Everything is Energy

To me, gender is spiritual.

I connect with the idea of masculine and feminine energy in the same way I connect with the idea of the elements—earth, air, fire, water. They are energies that I can feel, ideas I can consider and explore.

I'm a woman, and I suppose that is for a few reasons. I have a female body and feel connected to it, and I definitely wouldn't want a male body. People see me as a woman and I feel comfortable with that. I like she/her pronouns. Although I sort of like he/him pronouns too, and I would be happy to go by those as well. People just don't use them for me, because they assume I'm a woman. And they're not wrong. I am a woman.

But I think I'm also more than that.

I believe that everyone has access to both masculine and feminine energy. So gender isn't just about which energies you can connect to, because anyone could connect to any (that doesn't mean they always do, but they could). Gender is so personal. It's internal. And we can make it external too, with our expressions of it, but where it truly resides is inside us.

And no one really knows what it is. Is it inherent? Is it learned? How much do our experiences affect it? Is it all made-up? No one really knows.

I do like the idea of being pangender (all genders), but I feel like a bit of an imposter saying so because I'm also a cis woman. I wouldn't call myself nonbinary. But pangender feels right. I'm a pangender woman. And why not? It feels right, and that's really the only way we have to determine gender anyway.

Not that I need to label it. But if I don't label it, I'm stuck in the "assumed woman" space.

Ultimately, the mainstream view of gender is still so limited. Gender is expansive. It doesn't need to be any one thing. It doesn't need to make sense. Because people are complicated and don't make a lot of sense, and I think we need to embrace that more.

So to me, gender is spiritual. It's a way for me to connect with myself, and with something greater than myself.

To someone else, it could be nothing more than what their physical body happens to be. Or it could be vitally important to them in a completely different way than mine is to me.

Why should it have to be the same for everyone? I say it doesn't. It can be anything.