GQ Challenge: Day 18

The Genderqueer Challenge can be found here.

18. How does your gender factor into your future plans?

This kinda depends on what my future plans are going to be, which I haven’t exactly got sorted right now.

Personally and socially, the only thing that’s relevant to gender in my future really is social transition — as I think I’ve mentioned before, I want to try to be more out with friends and acquaintances. I guess it also sort of relates to my future in that, if I ever wanted to get married in the future (which I don’t know if I will), then I would probably not want to do it until my gender is legally recognised. That’s partially because getting married is very gendered and so getting married using my current ‘legal’ gender would feel like tacit agreement with that gender, but mainly it’s just because getting married before my gender is recognised could cause problems once it is (there’s the spousal veto, although if I had a partner that wanted to veto my gender recognition I don’t think I’d want them anyway; plus there’s the fact that marriage laws would have to be updated, and if they weren’t I may end up having to get an annulment, which is what happened for transitioning trans people before the marriage equality bill).

From an activist-type point of view (because I’m sure I will eventually get past this giant burnout and go back to that sort of thing), I really want to get into nonbinary activism, especially here in the UK, if I can, so that’s definitely a plan for the future.

And finally career-wise, I currently have two options in mind once I finish my Bsc, and both of them could be at least a bit related to my gender. The first option is to become a clinical psychologist (this is the option I’m currently leaning towards, although it would probably involve finding a year’s worth of mental health work and then doing another two or three years of study, as well as actually getting my own mental health in good enough order to be stable when doing it). In that case, I’d like to either run a support group for queer kids (especially nonbinary kids) or at the very least make it super clear that I’m queer-friendly, because I know how much of a concern that can be when looking for a mental health practitioner. The second option is going into academia (which is probably waaaaay too expensive for me to actually be able to do). I’m still a little bit unsure of what I’d want to do specifically, but I’m leaning very much towards social psychology, and in particular gender and/or sexuality studies. I’ve wanted to do research on asexuality for a while now because it would be nice for the ace community to have an actual ace studying them so it’s a little bit less creepy, but I’m also now leaning towards really annoying gender essentialists and evolutionary social psychologists.