Sexual Orientation/Identity/Preference

STRAP IN, THIS POST GONNA BE LONG

i always find these conversations interesting and challenging because i often feel like i come at them from such a different place than most people having them!

foremost, i want to agree with p much everything @Antonym has said in this thread, because it is all so good. particularly these bits:

i wanted to quote those snippets because i am going to use them as a launching pad for the wordy explanation and critique i am about to launch into!

1. identity is not a linear spectrum

i have a bit of a reputation among friends and local communities for being extremely opposed to this as a concept. to be blunt, i don't believe in bidirectional lines. it's a very limiting conceptualization. bear with me while this gets a little abstract.

first, it assumes that every "spectrum" has two extreme cases - and that these cases are opposites of each other. second, it assumes that any other identity within that category falls in between those two extremes.

i'm going to jump on the one that is closest to my heart, and i'm going to use @stainsofblue 's representation of it, for the sake of this thread. i mean no disrespect to you by critiquing it; rather, i just want to provide more information from my perspective!

(for the record, the most accurate term for the identity on the left there would be 'cisgender.') there are a lot of ways i find this troubling and inaccurate. let's start with the implication that cis people and binary trans people are opposites of each other. both are people who have a binary identity - what makes them opposite ends of a line? a lot of trans people knew what their gender was from their earliest memories, so what makes that not a 'natural born gender'? and the word 'transitioned' bothers me too, because are trans people less trans if they don't follow a complete medical transition? what about genderqueer people who transition more than some binary trans people?

but even more than those questions, i am highly displeased with the pervasive belief that being genderqueer means being somewhere in between cis and trans. that i am somehow a mix of male and female, somewhere in between but not quite occupying either space. in my experience this couldn't be further from the truth, and it doesn't even make sense in the way i live my gender!

i like to be seen socially as a male. i like men's fashion. i love the aesthetic of wearing heels. i love my incredibly fuzzy legs and i also love my hourglass waist. i like my junk a lot the way it is, but i don't identify it as female. my kinky submissive orientation has a lot of female energy. sometimes i like to be treated 'like a girl' during sex, whatever tropes that means at the time; sometimes i like to be treated like a boy; sometimes i just like to touch and be touched without any associations of gender.

all of this is to say that my gender is positionally defined in some ways by its relation to 'male' and 'female', to 'cis' and 'trans', but that it is not linearly in between either of those. it is outside, piecemeal, mosaic, three-dimensional. i would consider myself more of an opposite to 'male/female' than those two identities are to each other!

and this isn't even getting into sexual orientation, which - like it or not - relies upon an assumption of gender identity in almost every single label. for this reason i call myself queer and nothing else.

which brings me to point number two...

2. labels help you know that you exist

i really, really wanted to live the 'who needs labels, i will just ~be myself~' life for about twenty years. it worked okay for me. except for the part where i felt really detached from other queer folks, even though i knew that i liked people of all genders and sexes. why couldn't i connect to them? and why did i feel so detached from my own body?

i literally could not put my own words to what was wrong until i heard the mere concept of 'genderqueer'. i needed that label, that convergence of experiences and definitions provided by all the other people who embraced that label for themselves, to begin to explore and comprehend my own feelings. unfortunately, the fact that i could never see anything like myself in the world before meant that i just had no words for it. so i will be among the first to say that there is a deep, deep privilege in being able to say "i don't need labels" and mean it.

i hope that wasn't too derailing, because i recognize that the point was not to debate whether or not labels are needed, but for me they are part and parcel of the same conversation. i couldn't have begun to get what was going on for me if the labels weren't there.

tl;dr identity is super complicated and words help with that!!!

Don't hate me, but this is my two cents in when it comes to sexual labels.

I'm a label fan. I like knowing what's what, who's into what, and so on and so forth (I know this seems nosy when I describe it like that but whatever, I will let this one pass). I'm not saying that I'm going to force people into labelling themselves just so they can be my friend, or what ever, but I will ask them to the ends of the world so that I can understand what they're into or the things that they like. I do it not to make another person feel uncomfortable, but for my general knowledge. Once upon a time, I had this short term dating session with this guy, and ended up wondering why we never did anything more than hold hands and it seriously made me question if there was something wrong with me. In the end, he just came out and said that he wasn't into women. That didn't make me hate him, but made me understand more as to why those intimate levels weren't explored.

I'm straight, and I'm not uncomfortable to say it around my "gray shaded area" friends. I go with them them to gay clubs and they often tease me that I won't be able to go get a free drink because everyone there isn't into a straight person, which is fine. It does make me a bit uncomfortable though when a woman asks if she can buy me a drink, but then after a short while it makes me realise that they're just like my friends and they do realise that I'm not into them but, we still end up chatting and shouting a drink for each other - no harm in that, as that is what I do with my friends (whether they be gay, bisexual, or straight) friends.

I guess what I'm saying is, is that I don't care if people don't label themselves. But for me, and for my general knowledge, I need to have things labelled because it makes life a lot easier for me. Please don't just assume I'm being narrow minded and just won't accept the fact that people are just sensual creatures and what not, because I'm not saying that. I'm saying that this is for me only. Other than that, I'm more than happy to know what people think or where they see themselves fall into what category. I'm into labels, but that doesn't mean that if a person cannot label themselves, I won't sit there and try and understand what they're describing to me.

I don;t understand why this fuss. I mean, OK, you are either male, or female. You might like males, females, or both.

So, sexual preference has, actually, three versions, and gender or sex has two versions each.

You have male genitalia? You are male. You may like males and it's nothing wrong with it. You may dream how it was to be female, but you are still male. (Damn, I am wishing I was male several days a month and it has nothing to do with the fact that I like males and I am happily married! It has to do either with biology, or with the wrong society....)

You don't merely wish to be female, but you have done medical procedures in this purpose? No matter that they are not finished yet, you are female. Thing solved. There are too many words, cis, trans, pan, to express the same things.

Nononononono. D8

Oh god no.

Not all transgender people WANT to get hormones or surgery done for a variety of reasons! For one, it's painful and invasive. And bottom surgery? Is really not that great yet. And it's expensive. And the person might not even be "out" as trans yet--which does not mean they're not the gender they say they are. And y'know, I don't think anyone has to get surgery or other invasive things done to prove their gender. If you feel you're female and say you're female, you're female. Doesn't matter if you have a penis or not. Being trans is about a lot more than just what parts you have or don't have, and it's about a lot more than just wishing whimsically to be male/female.

And there are more genders than just male and female. There's third gender, there's bigender, there's androgyne, there's trigender, there's genderqueer, there's two-spirit, there's Hijra...some people identify as those, or multiple of those, or none at all! Sometimes, gender identity fluctuates throughout the day.

To use myself as an example, I'm genderqueer and pansexual. I recognize the existence of more than just two genders and I myself am a big mess of genderfucked.

Sometimes I feel male, sometimes female, sometimes like neither, sometimes both. When I was little, I thought myself male and got very bothered by people using female pronouns on me (until it was beaten into my head as I grew older that, nope, girl), and that sense of feeling "other" has never gone away, though it's transformed today into not just male, but a fluctuating gender. (Because puberty hit and hit hard and it just aggravated all the confusing issues I'd already been dealing with.) Surgery wouldn't help me in my case, because I'd never feel fully comfortable in this body. xP Because sometimes I'm comfortable in this body and just fine and feel female, and other times I'm really, really bothered by being called female pronouns because I have a kneejerk sense of "but that's not me." It's a weird feeling. So surgery and hormones wouldn't help because that'd only solve half the issue (not counting those times I feel like both or neither) and then I'd be right back where I started. Because yeah--smartichoke summed it up. It's like a crazy clusterfuck mosaic and I don't feel fully male or fully female or fully anything for that matter, though sometimes I feel more like one thing or the other. Sometimes, I like my breasts and think they're awesome and wear things that accentuate them, and sometimes I make them as flat as I can [sports bras for now, until I can afford a binder, ahaha ) because it feels wrong that my chest isn't flat. (Not morally wrong, just wrong as in "I'm not supposed to have these, wtf." It's a hard-to-explain feeling.)

I don't really consider myself trans, but I also don't really consider myself cis.

It's not about "imagining what it's like to be X Gender". It's a lot more than that. And those words exist for a reason--to explain all these feelings. They're not words that express the same thing, they all express different ideas--in fact, they express the idea that gender is broad and not always binary. Sometimes, it's a clusterfuck.

@The Mad Hattress

The two concepts aren't mutually exclusive, though. It's not an either/or situation. O_o

Just because I use labels to describe myself (note--describe, not define) doesn't mean I go around introducing myself as "Hey, I'm Rhiannon, the geeky nerdy genderqueer pansexual brunette with the 700+ My Little Pony collection." I just introduce myself as "Rhiannon".

The thing is, the idea of removing labels completely is...kind of a privileged idea. I mean, sure, I'd love it. I'd love to live in a utopian society where the sexes/genders/races/classes/etc were all considered equally human and there was harmony and peace and yay! But we're...not there yet.

The labels keep me visible. The labels are, in many cases, political more than anything. Day to day, I don't think of myself as pansexual or genderqueer, for example--I just am who I am. But we live in a society where LGBT rights are STILL BEING CONTESTED, for example, and it's only because we're being loud about it and throwing around those labels that people are finally, maybe, in some places, considering giving us equal rights. If we were just quiet and stuck our fingers in our ears and pretended these things didn't matter because people are people u guiz (which no one is contesting) then...we'd be ignored. Same sex marriage still isn't legal in most places, some places don't allow you to legally change your gender unless you've has SRS, etc. So yeah, the labels and loudness are kinda important.

(lol okay I give up I am gonna join the derailing lol because if this is what people wanna talk about, that's awesome too.)

I get the desire for no labels. Believe me, most of the time I laugh about them and find them silly. Once as a joke, @kisstheground and I made this whole string of labels that would fit us and it was really long and funny and you know basically served to prove that labels are stupid and a lot of the time harmful because what a label means to me isn't the same as what it means to you and it carries this whole string of associations that aren't the same for everybody or that I don't all associate with.

However, and this is a big one. We need the words. It's this 1984-orwellian idea that you can't understand or think about something if you don't have the words for it. And yes, sometimes people drive it to extremes, yes people use it to feel special or whatever, but what I was actually trying to say in this thread wasn't about being labelled by society but how you think about yourself and go on this journey of discovery.

Because as @Rhi-Rhi said (and I don't have it about gender, which is why I was very grateful for @smartichoke 's post because I really don't understand all the subtleties, but I have it about other things) there is feeling of wrongness or otherness and it takes time to figure it out. It is important to understand who we are in order to figure out what we need and if we don't have words for it, we can't google them, can't find people who wrote about that stuff and make us feel less alone in the world, less crazy, less other.

You are totally right, Hatty, that I would never open with "Hi, I'm *label1,2 and 3*" and most of my friends know very little about my sexual identity -- that is mine and I don't assume people actually care? But I need it for myself, I need it to understand myself.


This is kind of why I get so upset when straight cisgendered happy people say that labels are stupid and useless because it's like... of course they are to a person who is the norm, who doesn't feel weird and different.
So yeah, labels to label people and to judge them are of course problematic but that isn't the only thing they are for.

this is such an incredibly uninformed opinion that it would take me hours if not days to explain to you all the ways this is not true. i highly recommend you do some basic googling of "trans 101" before rejoining this conversation.

i AM "whoever i am." and i still need labels sometimes to explain it. i understand why you choose not to use labels for yourself, and that's awesome, but broad sweeping statements like this are actually quite insulting.

i would encourage you to consider people whose identities are not reflected, validated, and confirmed in popular culture/media/narratives, and how that makes it extremely difficult to just "be who they are" and have anybody else recognize it. if you don't have words to tell people who you are, you tend to just become invisible.

that doesn't mean you have to go around telling everyone all the identities you claim every time you meet them, but it does allow you to identify yourself when it is appropriate or necessary and also to find other people with whom you share experiences.

Exactly, @stainsofblue. <3

And I dunno. Labels are so often talked about in a negative fashion, but I actually like them when they're applied positively. I see so many straight cis white folks talking about the sins of labels, and yet--labels show the diversity of people and the world.

And I like them because of that. People are all different. I don't much care for this "but we're all people!" thing some folks like to throw around because it's like no fooling, buddy! No one's arguing we're not all people. It's like people that argue they're colorblind and "people are people! <3" when race issues come up. >_o It feels like trying to just...erase people and the problems in a sense.

Differences aren't bad things. And it's good to acknowledge those differences, because to not acknowledge them is to ignore both the beauty of those differences, and the problematic crap and experiences people suffer because of those differences. Trying to pretend they don't exist is just really dismissive. :\

trust me, i did not miss the point of your post. in fact i hardly think you even read mine.

i think you may have missed this: i was not talking about you. i explicitly said "people whose identities are not reflected, validated, and confirmed in popular culture/media/narratives". this most certainly does not include you as a straight person, and it also does not include your lesbian or gay cis friends.

frankly, i don't care how many of your friends reject labels. that does not make any of you an authority on how valid or useful they are for anyone else. it just makes you sound arrogant and uneducated.

wrong! you seem to have not read anybody else's posts on why labels are really important to them! if we stopped having labels for various marginalized identites, we would absolutely never have any of them recognized, and the privileged identites along any given axis (white, straight, cis, able-bodied, thin) would continue to overwhelmingly dominate the public consciousness.

Of course you're not invisible. You're straight. Straight people are 100% represented in the media. And just a friendly request, but please don't pull out the "I have queer friends" card to validate your argument! We're not cards in a deck that ya can just whip out to argue your point and I know I'd be really bothered if people used me that way, friend or not. :\ And your friends are certainly not the authority on the subject! They can have different opinions, certainly, but I don't share them.

That's the thing, though. It's really simple for you to say that personality is what makes you stand apart. And I agree in a very simplistic sense. But queer folks ARE largely invisible. How many awesome, well-developed queer main characters can you name in popular media? How many trans characters can you name? I'm talking main characters, btw, and characters who are portrayed as more than their sexuality, who aren't just there for comic relief (BECAUSE LOL GAY/TRANS IS FUNNY) and who aren't just supporting characters for the straight main peeps.

Of course me being pansexual and dating same-sex is only one part of me. And I'm pretty danged vocal and hard to ignore. But I still feel invisible. I have to really dig and search for media that has relate-able characters--and of the stuff I find, very little is good quality. Straight folks don't have that problem. Straight folks are all over.

This is almost letter for letter what I was talking about with Dun on a couple of occasions. I find trying to discern where you fit in on a multi-dimensional scale is far more fair and accurate than just seeing things in black and white - and, sometimes, mid-gray, lol. I find the idea of boxing something like sexuality, gender etc. is like trying to box any other characteristic of a human being: it's like saying people can only be smart or dumb, for example.

This is the reason I'm personally not a fan of anybody flaunting the LGBT flag at me. I think most people are different shades of gray in all of the dimensions above rather than blacks or whites. When you have a variable scale like that, I don't think it's fine to just hide under a name. You're more than that.

*throws a penny on the tracks -- participates in the derailment of the thread*

I get tired of labels. Not the labels I give myself (which include "amazing" and "walking google"), but I get really offended at the labels other people put on me ('stupid fat b*tch', 'idiot', 'cisgender' etc.), because guess what? I usually don't label myself with them. Yes. My gender identity and my physical sex match, but I don't call myself cisgender. I don't like the word. I don't use the word. The only time I've seen it used in my social circle is someone just disregarding points of view and people because 'they're cisgendered.'

My personal labels might not match what the label means to other people. And that's fine for me, because I'd rather actually learn about someone than just smack a label on them and yell 'done!' at them.

I'll let people define themselves, or not, the lack of labels is just as telling in some respects.

Mostly I call myself Carrie.

if only i could really express to you how unbelievably angry you just made me.

what would you call people who aren't trans*? non-trans*? even worse, normal?

let me tell you a little secret: 'cis' is the latin prefix for 'on the same side.' that's it. that's all it means.

the whole point of using the term 'cisgender' is to identify what it means to have your designated sex and gender identity match, WITHOUT making trans* people "the other ones." the point is to not make trans* people the outcasts, the weirdos, the outsiders, the abnormal people.

it is not an insult. it is a term. it is used to make discussions clearer. it is used to identify what you are, nothing more and nothing less.

the idea that it is an offensive term is so unbelievably bull-headedly swimming in privilege that i am spitting with anger just thinking about it.

you tell me, carrie. let's say i want to make a statement about a difference between trans* experiences and cis experiences. what word should i use to replace 'cis'?