Gender to me feels like poetry in a world made for calculations
A Personal Essay for pride 🌈
Gender today feels like a war no one asked for.
It’s like two politicians screaming over each other on primetime,
each one red in the face, convinced they’re the chosen voice of biology.
And if you’re not wearing the right “team jersey,”
they ask you to leave the room entirely.
But what if I never chose a team?
What if I am the room?
Being outside the binary is like being
a poem in a world that only accepts spreadsheets.
They want margins. Columns. Predictability.
He or she.
Pink or blue.
Tick the box or don’t exist.
And me?
I’m a scribble in permanent marker.
Un-erasable. Untranslated.
Illegible on purpose.
They say gender is “socially constructed.”
Okay.
But by whom exactly?
Why does my shampoo bottle have hips?
Why does “For Men” smell like war and pine needles,
while “For Women” smells like silent compliance?
Why is my razor “for sensitive skin”
just because I like earrings
or cry at sunsets? why do I pay more for things which are pink?
Since when did crying need a gender?
Gender is buried in everything:
In the fonts used for baby clothes,
the pitch of a flight attendant’s voice, even how your name autocorrects
to something more “palatable.”
It gets politicized because anything that isn’t instantly legible
Scares the system.
Because once you stop asking “what are you?”
and start asking “why do you need to know?” —
The power structure shakes a little.
Is gender even real?
Yes?
No?
Sometimes.
Only when I’m not being looked at.
Sometimes it’s the depth of the curve of my voice.
Sometimes it’s how I walk like thunder down a street at night.
Other times, it’s how I shrink at a dinner table
when someone misnames me
and I’m too tired to make it a teachable moment.
Pride, for me, isn’t about rainbow capitalism.
It’s about history. It’s about the first pride walk in Asia called the “Friendship Walk”— Bengal, 1999 — before the West “discovered” queerness. We walked when it wasn’t aesthetic. When 15 of queers walked in ugly yellow T shirts. When it was dangerous.
Sometimes I think of Virginia Woolf,
How she wrote:
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
And I wonder —
What if your gender doesn’t even fit in a room?
What if it seeps under the doorframe,
stains the curtains,
and peeks out from under the bed?
Will it feel like a monster under the bed —
or am I the monster?
Woolf spoke of space as freedom.
But for those of us with genders that scribble instead of settle,
We’re still knocking.
Still asking for a room, a shelf, a sentence
that doesn’t box us in.
Because when your identity is seen as rebellion,
your body becomes protest,
and your existence gets political —
even when all you wanted to do
was just write.
So I write.
Not to explain myself.
Not to educate the privileged.
Not to shrink myself into digestibility.
But to breathe.
Because my gender was never a checkbox.
It’s a page covered in ink —
smudged,
raw,
and still becoming.
