I/Me/Myself (by Will Wood) & my relationship with gender

Everytime I listen to I/Me/Myself I fully fucking TRANSCEND there has literally never been any other media representation or discussion that has portrayed this feeling as accurately and I have such a hard time putting it into my own words so it's the greatest thing ever. I saw this tiktok the other day that was discussing a common experience amongst autistic people about the correlation between autism and gender identity and that tiktok also made me very happy because it was clearly talking about the exact thing I/Me/Myself is talking about and I just wanna share what it said because I think it's so cool.

"I think a lot of autistic people have the same relationship with gender as electrons have to space, which is to say, not at all until somebody is looking at it. To back up and explain for a second, electrons aren't really in one place, unless you're looking at them. So 99% of the time they exist as kind of like a wave. It's hard to explain but like, let's say an electron that's supposed to be in my bracelet, if I'm not looking at it, it could just be across the universe in like half a second and then just suddenly be back here. Like they don't really have a place, they're just vibes. But then like the second we look at them they start behaving. They don't fall for the like, peeking through your hands bs, like no they don't do that. No matter what they do, they cannot get electrons to behave without looking at them, and they can't get electrons to not behave and look at them at the same time. And I think a lot of autistic people feel the same way around gender. If I'm alone, if I'm just vibing, I don't really have a gender. Like, there's a camera in front of me, and that is an observer, and so I'm a boy. But like while I was writing this, there was nobody there, there was nobody around me, so I didn't really feel like I had one (gender). There's no shape, no form, just the vibes. But then the second some asshole looks at me it's like, bam, gender! It's like object permanance except when you're not looking at the thing it actually doesn't exist. Because when people look at us they expect us to be in one space. They don't like when we're just like hovering, vibrating masses of formless void, metaphorically, they don't like that. The neurotypicals and cis people don't like that. They don't like hovering masses of genderless gas. And so we make masks early on and whenever there's an observer we just turn into this version which is stagnant and has to obey rules of time and space and it's exhausting."

And OMG do I feel that. I'd still always consider myself trans in the sense that I'm transexual and I experience the trans experience but when it comes to gender it feels like no matter what label I come across it's all just a mask at the end of the day. The mask that I wear to be more conventional to the masses has a gender but I don't. Even calling myself agender doesn't sit right with me. Like the fact that I have to call it anything is inherently part of the mask to me because it's just making myself unnecessarily uncomfortable for the sake of conforming to a greater social standard that you have to have a gender and that your gender has to be an extremely vital part of you and your life, so much so that it's impossible to see you as and refer to you as a person unless you establish your gender or it is established for you (assumed). The only term I've come across that I actually like and feels true is autigender, since my "gender" solely belongs to my mask, not me, it is inherently tied to my autistic experience and my autistic experience is inherently tied to it. I also very much like the idea of an I/Me/Myself based xenogender as that would probably be the only other term that would fully describe the experience. I very frequently think about the way that virtually no one has ever or will ever trully 100% see me in regards to this topic, because even when I explain my pronouns to someone they intake that information and automatically make an assumption that I'm either a trans man or a transmasc and most just won't understand what it truly means to me even if I tried to explain it. I've only ever met 1 person who really gets it and really never views me under the lense of gender because they just see me as a person and that's it. This thought is often the #1 cause of dysphoria for me, even when someone is using the correct pronouns on me I know it's still wrong because to them it's gendered regardless of if the terminology is gender neutral or not. It makes it extremely exhausting to be perceived at all because I'm never being perceived correctly.

Moral of the story is, headphones aren't enough, I need to inject the song into my bloodstream. 

"I am quantum physics, MY WITNESS BRINGS ME INTO EXISTENCE!"