B-Story
Gio sat and stared at the form. The word Gender stared back. Gio hated that word. It had stalked them their whole lives. Firstly, in the shadows. That off feeling they would get when someone would say “she” or “her” or “that woman over there looking awkward as fuck”. The terrible presence of their breasts whenever they move their body. The culturally expected feminine clothing they were forced into. Eventually, they would learn words like non-binary and gender diverse, and their stalker would emerge from the shadows. You would have thought that finally understanding all these feelings after so long would have been liberating, but it wasn’t. You suddenly feel gender's presence everywhere, you become hypervigilant of its presence. In what you wear, when walking around the shops, seeing everyone doing their utmost to abide by society's idea of what gender they should be. And, of course, in forms like the one their cursor sat blinking in.
Most people who become aware of their gender-diverse nature go through some form of transition, whether just changing their appearance through clothing and hairstyle choices or maybe some sort of medical transition. And after this, the gender spectre seems less scary. You don’t notice it as much when people use the right pronouns, or when you look how you want to look in the mirror. But for Gio this wasn’t the case. Sure, they felt better since they had the mastectomy and started wearing fairly neutral clothes, jeans and a t-shirt being their go-to, and cutting their hair extra short. But these were just half measures; All just attempts to remove gender from their lives. This is what they had realised about themselves. They didn’t want to transition to another gender, or to express their true gender, or any of that bullshit. They just didn’t want anything to do with gender at all. For it to just leave them alone entirely. It was impossible, of course. For example, they had tried to avoid pronouns entirely. This involved getting people to say their name instead of a pronoun, “Gio’s over there” instead of “She’s over there.” But it didn’t work. All that happens is you explain it to people constantly, and they constantly get it wrong. You’re just even more aware of how society is gendering you. So they had compromised and just used them/they pronouns. Any attempt to escape gender just trapped you further in its grasp.
What annoyed Gio even more about gender's inscrutable nature was that they worked for the Bureau of Standards. Their day job was nothing but definitions, classifications and procedures. They loved their job. Loved the logic and organisation behind developing standards. Loved the precisions of measurements they undertook. The last time they had masturbated had been to the minutes of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers quarterly meeting on the IP/TCP protocol stack. They had even named themselves after Giovanni Giorgi, who had developed a precursor to the SI units.
Gender was the antithesis of a standard. There were no well-defined rules and no easy way to measure it. The categories of man, woman and everything in between were so vague. At first, Gio had decided they were non-binary. They liked to non part of the term. But soon, it became apparent that the term non-binary came with a lot of baggage. There was a whole non-binary culture that they were expected to conform to. Everyone suddenly expected them to have a septum piercing. The final straw was when they discovered that International Non-Binary People’s Day was chosen to be exactly halfway between International Men’s Day and International Women’s Day. The standards nerd in Gio did like the idea of each gender getting a designated day, but why should the non-binary day have to be defined in relation to men and women? Once again stuck being defined in relation to the binary. They tried identifying as agender but had the same problem. And so we get back to where we started, Gio staring at a form on a webpage asking for their gender.
They groaned again at the thought of putting something in that field. If they hadn’t really needed to see a doctor about microdosing testosterone, they wouldn’t bother. They just wanted to be free of gender! They just wanted to, well, be. They thought about that motion for a bit, then decided that was good enough and typed “B” in the form. Maybe the way to escape all the expectations of a given gender label was just to invent your own. Gio could define what it meant to be a B. The essence of B was them.
After solving that problem, Gio felt freer and started using B as their gender wherever it was needed: on social media profiles, dating apps, official forms. But then the questions started: friends asking what it meant, officials questioning whether they could legally use it. At least that wasn’t so bad, but it soon got worse.
“What’s with your gender?” the potential date asked Gio over one of the numerous dating apps they were signed up for.
“Oh, I thought all the other genders were bullshit, so I made my own,” they replied before attempting to change the subject.
But the match persisted, “Lol. Omg, that’s so cool. I might change my gender to B.”
Gio panicked at the suggestion, “Oh, well, it’s sort of my thing, so I’d prefer you didn’t.”
The match’s gender was updated to show B, and they typed back, “Well, you don’t get to decide my gender, right? I mean, like, it’s my decision.”
“Nonononononononononono,” Gio typed as furiously at the touch screen would let them.
“Well, screw you jerk!” they replied and then unmatched before Gio could get another word in.
Gio stared blankly at the screen. It’s fine, they’ll probably get bored and change it back within a day, they told themselves, nothing to worry about. They’d have it back to themselves soon enough. But it was out of their control now. Soon, they saw a friend update their gender on Facebook to be B. Gio asked them why they did that, and they replied, “I’ve heard a lot of people talking about being a B, and it really just resonated with me.”
Gio was furious. It’s my gender! How could it resonate with you? That makes no sense. But it got worse. They saw a TikTok video of someone talking about stereotypical B things they do and how it’s so typical for a B to get a tongue piercing. “There is no stereotype; there’s just me!” Gio yelled at their phone in a futile attempt to change what was happening.
Articles appeared in major newspapers talking about the rise of B culture. Gio saw queer-looking people in the street wearing Bee pins on their jackets. Conservative commentators started decrying the rise of B culture, calling it a social contagion. Legislators started passing bills banning the discussion of anything B within public schools. Some went so far as calling to shorten the alphabet to 25 letters, “What has the letter B been used for anyway? Nothing but horrible words like boob and butt and banana!”
The left pushed back, but there were fractures in the cause. Bisexuals became frustrated with B’s, claiming the B in LGBTIAQ+ as their own, saying the acronym should be updated to LGBBTIAQ+, but then the pansexuals demanded a P be included if the bisexuals were getting two B’s and infighting in queer spaces grew. Divisions even began amongst the B’s themselves. Some splintered off to form the lowercase b faction. Some claimed it was actually about inhabiting the gender of honey bees. Someone died when a honey bee faction B attacked a far-right activist with a makeshift stinger. The B had tried to make it authentic and had pulled out some of their own organs with the stinger.
Gio could do nothing but watch on as their gender was used to create this chaos. Somehow, their attempt to escape gender had created even more gender in society than before. They thought they should just cut their losses, maybe move onto C, but other people already had this idea, and there weren’t any letters left unclaimed. Even the Greek alphabet had already claimed. They thought maybe they could try and explain to people that they were the original B, B prime, and people didn’t really understand their gender. But that was also a no-go; many others had claimed to be B prime, which caused some of B's sub-factions to emerge.
Gio blamed themselves; they should have made a proper standard for the B gender before they let it loose on their dating profile. A guiding document these people could follow. Then they remembered that no one followed standards anyway, and then they had a grand realisation. It wasn’t gender that they had an issue with! It was people. Gender was a harmless abstract idea; it’s people who take it and twist it. Who fail to conceive of genders outside of the binary. Who come up with expectations for how a given gender should present. The problems that the B gender was now inflicting on society weren’t Gio’s fault but just the normal tale of people and culture going too far.
So Gio came up with a new plan. They moved to a cabin deep in the woods, completely off the grid with no internet connection. Spent their days tending to their garden, cooking food they grew themselves, reading books, going on walks and writing detailed letters to standard bodies complaining about a revision to Avogadro’s number. A simple, peaceful existence. And they could finally just be.