This might be a controversial hot take but, when I say I'm bi, it is honestly 100% not in any way shape or form about cis men. There are a lot of genders out there, there are people who are gender fluid, nonbinary (which is a spectrum, but also NOT man lite or woman lite) there are dual gendered people and agendered people and third genders from across the world.
And like I did have a point where I was like "could I occasionally be bi for like, a day a month" and a point where I was like "I would definitely stay with someone who turned out to be a transmasc, because more authenticity always increases hotness," or like, date a he/him lesbian.
And eventually I realized that I didn't really care how I thought about cis men. And I didn't think that sexuality needed to center them. And while I spent all this time thinking about if X was possible or Y was possible, or who I maybe liked once....
And I was ignoring that I've already had attraction to a nonbinary person who isn't a woman.
@CharlotteEowyn
🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗
You are who you are, and nobody else but you gets to be the final arbitrator of that.
I'm not sure I know what my set of attractions are. I haven't formed a new enduring relationship since I was rescued from conversion therapy, and I don't have all of my memories from before. All I can really narrow it down to is nice, protective, and they make me feel like a woman.
So like I was hesitant because people ANGRILY debate this. With vitriol. Especially on Reddit but everywhere there's queer community.
But at the end of the day, if I've always only thought women were hot, and now I also think enbys and a variety of genderqueers are hot, to me that feels new, and I don't think I need to center cis men in how I approach sexuality.
I'm primarily emotionally perceiving attraction anyways? So like I don't even need to really center what one temporarily looks like, I don't care. Change happens. Health is temporary. Gender shifts. Weight comes and goes.
Wait, I was confused and then I remembered cis men's entitlement. I just spend so little time around them outside of work that I kinda forget about it sometimes.
Anyways I probably should have asked you like, literally a year ago but your always busy and do so much emotional work for the community I didn't want to bother you. I only started hesitantly asking bi people a week or so ago, but got a um.... range of definitions in response.
@CharlotteEowyn I mean, you're a friend, Charlotte. You're always welcome to reach out!
But yeah, sexuality is fuzzy and weird. Like, could I claim somewhere on the bi spectrum? Technically, maybe? I'm attracted to femme-of-center presentations and gender, with some asterisks for genderfuckery of certain types. But it feels sapphic-expansive to me, so Sapphic is what I go with.
I like to look at these identity labels as a sort of shorthand, so we don't have to explain too much. They're only--
@CharlotteEowyn
--as useful as the labor they save, which is why I usually just use "lesbian," even though it's not my chosen microlabel. Once that intersects with my demisexuality...
Well, shit gets fuzzy and weird.
Which... guess that's just what it means to be queer.
@Impossible_PhD@CharlotteEowyn Well, don't forget a bunch of queer teenagers came of age on Tumblr, Reddit, and elsewhere without much connection to queer elders...and just looked at the word and decided "bisexual" meant ONLY two and excluded trans people. So the pansexual vs. bi discourse began, with some pan-identified folks making such claims about bi-identified folks.
I will say, in LGBTQIA+ activist spaces, bi and pan people almost always caucus together and we actually don't see much of a division in our work. It's more just a preference for the label that best fits one's expansive sexuality.
Verily Bitchie has done some very useful excavations of this history:
@CharlotteEowyn Hehe, glad to see you claiming your label and finding confidence in this. 💖
I do like to joke that, "Yeah, I was bi, but it was just a phase....like the moon. It will wax again in a few weeks and I'll be extremely here for a plethora of genders." 🤭
Wait...does that make me a were-bi? A bi-wolf? A bicanthrope?!
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