Gender is something I have only begun to think about very recently, and I still have work to do in order to understand better where I stand in relation to it. But, even though I have only been exploring my own gender identity for about three months, I had known for a while longer that it is quite a complex matter.

The first thing to know is the difference between sex and gender. While sex is a biological fact, gender is an identity; it is about how one perceives oneself. For a long time, I did not know about gender; this is not a widely known concept in mainstream France (recently, someone I know wrote a survey with a question about “gender”. She told me her professors had said it was the politically correct word to use for questions about biological sex.). I knew about transsexual people, but I only knew about them as “people who feel they were born in the wrong body and need to change their biological sex”. As to myself, my being a girl was just a fact, like my height or my birth date – a fact about me I had no control about, and which meant even less to me than my height or my birthdate do – and I could not imagine it mattering at all.

Most people divide relationships with people who do not belong to their family in only two categories: friends and romantic partners. A specific set of expectations and “normal behavior” is associated with each category, and transgressions are frowned upon: One is not supposed to kiss one’s friends, or hold hands with them, for instance, but on the other hand, it is not considered “normal” not to kiss or have sex with one’s romantic partner.

Very often, people use the word “relationship” to refer to romantic relationships – just as they use the word “love” to refer to romantic love. It rather annoys me to see those words trapped into one of their specific meanings, especially as this specific meaning is not one I can relate to. So, be warned – in this blog, “relationship” refers to all kinds of relationships, and “love” refers to all kinds of love.

I did not always identify as aromantic.

For a long time, I did believe in the whole romantic myth that one is truly happier with a romantic partner, and I wished for one. I longed for the time when I would finally live those idealized shared moments with my beloved: having breakfast together, taking long walks hand in hand, talking about everything and anything for hours, kiss passionately like in my favorite love scenes in movies…

Sex is a complex matter. It is hard to define – for some people, only genital penetration counts; for others, anything involving someone’s genitals is sex. It also has several meanings: an expression of romantic love, a fun activity, a way to experience pleasure, a way to prove one’s worth… and many more. Some use it as a means of pressure (withholding sex in punishment or offering sex as a reward in order to obtain something), while others plan strategies to obtain it.

I will not lie to you: Questioning one’s identity is scary.

The evening of June 4, 2006, when I finally became aware that I probably was not heterosexual as I had always assumed, and the night that followed were, at the time, the scariest moments of my life. Now, four years later, they have only been pushed to second place by another evening that I do not want to talk about (and anyway, it has nothing to do with asexuality or any of the other matters that I wish to discuss in my Petri Dish).

Since today is the fourth anniversary of the evening during which I realized I needed to reconsider my assumed and never questioned heterosexuality, I thought I might as well tell the story of what exactly happened then.

I had a LiveJournal account in which I wrote regularly – and there are entries about that event. The first one was published at 10:18PM that night, which means that the event happened before.