Aisha Sie

In recent years, I've been doing a lot of thinking about myself. I've always been an (overly) introspective person, but exploring how I feel in terms of attraction (finally identifying as bi+) towards other people has also led to me exploring what other terms are out there describing different types of identity.

Which is interesting in itself: I used to dislike labeling myself, or more precisely, I used to dislike being labeled. When other people label you, it's often disempowering because their assumptions are made visible to the world before checking in with you about their correctness. Being a Dutchie of Chinese-Indonesian descent had me dealing with people's assumptions based on that anytime of the day. That was an immediately visible “other” label I could not erase. So I had to deal with carrying that label whether I wanted to or not. And especially as a teenager, it made me feel rebellious, to want to “just be me” in order to rid myself of those other people's labels on me. And I stayed far away from going beyond “just me” on purpose, in an effort to make those other people's labels ineffective.

However, terminology matters. I've learned about this also in my professional life: I used to help develop healthcare information standards, where making use of coded terminology was part of the key. When one system is talking about “influenza” and another system about the shorter “flu”, you want both to recognize that they're talking about the same thing. This is where a terminology standard like SNOMED CT comes in, which puts a code on a certain clinical concept with all sorts of relations to other concepts, and both these names included as different synonyms. By IT systems using this code (label) anytime someone says “influenza” or “flu” makes it clear to everyone, they mean the same thing. That precise shared understanding about meaning helps health professionals and patients to know exactly what they need to treat and make better informed decisions from there together. (Obviously “influenza” and “flu” are not likely to be confusing, but plenty other clinical stuff out there where the risk of confusion and impact thereof is much higher.)

And of course, there's plenty of mythology out there about the power of knowing one's true name. Rumpelstiltskin's entire mojo is based on nobody knowing their true name, and that story ends when that name is discovered and called out. Various mythological beings are summoned to one's beckoning by calling on their true name. Names hold power, is what we've recognized early on.

Identity is similar in the sense that, when trying to learn about yourself, names/terms/labels are helpful for making (parts of) your identity tangible and recognizable. First to yourself, then to others if it's something you want to share with others. Knowing there's an existing term out there for something you experience, it helps to know you're not alone in that experience, not the only weird one out. And it can help to explain to others, this is something that is part of who you are as well, without having to dig up descriptive words entirely from scratch.

That's what “all those letters” in the queer community mean and represent: our vocabulary. And it's that vocabulary which helps to empower each one of us to recognize ourselves and others, as being just fine this way we are.

So ever since recognizing in myself that, yes, I do identify as bi+ in terms of being attracted to more than just one gender – that only covered one aspect of my being, who am I attracted to. By exploring vocabulary describing the asexuality spectrum via the AVENwiki, I went on to discover another aspect to consider: how (much) of what kind of attraction do I feel when? And exploring vocabulary describing the gender spectrum via the Gender Wiki, I went on to consider: what gender am I anyway?

This helped, because before this, I had always been carrying around the sense of even more ways I'm “other” than the ones that I was being labeled as. It was all the stuff I was putting under “just me” but because I kept it vague for the sake of others, I kept it vague also for myself. But naming these aspects gives myself power: there is no greater knowledge than knowing yourself.

From the asexuality spectrum, beyond superficial fangirl celebrity crushes, I'd rarely feel sexually attracted to people I didn't already know – I need a stable basis of trust for genuine attraction to hook onto. So the term demisexual became recognizable. And even when attracted, for me there's far more emphasis on other ways to be intimate than purely sex – to the extent that I found gray-A to be a potential fit, which also includes demisexual as an umbrella term. So there's that.

On the gender front, I'm assigned female at birth (AFAB) – so when I was born, my biological sex was interpreted as a girl. I would then spend my childhood abhorring typical girl stuff like Barbies and make-up and dresses, leaning more towards boy stuff like Star Wars and videogames and baggy pants, just like my brother. And I also found out in my teens that I had a higher-than-normal level of androgens: testosterone being the most important androgen variant. So I had enough of that going on, that when puberty hit, my face started growing chin hair – thick black strands that I'd have to remove or they'd definitely be noticeable. The hairs on my forearms, stomach and thighs were also thicker. And I've always had a deeper voice than other girls. Around 15, I started taking the Diane 35 pill as an anti-androgen (which doubled as a contraceptive so hey) to reduce that “male pattern hair growth”.

So long before I knew there was a queer community coming up with vocabulary for this, I'd spent a long time wondering what gender I really am. Not conforming to either gender roles or hormonal norms, that made me question early on – am I really a girl? With me liking boy stuff more and growing male hair, am I maybe a boy instead? But the tricky thing about gender identity is that it is not directly equal to either gender roles or biological aspects. Gender identity is about what I experience myself as internally, separate from those external rules of society (which is bullshit anyway) or biology (which is far more complex than XX or XY anyway) put on us.

It took me a long time – until this year in fact – to get a better sense of: I do feel like a girl/woman for the most part. But there's also part of me that doesn't feel like that. Also not boy/man though: I really dislike being seen by others as a boy/man and I've stopped taking that pill which makes my chin hair grow in thicker again, which still makes me feel uncomfortable and remove them. But I know that this part of me is at least not girl/woman and not boy/man so non-binary of some kind. And it turns out there's a term for that as well: demigirl, for being part girl/woman and part not. And what made this all the better: turned out from this Queer in the World article about demigirls that June 21st, my birthday, is also Demigirl Pride Day!

So for now, these are the various terms that I have for myself: I'm a Chinese-Indonesian Dutchie who is also a bi+ gray-ace introverted demigirl. And I say “for now” because the other thing I learned over the years, is that this stuff is fluid. We know that people change over the years with the additional life experience, so it's really not that hard to grok these parts of ourselves to be able to change over time too. As well as our community expanding our shared vocabularies – there might simply be new terms coming into existence that turn out to be a better fit.

But that's all for the future, and for now, having these terms to recognize myself in is enough. Beyond writing this blog post, I won't even really make a big deal out of these newer terms I've added here. [Edit January 2023: okay fine, I added grayace demigirl to my Mastodon profile after all.] But it gives me some measure of inner peace to have them. To know myself on that level.

Labels by others is disempowering, but labeling yourself can be empowering. That's what the power of names should really be.