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.

I've known all my life that I was “other” – whether by the color of my skin and foldless shape of my almond eyes, the quiet shy nature of my personality, our Asian family dynamics that differed so much from my Dutch peers, the range of my nerdy interests and hobbies, my having online friends before being online was considered cool – so somewhere along the way, I stopped expecting to fall within the norm of anything. I stopped expecting being anything than “other”.

It's not that I didn't care, not yet anyway. In fact I would say that part of my shyness was that I did care about all this quite a bit and thus was ashamed of what made me “other” in whatever social context that was then most relevant, preferring to stay out of the limelight to keep anyone from noticing.

But there was a hard line inside me somewhere that said, at a young age, despite that shame, despite that awkwardness – I was not going to be able to turn myself white no matter what I did, and any previous attempts by myself at being or others at encouraging me to be an extrovert or non-nerd have been entirely futile anyway.

So I was going to stop trying to be “normal”, and just be me. Just “other”.

With the online friends from the mid 90's onwards (I was 11 when my older brother first introduced me to old school bulletin boards and IRC) also came the far more diverse social circles than I would have had, had I been limited to only those social connections in my little city (not Amsterdam) in my little country the Netherlands. Through online means (from IRC to web forums to ICQ to MUSH servers) I had friends all over the world of all different stripes.

And since, again, at that time being active online was still seen as a nerdy totally socially unacceptable thing to do, we were just a random collection of weirdos finding connection with other weirdos. We were all inherently “other” versus the majority of people for this being online aspect alone. And it felt like folks being “other” in this one aspect made it all the more likely for them to be “other” in different aspects as well.

So through that, my world view broadened very early on, allowing me to find different communities to call myself part of, different people to connect and exchange experiences with. I got to know folks who shared some of my “other” aspects, like other Asian-European/Americans, that helped me feel less alone in those experiences. I also got to know folks who had entirely opposite experiences to mine, for example far from my privileged middle class doctor's kid background, that helped me gain understanding of and empathy for those unlike my own.

And I got to know a lot of queer people, who mostly didn't even call themselves queer at the time but just lived it in their lives. Who didn't make a big deal out of it, just mentioning in passing while discussing music, oh her first crush was another girl when hearing her sing that song. Someone used the term “omnisexual” and I remember looking it up and thinking, oh that's cool, just this all-encompassing love for anyone without any need to divvy up in man or woman or whatever. This concept alone already felt quite freeing, but I didn't think about it beyond that for myself.

My friends weren't only online, though – I had (and still have) a close circle of girl friends at school. And I remember one night where we stayed up late during a sleepover, a few of us 15 year old girls talking our usual nonsense about life, the universe and everything. And one of them asked if we'd ever felt attracted to both boys and girls, because she did and was maybe leaning more towards girls than boys, contrary to what would be expected of us girls to be attracted only to boys. I remember we talked very openly about this together, no judgement whatsoever between us. I remember saying I did think I could be attracted to both, probably leaned more 50-50, but didn't really have much experience, so who knew? Not a big deal if any of us felt like any which ratio of all this.

Looking back, I don't think I realized how lucky I was to have had this comfortable open discussion in the safety of friends as my very first in-person talk including my own not-quite-heteronormative feelings, even without formalizing any of it at the time. I may have been born and raised in the Netherlands, which outwardly prides itself on its tolerance and progressive stance towards the queer community – but that didn't have to mean anything on an individual level, as I now know many queer Dutchies have had and still have far more troubled experiences.

I went to university, I met more queer friends in real life there, including my chosen little brother and his now-husband. I met my own now-husband (or formally “registered partner” since we wanted to avoid the trappings of traditional marriage but keep the same legalities – our self chosen “other” status) with whom I quickly shared inside jokes about having fangirl crushes on ladies in movies/shows we both watched together. But I never dared call myself more than “a bit bicurious” to him, let alone anyone outside our safe little relationship cocoon, because I had zero actual experience with anyone other than him, a straight cis man. And yet, here I was, feeling myself drawn to those queer friends as more than a simple “ally”. But not daring to stand up and claim my space as one of their own.

Until 2019, just before my 35th birthday in June, I started poking around online if perhaps there were other women who had that same naggy feeling that I had. And I came across this post which opened my eyes. In her confusion before discovering she was bisexual, the author describes an initial anger towards women that I didn't recognize, but what got me was this:

“Here’s the most important thing I’ve learned: I get to decide what I feel and how to feel it. Just because I’m with a man doesn’t mean I don’t like women too. As to whether I can like women without ever having been intimate with one — well, I liked boys before I ever kissed one. Why can’t I like girls without kissing one? I don’t need a side-by-side comparison to know what I’m attracted to.”

Boom. That was it. Who really said that my lack of experience with girls meant I couldn't be bisexual when I was attracted to said girls? That was just something that was in my head, not necessarily some golden rule that I'd been given by anybody. So what was to keep me from identifying as such, since I was obviously attracted to at least women (and later I realized also non-binary folks) too? And funny story: when I later told my husband, considering we'd been jointly crushing on plenty women for years by then, he was not just extremely supportive – he was more surprised that this was still new to me.

And then I went to find that corner of the queer community where I could be not “other”, for once.

That was around the time when a new national organization, Bi+ Nederland, got started. Summer 2019, they opened a Facebook group for anyone who is attracted to more than one gender, the umbrella definition of “bi+”. As I didn't find myself comfortable reaching out to broader queer communities because I was still newly getting used to this idea of being “queer enough”, it was extremely serendipitous timing. I immediately jumped on board and began soaking up other people's bi+ experiences, enough of which hit close to home that I could finally, truly, settle into this bi+ identity as my own. No longer feeling any need to justify being “queer enough”.

Already having experience with organizing events for the tech community, I was then quick to volunteer when in early 2020, Bi+ NL asked for folks to help organize an all new dedicated Bi+ Day with talks and workshops. It sounded like a great way for me to give back to the community that had given me this comfort in my newfound identity, and to start getting involved as a baby queer in queer spaces from a role that I was already comfortable with.

I remember in early March 2020, just when news of a virus in China popping up on our shores was making the rounds, we got together at their office to brainstorm ideas. As people came in and went around for introductions, one of the other folks there already proposed elbow-bumping rather than shaking hands, which we did start doing just to be safe together. That evening when I got home, the news broke that the government was indeed advising no more handshakes. A week later, full lockdown.

Perhaps the pandemic is something to train-of-thought about some more in the future. But for now, suffice to say, with 70+ years old parents and neighbors as well as an older brother and other friends with asthma, we were/are extremely careful and paranoid about catching and unintentionally spreading COVID-19, especially prior to the vaccinations becoming widely available. The frustration of seeing widespread misinformation and antivax sentiments, plus everything Black Lives Matter and anti-Asian violence, topped with not-great work situations – let's just say I didn't have a lot of spare headspace for any kind of volunteer work.

Originally Bi+ Day was planned September 2020 and obviously that didn't go through. Other online Bi+ NL events were planned, but being exhausted from suddenly endless remote work calls four days a week, I tapped out. Meanwhile I told Bi+ NL to keep inviting me to volunteer, there'd be a point I would be back in action.

That point came this summer when they asked me to volunteer for Bi+ Day this September. It was an awesome day: I could finally contribute to this bi+ community that turned out to be as open and welcoming in person as they had been online. No judgement or assumptions, even for me as a quiet introverted baby queer of color. I wasn't even the only one on any of those aspects!

I'd found my queer community for sure and was raving about this to one of my long time queer friends who as a fellow introvert shared their difficulty to find community in overly loud queer spaces. Many of queer events revolve around the rainbow glitter Pride parades, around exactly that public visibility, around taking up space because normally queer people are not afforded that space. But when you're like us and prefer to curl up with a good book or have deep conversation... Well, where are the quiet queer spaces? (A question I later learned was already asked by the brilliant Hannah Gadsby.)

So that's my next goal, my next pondering. I've organized regular boardgame nights for a tech community before, which was an absolutely great way to break the ice and hang out with other folks. I've been gobbling up loads of bi+ representative media as of late, which can be a great basis for discussion. And that's got me pondering, we'll see how this will take actual shape and whether I now have sufficient volunteer-work headspace to make it happen.

But that's what I want to do next: keep making it possible for myself and people around me to be “other” in our own ways, even in already “other” spaces. To just be who we are, as “other” as we are, without shame.