supposed to apply to them) because they don’t particularly identify as to which they refer. Nor do they feel discriminated against (even when they are) for being their gender. They feel no pull into joining any gender-pride groups, and do things considered against gender norms without much considering it. The idea of a “coming out” as agender seems absurd.

Not to say that identifying as a gender isn’t valid, social construct or not. Says a cis-female, “My family was really open to gender fluidity and sexuality, so naturally we experimented, and I particularly questioned what was and wasn’t male or female. Now more settled and older, I don’t need to try on identity. I’m female.  I think inner confusion of how an individual relates to their world determines how much they consider their gender before finding the one that fits. Then they stop thinking about it so much.” She adds, “I do wish I had more experience that made me more classically female, like bra shopping or how to wear makeup.”

So, what do you think? Is gender apathy another identity, an impossibility, or more like gender equity apathy: a way to avoid participating in a fight for human rights in a world where gender discrimination is real. Or, is the norm we should all be striving for in this crazy new counterproductive world of identity politics?

I for one really don’t care. I was asked to write this.

Dear Bob,

Happy one year Japanniversary to me! I was supposed to be home by now. And then I was supposed to stay another year. And now I’m sitting here in the airport, en route to Korea and back in a day for the purpose of extending my stay for 1 more month for….no purpose at all. It’s a long story. One I can’t tell because it doesn’t make sense yet.

It’s weird reading my first few letters when I was just settling in. The story was so easy to tell. It was mostly exposè. My shallow impressions of a whole new life. It wasn’t fulfilling yet – but it seemed to promise it would be, the deeper in time I waded.

These last few months have been harder to write about. Yes, it’s deeper, in that the situations you stay in build in complexity exponentially, but making sense of it – that is, turning it into a story you can tell yourself (“ah yes, this is what’s happening here”) and live with (“and I am doing the right thing”) – requires many more assumptive leaps (especially in a culture where people hide their true feelings and I will never belong). That is the art of storytelling, I suppose; committing to a situation long enough for it to become wholly unique, and then being able to craft it into something that others can understand, relate to, find fascinating. It’s too hard. I think that’s part of why I like to change my life every year.

This last third has also been unusually full of sudden change compared to the rest that I couldn’t trust myself to reflect in the midst of it. Not like you can reflect in the midst of things anyway. You have to give some time….but not too much. There must be some sweet spot for optimal reflection, past the disorientation of the moment but before the inaccuracy of reflecting on memories of memories.

So I wasn’t writing because I wasn’t reflecting, and I wasn’t reflecting because the raw material was unfolding too chaotically to make sense of it. I know, I know, I’m vague. This isn’t about Japan anymore. It almost never was.

How do you reflect? Do you do it in terms of right or wrong (did I make the wrong decision then, was I or were they in the right or in the wrong when we fought, did I do a bad thing that caused this…)? And if you do, do you always conveniently come out the good guy? Or do you reflect in terms of cause and effect, so you can understand why the outcome happened? If so, do you always understand? Are you OK with not understanding?

Anyway, onto more concrete items: one main change is I had moved to part-time teaching small groups or 1:1 to mostly adults, and all people who want to learn. It was such a different level of job satisfaction. I think I’ve realized that I just don’t have the patience for people who don’t want to learn, and I don’t want to be where I’m not wanted or needed by the people I am offering to. I think this probably rules out my option for becoming a teacher in the future (actually, the option is ruled out for me because I took almost no teachable subjects in my undergrad…go figure)

At the same time I moved into a new house further into the side part of the countryside, had to give up the car, and am biking everywhere. This has been an excellent change too. Gosh I am really not looking forward to moving back to the city. If it weren’t for the ones I love I…. don’t know where I’d be.

And why am I stuck in this very inconvenient and wasteful 13 month situation? There are reasons, but the story I stick to is it’s because of my hopeless ambivalence. If I knew I wanted to stay only 1 year because I have shit to get on with back home, I would be back home now fully immersed in the shit. If I was entrenched in all the good this life here has to offer, I would have easily chosen to stay. It was my choice, but I could have gone either way with any small reason. When you don’t have any direction either way you become at the whim of the emotions in the moment. Is that what “living in the moment” is? Well I hope it’s leading me somewhere good.

As if reading my innermost anxieties, you sent me this webcomic the other day that I can’t stop thinking about. 

See, I’m pretty disappointed about how many things in my year here have gone (or rather, not gone) given that what I couldn’t control was so to my advantage in getting the things I thought I wanted. My lack of writing stories, learning Japanese, saving money, clarity, community integration being the main ones. But according to the comic, all these things that I wanted out of this experience were because I didn’t actually want them. When you want something, you put in the effort. What you actually do in life proves what you actually want.

So, the explanation is simple: I just don’t want it enough. The life I have is the life I want. That doesn’t seem right though.

The End

Dear Bob,

You posted the quote,

This has been one of those lifelong trending topics of interest for me – the whole faking it until you make it business, and whether it is at odds with authenticity, since it implies you are not being who you are. But also whether being who you are is overrated and a certain amount of pretending is what we all do to become the person we want to be, and maybe my refusal is why I am sooo delayed. Maybe.

The quote has a foreboding ring to it though, so maybe that’s not what it’s about and I am once again projecting to a quote out of context and missing what the author intended. Well, here I go.

It’s part of his book Mother Night and I didn’t have to get very far – it’s the third sentence. Goes like this:

“This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral, I simply just happen to know what it is. We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

Unfortunately he doesn’t expound. The next line goes:

“My personal experience with Nazi monkey violence is limited…”

So I listened to the rest (of the audiobook). It’s about an American who pretended to be a U.S. defector-turned-Nazi to spy on the US during WWII for no reason other than that he was approached and could use his skills as a playwright to write brilliant propaganda and such. “I would fool everybody with my brilliant imitation of a Nazi, inside and out” he says, “and I did fool everybody. I began to strut like Hitler’s right hand man. And nobody saw the honest me I hid so deep inside.” But when the war was over, he found it was not so easy to resume an authentic life.

So in context, the quote refers to this man who has adopted a pattern of behaviour that didn’t reflect his attitudes and how and how those behaviours followed him past the point he dropped them off. This is the lesson that put the quote in the context I think it was meant to be in, and not the one I was projecting – that our reality is determined by our behaviours, not our thoughts, and compartmentalizing the two is not so easy. That’s why we must be careful we aren’t leading anyone astray in either direction about who we really are via our behaviours, because it will come back to haunt us. Maybe not in the form of influencing our thoughts and muddying our authentic self on the inside, but like in this case, being unable to lead an authentic life on the outside because of the reality he has created with his behaviour (in the form of his worshipers tracking him down).

Maybe it’s why he kills himself at the end, despite having his name cleared after nearly being exposed. Maybe the cognitive dissonance was too much to bear, or maybe he knew he couldn’t escape the life he’d pretended to have. In any case, he severely underestimated the difficulty of separating one’s thoughts from his actions.

But when people pretend it’s usually to be someone less despicable. So what to make of pretending to be someone better, more noble than they actually are?  If it’s true that we are what we pretend to be, what’s to distinguish someone acting and someone’s being, so long as they act consistently? So long as they never let on to anyone what their true feelings are.

Do feelings change with behaviour? Is that what transformation actually is?

Comments welcome!

Jess