"In her early 20s, Sherrinford Holmes began to discover that she can't stand the feeling of being confined to any point on the gender spectrum, whether it's woman-which she said is how most people perceive her- man, or genderfluid. She likened the sensation to feeling weighed down by hotel bed sheets or blankets when she would prefer to kick them loose. "It feels restricting," said Holmes, now 33. "It feels suffocating.""
"He asked each participant to describe their gender identity. Almost everyone gave him a definite answer, but when Winer probed deeper by asking about how accurate whichever label they provided felt to them, about a third of people seemed to distance themselves from the initial answers they had given him. So in a paper published earlier this year in the journal Socius, he coined a new term to describe the phenomenon he noticed: gender detachment."
Some people experience a persistent inability to commit to any fixed point on the gender spectrum, feeling constrained by labels such as woman, man, or genderfluid. An individual described the sensation as being weighed down by hotel sheets, preferring to kick them loose, and noted that clothing choices often reflect practicality rather than identity. A study interviewing people about asexuality found that roughly one third distanced themselves from initial gender labels when probed, prompting the term gender detachment. Many gender-detached people place little daily attention on gender and prioritize other life tasks over defining or performing gender.
Read at Slate Magazine
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