Hello, I’m here to change your sexuality, there is no such thing as straight or gay, in my opinion we are all pansexual, but some of us are gynephilic (attracted to feminity) others androphilic (attracted to masculinity) some are both.
Of course women can be masculine and men can be feminine, what matters is presentation, you’re attracted to presentation not gender.
Ergo if a femboy is so feminine that you’re attracted to them it’s normal, it just means you like feminine presenting individuals. (Means you’re straight, but what does straight even mean bruh)
However there is something important to take into account, romantical attraction, you can only want to date women but like a more manly presentation in that case you are still androphilic BUT you’re romantically attracted to women. Which is probably an oversimplification of butch lesbianism, or liking tomboys.
This is my theory on the subject, it’s probably flawed somewhere but I need other eyes to see it.
I agree with this, putting up straight lines between this shit is so dumb. Especially when you see what a broad array of fetishes there are, but when it comes to sex/gender you can only be strictly straight/gay/bi thats stupid.
Oh oh, I had this exact train of thought recently! The femboy part downward, at least.
It set off an introspective spiral for a little while that made me recontextualize a whole bunch of shit throughout my life. Turns out not only am I bi, but it has actually been kind of really obvious the whole time.
The tragic hilarity of toxic masculinity is that it strives to define “a man” by what he isn’t, in an attempt to preserve an exclusive and narrowly defined top slot of a social hierarchy. But all one has to do is claim behaviors as a different group, and the definition contracts accordingly. At the same time, the fact that said “masculine” definition is malleable to the point of sheer fiction, evades everyone in that group.
Sound alike the gymnastics to define racial categories to preserve a social hierarchy as well. What is white? Well it’s people from here and here, not Irish, not Jewish, etc. Oh wait, Irish are allowed now but not Okies. Okay, they’re allowed now but no Jews! Now, Jewish can be allowed sometimes but no Italians. Alright, Italians, but no Jews, Irish are also okay, some Hispanic people if they can pass, certain Asians can be let in, etc. Etc. It always go on like that. It stays malleable just to make it exclusive.
Men is what my ooga booga caveman brain defines as not female and not unkown. Non-binary folk are unkown to caveman brain for example. Trans women are women and same with trans men. Femboys are close enough to female that ooga booga caveman brain wants to put dick in some.
Reject modern prescriptivism, embrace caveman brain descriptivism!
Dude is thinking about this so hard he fell asleep before sex. Just admit your enby or bi. Its easier than trying to explain why. Its not your problem if people don’t like femboys. Femboys are beautiful.
I’m wildly attracted to both of those people and just call it Bisexuality. Classifying attraction is kinda dumb anyway, as there’s no point in setting up heuristics that will have that many edge cases and exceptions.
I also call it bi - but I’m 40, I think younger people are more fluid and open to other labels.
Being straight and being attracted to women who present less femme could just be straight-with-a-preference or -type, could be bi/pan, could be higher on the Kinsey scale, or the existing but niche terms are flixisexual (/romantic), skoliosexual, or could even be androgynesexual, or androsexual (attracted to masculine traits, regardless of birth gender)
I strongly recommend reading their (utterly fascinating) Wikipedia page. I’ll just screw up the details by re-hashing it here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1NN5TER
Creating a whole spectrum of labels seems like the wrong direction - if I’m attracted to someone, that’s all there is to it. The rest don’t matter, especially if it’s about other people’s relationships, then all the more so - that’s their business, and as long as nobody is getting harmed, then we need to support them.
I kinda agree, but also want to offer a different perspective. I agree that the more specific labels are not efficient for communication in most cases, because nobody knows all of them and it’s easier to just say who you find attractive.
However, they can still be useful to discover more about yourself. As someone who’s aromantic and asexual I’ve found that many of the labels in the community caused me to ask myself the question “how do I feel about this”. Before finding “my” labels I just kinda felt like “nope” about anything related to relationships, but all the more specific labels and spectra have made it much more clear to me what I want and what I don’t want. They also provide a way for people to find others with the same experiences as them, which can feel incredibly validating.
These specific labels are a jargon for queer people, they make sense in their context, but are not useful when trying to communicate with most people from outside of the community.
I think you are right, but after a milennia of religious obligations to be 1) man or 2) woman and no other couples allowed than 1 + 2, it might help people sort it out.
I mean it’s not like a cis man likes all women either.
So in the meantime, before we become an enlightened startrek society, it can come in handy I guess.
I agree with the “not getting all these labels” but they aren’t really for me. I’m not out trying to find someone to date or bang or whatever.
I was having a conversation with some co-workers last week about the difference between bisexual and pansexual. I might have been wrong in my explaination. I’m a straight white man (so my knowledge is limited), but I’m usually more open than my (normally older) co-workers. They didn’t understand the need for it, or why it mattered. I said well apparently LGBTQ people had enough interactions to need a new word. If you aren’t dating or in that world then you wouldn’t understand the need for a more detailed definition of Bi vs Pan.
For the record they just thought it should all be lumped under Bi with no need for an extra trans inclusion word since (in their mind) trans was already included.
I recently realized that the straightness category is very analogous to whiteness.
If a cis person were to date an agender enby, they might be heterosexual by virtue of being sexually attracted to someone of a different phenotypical gender/sex, but would probably not be considered straight. Despite the enby being hetero to the cis person, people might call them homos, even if the enby was AMAB and the cis person was a woman.
This is why people see attraction to trans people as not straight. If the chick has a dick or the dude doesn’t, it just doesn’t feel straight to cis people. Even if the trans person had The Surgery^TM^, the fact that they’re not “normal” makes attraction to them not straight to these freaks.
Just like conceptions of whiteness, male/female, and pornography, straightness is really based on vibes rather than strict criteria. This allows the category to be used as a tool of exclusion and oppression, given legitimacy by its supposed ties to objective measures.
Straight =/= heterosexual. Liking femboys is gay, liking tomboys is gay, liking trans people is gay. An AMAB transfem & an AFAB transmasc in a trans for trans relationship aren’t straight, even though they aren’t homosexual from any coherent perspective. Straightness isn’t coherent beyond separating normal from queer. All heterosexual people can find a trans person hot if we pass, and many will find us hotter if they know we’re trans.
I’m bi with obvious bias towards femme presenting people, and some scummier gay men (those that forgot 2000’s homophobia and now are transphobes on the same tropes) did harass me for being a “spicy heterosexual into getting pegged”.
I think part of the issue with these terms losing meaning is because we stopped using them as intended. Straight Gay and Bi were just the entry points in delivering vital info about what sexual organs you had and which ones you were engaging in sex acts with. Under old school definitions that would list me as Straight because I have a penis, and am only interested in engaging in sex with a vagina. Now, because it does not matter to me whether the person who has a vag is a man or woman, under the newer definitions I am bi. So the system made sense for the original system we set it up in, but its breaking down in our more modern way of thinking
edit: Side note, I especially like how this effectively makes me Shroedingers Gay, as I am either Straight or Bi depending on whos looking
They made sense in a world where trans and gender nonconforming people don’t exist. In this mythical past you imagine, you having sex with a masc presenting woman wouldn’t be straight either, as you’d be having sex with a queer freak. It’s never been about genitals.
Anal sex, hetero or homosexual, was sodomy, and while they usually went after homosexuals, they would be willing to go after “straight” people if it interfered with the woman pumping out babies. If you’re visibly not fitting into the mold, people will deny you’re straight. Many people don’t mind, but the conservatives would throw people out of thefi group if you “feel” off to them.
Trans people have always existed and GNC people have always existed. The old understanding was never accurate intentionally. It excluded people by design, and is only losing meaning because we’re actually questioning it. When it was not questioned, it wasn’t somehow more accurate. We’re not creating new definitions, we’re pinning down the unspoken parts of the original definition.
I’m not trying to minimize anyones life experience with my previous statement. We try to improve society as time moves forward, and if we are successful at that, that means that in the past things weren’t as good/inclusive/knowledgeable as they are now. Public knowledge on sex/gender/biology has advanced a lot since we started using the terms straight gay and bi, I was merely acknowledging the past existed as it was, and that they worked for the more limited public knowledge that we had then, we know more now and they’ve become less relevant/useful because of that. The one thing you are wrong about though is yes, it WAS primarily about genitals, if you had a dick and liked dick, you were gay, same with if you had a vag and liked vag. If you liked both, it was bi, and if you liked the opposite it was straight. Society as a whole didnt fully understand the difference between sex and gender then though, so what genitals you were interested in and what gender you were interested in were used interchangeably, but that didnt stop the primary purpose as it was generally understood back then from being specifically which sexual organs you wanted to do the nasty with.
Tl:dr: as we advance our understanding of our world and old models become inefficient/outdated, it doesnt mean they werent compatable with our modern understanding of the world out of malice, it just means we have advanced to the point they no longer work
People don’t think that rigidly or uniformly. Straight meant opposite genitals AND opposite apparent gender. If one or the other was violated, many would consider things not straight. Some did think it was only genitals, but many would disagree. Just like how white supremacists will say Jews aren’t white, conservatives would identify either same genitals OR same apparent gender as not being straight, even if many people didn’t. Some people might have considered apparent gender to matter, and genitals to not.
They’d all use the same word, but mean different things. That’s why “American values” means liberal democracy to some, Christian nationalism to others, unregulated capitalism to many, and a combination of the three to most people. They all think they’re in agreement, but in reality they aren’t.
Language is always fluid and inconsistent; allowing room for semantic abuse. It’s how fascists bind an unpopular idea, like queers being pedos, to the more popular idea of us grooming kids into being queer. We don’t make people queer either, but it’s a more common of belief that can boost the popularity of us being pedophiles through the vague word “grooming.” If someone accepts that we groom children into gayness, they might spread the term groomer, or internalize it and start to believe we groom kids in other ways.
White could just mean skin color, but it wasn’t only used that way. Straight sometimes just meant genitals, but it was also used to other people that didn’t fit in for just as long.
That’s it, absolutely. It’s bigotry in language form. The only people who care about what qualifies as “straight” are those who shun those different from themselves.
I figured out that I’m attracted to femeninity. What’s between the legs doesn’t really matter to me. My girlfriend told me that it makes me part of the community and not just an ally like I’ve always called myself.
Gynesexual/gynosexual people: Individuals who experience sexual attraction toward women, females, and/or femininity, regardless of whether they were assigned female at birth.
What about if you think some trans women are gorgeous and you’d totally kiss them, but you’re not into penises? Would that fall into the same sort of category?
Not that it really matters because attraction is a very fluid thing that can be difficult to specify, but I’m curious.
I like the meme but let’s get that straight (no pun intended): both tomboys and femboys break out of the gender binary. Their very existence puts heteronormativity into question. If a boy can look like a girl and be it just having long hair, that’s the beginning of the end of an oppressive system that should end as soon as possible.
This seems to be the attitude of most I encounter nowadays. I think every friend I have who I’ve asked about their sexuality tend to reply “I dunno, I just like what I like.”
It seems the labels are slowly starting to lose their use, which to me is a good thing. It means we’re getting to the point where we don’t need it to feel normal anymore because it’s just normal by default. We’re not quite there yet, but it shows we’re moving in the right direction.
Not that people can’t use labels if it makes them more comfortable, I’m just glad more people are starting not to need them because they’re already accepted.
I’ve noticed this too both in those around me and myself (mid 20s). I don’t identify as queer and have always been “straight”, but more recently the thought of sucking a trans girl’s dick is kinda hot? I’m not attracted to guys at all, so it would have to be someone who is otherwise extremely feminine, but eh?
I don’t know what to call it and I honestly don’t really care to think about or try to label it because it’s a worthless distinction. It helps that most of my friends are queer so I’ve had any and all stereotypes/expectations surrounding attraction completely shattered, and I’ve found this to be true of more people I meet over time who don’t identify with queer culture at all. I’ll be interested to see how this continues to change in the next 20 years.
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