Ah. Starting to get at why I have no fucking clue about gender and why people cling to it. Pleasure.

Everything that confuses me seems to come down to pleasure, in the end. I just don’t… get the point of it? People tell me it feels good. Mostly it freaks me out and makes me want to cry?

As ever, I don’t mean to discount others’ experiences. I experience the world strangely, it would seem! But it seems like any topic where the object comes down to “fun” or pleasure… either it upsets me or I just… feel nothing? I don’t get the point of it.

I’m—I’m still not 100% on classifying things by what they aren’t, but In practical terms I’m asexual. I can’t deal with physical experiences. Never done recreational drugs; never intend to. I don’t understand “just cuz” entertainment. Anything beyond fairly simple food makes me anxious. And, alongside embracing my asexuality I’ve come to understand recently how deeply the whole idea of gender just… baffles me. Like, I don’t get why people perform it on either side, instead of just… existing. All performed gender weirds me out, even if masculinity is grosser.

I’ve not quite figured out how that goes along with the asexuality, though it’s clear it’s related somehow. Then I saw this Judith Butler quote, in a discussion on how TERfs have been unfairly co-opting her, and she has lots of good things to say about gender. And, it made sense:

Sometimes there are ways to minimize the importance of gender in life, or to confuse gender categories so tha tthey no longer have descriptive power. But other times gender can be very important to us, and some people really love the gender that they have claimed for themselves. If gender is eradicated, so too is an important domain of pleasure for many people. And others have a strong sense of self bound up with their genders, so to get rid of gender would be to shatter their self-hood. I think we have to accept a wide variety of positions on gender. Some want to be gender-free, but others want to be free really to be a gender that is crucial to who they are.

I’m coming to understand that gender is like religion to me. What’s the goddamned point, you know. Why worship this? Just, be a person, yo—to the extent that one is able, given the culture that we’re in and how much importance other people put into it.

But, pleasure. Right. Of course. Everything I don’t understand. Everything where I think, “Why would you even do that?”—the answer always seems to be pleasure. That big fucking question mark.

I just… don’t understand any of it.

Mind you, a huge portion of the world’s injustice revolves around preventing people from doing things that they find pleasurable. Decriminalize everything except harming others, you know. I just, I don’t understand it. Mostly I want to be left alone.

This may be the autism speaking.