4:04am June 19, 2013

➸ my two cents (or more): josiahd: Gender variant and sexual orientation issues get so damn...

josiahd:

Gender variant and sexual orientation issues get so damn *complicated* and full of hate so quickly.

I wish they didn’t.

If it helps, I try to keep my Tumblr a “safe space” for people who want to talk about those issues but have trouble talking about them in the expected or…

Thank you for that. I wish there were other safe places to go and discuss these things.

People tell me I can’t be nongendered and lesbian. They tell me I have to pick and choose, and that my choice reflects some profound truth about myself. Such that identifying as lesbian actually means I’m not nongendered, that womanhood is what I identify with in the end. Or that saying nongendered instead of nongender shows I’m all wrong in the first place. Or that being nongendered should negate that I have anything to do with being female, even female bodied (which I’m very much not supposed to say), and therefore reject lesbianism.

I don’t know how to tell them that gender and sexuality are complicated and interwoven, not just neat hierarchies. That there is a reason trans women sometimes find themselves attached to the gay male community, trans men to the lesbian community, and all sorts of mixed gender and between gender and no gender people find our way as best we can throughout all these different communities.

And the communities are not a string of letters. They aren’t a hierarchy of privilege where we each have our place. They aren’t mutually exclusive categories where our bio sex means nothing at all to every single one of us (without being cis when it does), where it formed no important ties for us.

Yet we’re supposed to abandon it or face accusations of giving too much weight to the entire idea of being bio anything but what we identify.

And it’s too big a mess to fix in one post or ever. It’s just something that looks simple to me, but people make it complicated with ideology and the desire to see us all go by their rules their language their hierarchies their words their idea of reality.

Fortunately for the rest of the world, we are getting along fine, or badly,or both, in our chosen communities in the real world underneath all the hyperintellectualized stuff and nonsense they are trying (badly) to make a world out of.

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