When I hear it, it's usually a nonbinary person who was afab and considered themself a lesbian. Then they realized they were nonbinary but kept considering themself a lesbian.
I am somewhat skeptical of the phrase unless the person really isn't attracted to nonbinary people. It feels like it's erasing us, but that is considered an incorrect opinion, so I haven't shared it with others.
It can apply to either but in my experience it is mostly afab people who are nonbinary butch lesbians (self-identifying as butch). Often it's understanding their gender as 'lesbian' while also experiencing alienation from womanhood - this has a long history within the lesbian community, with Leslie Feinberg being probably the most prominent example. They are lesbians first and foremost, but also 'not women'. I don't know how you expect butch lesbians who consider themselves butches rather than women as such to identify if you think nonbinary lesbian is inappropriate.
I like this article from Pink News which supports the term. I think that people who say their gender is lesbian often, like H in the article, identify as nonbinary and women.
Other people find
“To be honest, what other label can I use? There is no label to describe a non-binary person being attracted to one binary gender so the only word I feel is applicable to describe how I identify sexually is lesbian.
I think it's probably mostly a word problem.
And I know some people are trying to use this issue to attack lesbian culture, and I don't want to be used for that. It's the last thing I want.
I would also say that I am not a woman. I accept that a nonbinary person who is attracted to women, is validly a lesbian if they say they are. However, people who say they are lesbians are excluding the possibility of dating people like me. Which is fine. No one has to date nonbinary people if they're not attracted.
But if they say they are a lesbian and then also date nonbinary afab people, it feels like they are denying that their partners are really nonbinary. And that's real too. I have people, including relatives who refuse to use my pronouns and others who make it (accidentally?) clear that I'm really a woman to them.
Except that many trans people do refer to male biology as the biology of people of the male gender. Because trans men are male and it's their biology. Biology is much more complicated than you are suggesting. A trans man who has testosterone markers identical to cis men is clearly biologically much more similar to them than a trans woman with a testosterone level in the normal cis female range. Hormones and surgery have enormous effects on biology and it's silly to suggest that eg a male penis and a female penis are the same.
If a lesbian, nb or not, is not attracted to any trans women or any amab person, no matter how femme, should they/she try to examine why? (You could ask the same of straight men, as I did earlier or of gay men with regard to trans men and afab persons)? I'm not saying that anyone attracted to women should be attracted to all women, but that we might need to look at some bigger forces at work - other than just individual idiosyncrasies - that help explain our attractions and, as I discussed above, our non-attractions and/or repulsions.
You can look at the example of race in dating. Most people, at least here in the US, and I would imagine in much of the West, now say that they would be open to a relationship with a partner of any race. But metadata from straight dating apps shows that messages sent from certain racial groups such as black people of any gender or Asian men are systematically least likely to receive a response than messages from other racial groups, and that whites are most likely to respond to messages from other white people. The gay hookup app Grindr has said that it is opposed to profiles that say things like "no blacks no femmes no fatties" or do the opposite and put a "++" or "to the front of the line" after the name of racial group, but I would not be surprised if most Grindr users don't have unspoken rules about whom they either will not respond to or will give a polite response to but will eventually stop responding to before actually meeting, and of the people whom they will respond to, who they are most likely to actually meet. And I honestly don't think Grindr users are that much shallower than the general public, gay, straight, or any other orientation. Their shallowness is just more visible, both in what some of them say on their profiles and in the metadata that shows how people actually act.
All that said, I don't think people should be forcing themselves to date people that they don't feel an attraction to. But we should ask ourselves why we aren't attracted to certain people, especially if those people are in a marginalized group but otherwise fall within the "target" of whatever sexual orientation we ourselves claim to be. And, if we allow ourselves to open to the possibility that implicit bias might have something to do with it, we should probably redouble our efforts to reduce all de facto segregation of all marginalized groups and increase the visibility and acceptance of all people with non-normative gender identities and expressions. It won't mean that everyone will be attracted to everyone, but it will probably mean that fewer people feel like they are the factory rejects on the dating market.
@Gwai oh sure, I'm only talking about the former situation not the latter - unless it was a situation where the other partner also primarily identified as a lesbian before any other gender identity, I guess? But in my experience it's overwhelmingly lesbians who identify as lesbians first and foremost and who are only attracted to women, and usually along butch/femme lines. It also tends to have a strong correlation with stone lesbian sexuality and the lesbian leather subculture, though maybe less so now than in the 80s and 90s.
Certainly I would agree that it wouldn't be applicable in the latter situations you describe.
@stonespring I mean sure - no trans person wants to date someone who's not attracted to them. Attraction also doesn't exist in a vacuum. I wasn't exactly talking about the 'cotton ceiling' issue though, but more that even if people acknowledge that gender exists outside of a binary system they don't necessarily stop viewing biological sex as rigidly binary, in a way that doesn't work that way in real life. While I get what @Leorning Cniht is saying, this quickly gets into the arguments that the PM and his cabinet have been making against trans women playing in women's sports. Not that I think LC is supporting those arguments! But I think part of the basis for those arguments is seeing biology as some immutable, omniscient force which it really isn't.
Except that many trans people do refer to male biology as the biology of people of the male gender. Because trans men are male and it's their biology.
Sure, but why say "I have male biology" rather than "I am a man"?
If in your use "I have male biology" and "I have a man" are necessarily equivalent statements, then why would you ever use the former statement rather than the latter? To me, it doesn't make any sense to use the former construction in reference to male gender, because it is functionally equivalent to the latter, much clearer statement. Which is why whenever I personally feel the need to use that kind of construction, the 'male' refers to biological sex and not gender.
It would be convenient for this sort of discussion if we had different words to refer to the two dominant gender clusters and the two dominant biological sex divisions, but we don't (at least, not ones in normal English...)
Biology is much more complicated than you are suggesting. A trans man who has testosterone markers identical to cis men is clearly biologically much more similar to them than a trans woman with a testosterone level in the normal cis female range. Hormones and surgery have enormous effects on biology and it's silly to suggest that eg a male penis and a female penis are the same.
Yeah. Classification and models simplify things. I never said that a woman's penis was "the same" as a man's penis, but I would certainly say, if you asked me, that it was more like a man's penis than it was like a clitoris or a vagina. By virtue of being a penis. (And if you want to consider an extreme example, consider the penis of a person who has just come to the conclusion that she is a trans woman. Her penis is indistinguishable from a man's penis. Yesterday, she would have called it a man's penis. Nothing has changed about the penis, except that she now calls it a woman's penis.)
Re binary gender, I would consider that the experience of being a trans man (for instance) is uniquely trans male and does occupy a different gender space to being a cis man - but not in a way that makes them less male or a separate kind of maleness. I would compare it to any other intersection of being male and being in another marginalised group. Likewise, men from X marginalised group and men who are not from X marginalised group are all still men, but those who are also in X marginalised group also have experiences not shared by those outside of that group.
But of course, not all trans people would understand it that way - there's not one trans view on this. It isn't something you can solve like a logic puzzle as you seem to be doing - I'm not accusing you of anything but responding in good faith, just pointing out that you're taking a very cerebral approach to something which is just....not possible to put in such cerebral categories for most people concerned.
I suppose I tend to have a cerebral sort of way of looking at the world. It's the way I analyze myself, and the way I analyze the interactions I have with other people.
And the same goes for discussing labels. Language is only useful if we agree on what the words mean. So saying that you identify with some set of labels only means anything if we agree on what those labels describe. @Gwai said that we have a "word problem", talking about nonbinary lesbians. I don't know whether it's strictly a word problem, or a category problem, but whenever you're drawing lines in continuous spectra, the categorization near boundaries is a little less certain. We can all point at things that are clearly blue, and things that are clearly green, but do we all agree on which of the blue-green boundary colours are "blue" and which are "green"? It doesn't change anything about the colour if one of us calls it blue and the other calls it green - the colour is still the same. And it's not very productive to have an argument about whether a particular turquoise shade is a kind of "blue" or a kind of "green". I think "nonbinary lesbian" communicates quite clearly, to the extent that you can capture anyone's gender identity and orientation in a handful of words - and it doesn't mean that you have to be identical to someone else who describes themselves as a "nonbinary lesbian" - just that that's the closest reasonably understandable few-word phrase.
With any kind of classification of people, there are going to be some people who form the archetype of that group, and others that differ a bit from the archetype on some descriptors. That's normal. You're not of higher status because you land at the centre of a classification cluster rather than on the edge of one. All classification is somewhat arbitrary, after all.
But I want to come back to your comment on gender:
Re binary gender, I would consider that the experience of being a trans man (for instance) is uniquely trans male and does occupy a different gender space to being a cis man - but not in a way that makes them less male or a separate kind of maleness. I would compare it to any other intersection of being male and being in another marginalised group. Likewise, men from X marginalised group and men who are not from X marginalised group are all still men, but those who are also in X marginalised group also have experiences not shared by those outside of that group.
...and because of how intersectionality works, the experience of men who are X is not necessarily the same as the union of the experience of X people and of men. We agree. But I'm not sure I understand what you mean by being trans male "occupies a different gender space" but isn't "a separate kind of maleness" - because to me, those two statements sound pretty close to synonymous. You're talking about experience a lot here - is the sum of your experiences a significant contributor to your self-image? Do you think your experiences largely form your identity? If I reach for my colour analogy again, I suppose you could say that scarlet and crimson occupied different regions of colour space, but were red in the same sense as each other. Is that sort of what you're getting at?
@stonespring I mean sure - no trans person wants to date someone who's not attracted to them. Attraction also doesn't exist in a vacuum. I wasn't exactly talking about the 'cotton ceiling' issue though, but more that even if people acknowledge that gender exists outside of a binary system they don't necessarily stop viewing biological sex as rigidly binary, in a way that doesn't work that way in real life.
I think part of this is down to taking preferences for attraction and making them into some kind of gender ideal (i.e "these are the women I'm attracted to" becomes "these are really feminine women").
Would it be fair to say (and I think I'm hearing, and trying not to project too much here), that much of the difficulty communicating these concepts is that 1) it struggles to be descriptive of all the individual nuances, and 2) tends to slide into being considered prescriptive?
I'm pretty vanilla cis-het male for most consideration. BUT personality bends the hell out of that circumstantially. Totally ignoring the suggested requirements of that label if ever stuck on a desert island with Ryan Reynolds.
Thinking about what @RooK is saying about failing to account sufficiently for nuances made me think of the 1980s theorist Eve Sedgwick who began looking at male homosociality in literature and closeted desire or displaced homosexual desires as masked in literature (Marcel Proust, Henry James). What does it mean for men to love other men without a sexual component although the warmth, tenderness, physical touching carries an erotic charge for at least one of them? What does it mean that the male homosocial desire inscribed in literature is only deciphered by those able to read between the lines?
She put out some axioms that made many of us pause and reconsider how we described political, public and private identities shaped around transgressive/deviant/conventional desires. I'm just mentioning a few here, rephrased for the 2020s:
* Identical genital acts mean very different things to different people and cultures. The repugnance and disapproval associated with masturbation in Victorian times, for example, now seems laughable. The felt need to spy on, police and control the sexualities of others may in itself signify suppressed forbidden desires.
* Sexuality makes up a large part of how some people perceive their own identity and the identities of others; for others it is negligible. When we are adolescent, we may spend a great deal of time thinking about desire and romantic expressions of desire, then find the interest wanes as we age. We may choose to put erotic energy elsewhere.
* Many people have their richest and most intense intellectual and emotional involvement with sexual acts they don't do or even want to do. Fantasy does not lead to real-life enactment. People may want to imagine bondage or high-risk activities in the safety of the imagination but have no desire to experience anything like it with partners in reality. In the same way that writers may enjoy plotting gruesome murders and have no homicidal inclinations at all.
* For some of us, fulfilling sex is sex embedded in a context of relationship, meaning and ongoing narrative. This may mean that for some of us sex is embedded in a matrix of gendered differentials and preferences. For others of us, sex is just as satisfying alone, or with strangers of any gender and need mean no more than enjoying a takeaway pizza.
* For some of us, the preference for a certain sexual object or act or scenario is so fixed and enduring as to seem innate. For others, sex is varied and aleatory.
* For many of us, the need to avoid abusive or coercive sex is enough to ensure avoidance of sex altogether. The scripts we produce around desire or the absence of desire may be spontaneous or heavily coded or fluid and changeable.
Proust's novels, his own closeted and hidden desire for men, led him to look very closely at creative and necessary lies: the lies we tell ourselves about those we love ("my son isn't queer") and the lies we tell those who love us, the lie as to what we might become if we were free to explore desire: "that lie is one of the few things in the world that can open windows for us on to what is new and unknown, that can awaken in us sleeping senses for the contemplation of universes that otherwise we should never have known."
Thinking about what @RooK is saying about failing to account sufficiently for nuances made me think of the 1980s theorist Eve Sedgwick who began looking at male homosociality in literature and closeted desire or displaced homosexual desires as masked in literature (Marcel Proust, Henry James). What does it mean for men to love other men without a sexual component although the warmth, tenderness, physical touching carries an erotic charge for at least one of them?
I think part of the problem I have with reasoning like this is that because of patriarchal structures we don't have a very good baseline of the extent of non-sexual male affection, so it tends to be hard to generalise from material like this in any real way.
Thinking about what @RooK is saying about failing to account sufficiently for nuances made me think of the 1980s theorist Eve Sedgwick who began looking at male homosociality in literature and closeted desire or displaced homosexual desires as masked in literature (Marcel Proust, Henry James). What does it mean for men to love other men without a sexual component although the warmth, tenderness, physical touching carries an erotic charge for at least one of them?
I think part of the problem I have with reasoning like this is that because of patriarchal structures we don't have a very good baseline of the extent of non-sexual male affection, so it tends to be hard to generalise from material like this in any real way.
Strangely enough, monasteries have historically been a good resource for texts about this - not least because monks themselves have been the ones writing about it. Certainly until the Dissolution in the UK (I am not familiar with monastic culture outside the UK which continued during the Reformation) monks occupied quite a unique place in terms of gendered life.
Thinking about what @RooK is saying about failing to account sufficiently for nuances made me think of the 1980s theorist Eve Sedgwick who began looking at male homosociality in literature and closeted desire or displaced homosexual desires as masked in literature (Marcel Proust, Henry James). What does it mean for men to love other men without a sexual component although the warmth, tenderness, physical touching carries an erotic charge for at least one of them?
I think part of the problem I have with reasoning like this is that because of patriarchal structures we don't have a very good baseline of the extent of non-sexual male affection, so it tends to be hard to generalise from material like this in any real way.
Strangely enough, monasteries have historically been a good resource for texts about this
I know what you mean, but I think a lot of these are fairly culturally specific and have a certain distance from contexts like the family.
@chrisstiles I tend to agree with you that it's hard to make generalisations and I was looking back to the 1980s and the beginning of academic studies in masculinities and male bonding under patriarchy, how cisheteronormative men form bonds and create spaces that exclude women and supposedly gay men. As @Pomona says, the focus in understanding homosociality has been on intentional all-male environments such as celibate male communities.
A more fraught space, though, and there is a substantial amount of literature on this, has been the military and the move towards more inclusive masculinities that admit the presence of queer or trans people into spaces organised by homosocial relations between men who bond in training, socialise exclusively with other men, develop camaraderie and "brotherly" bonds forged by war or the absence of women. Such spaces and organised hierarchies have a tradition of militarised appropriation of homosociality, often historically shaped by the determination to exclude what they would term feminised behaviours or explicit homoeroticism (what goes beyond bromances?).
I'd like to hear from anyone who has read more in this field or experienced the tensions within the military as it has struggled to transform into a more inclusive environment that doesn't rely on a social code of "Don't ask, don't tell". Traditionally the military in most Western countries (and possibly elsewhere) is a patriarchal institution that has relied on norms of cisheteronormative masculinity allegedly to sustain social cohesion and strict boundaries between fighting units and its collective identity as a brotherhood.
What happens then when somebody who openly identifies as queer joins an institution that has been constructed around myths of hypermasculinity: fearlessness, brotherly loyalty, physical strength, repressed emotions, patterns of father-son mentoring? Homosociality in the army is bound up with living together in close quarters, showering together, rituals of hazing or initiation involving nudity and horseplay, displays of informal wrestling. Newcomers are often subjected to ritualised or feminised humiliations, being sworn at or slapped, made to grovel on the ground or perform simulated sex acts, perform subservient tasks for a superior, endure mockery or degradation without protesting or flinching as a sign of masculine toughening up or invincibility. The ethos and ambience of this environment is profoundly affected when queer men or trans soldiers are expected to undertake the same intimate activities and enter into the same deep and intense comradeship that sustains men who have been through training and war experiences together.
In recent years, there have also been studies and memoirs exploring the tensions that develop when long-term members of the military come out as gay or trans people. A few years back I read Kristin Beck's Warrior Princess, describing how a decorated and acclaimed 'hero' Navy Seal fighter realised s/he was a woman and the shock waves that went through the ranks among former comrades and fellow officers when somebody they had only ever considered cisheterosexual and male exploded the myths around what maleness means.
@chrisstiles I tend to agree with you that it's hard to make generalisations and I was looking back to the 1980s and the beginning of academic studies in masculinities and male bonding under patriarchy, how cisheteronormative men form bonds and create spaces that exclude women and supposedly gay men.
Yes, and perhaps it is a topic for another thread, but because I'm not sure to what extent these bonds/spaces are in any way "normative" without patriarchy, I don't think you can draw many conclusions from them.
That's even before looking at the cultural specificity of these bonds/spaces.
@MaryLouise - I sadly don’t have much knowledge about studies of homosexual behavior or any experience in the military, but I do wonder whether or not homosocial and homoerortic desires (or, for that matter, social and erotic desires between people of any gender) are qualitatively different, or at least at qualitatively different as everyday conversation about them seems to reflect.
I’m not suggesting we go as far as Freud and try to contemplate sexual desires in toddlers directed at their parents. But keeping our discussion to what goes on in the minds and bodies of people from puberty onward, I’m not sure that there is a hard barrier between sexual and non sexual/social/platonic attraction. I think there definitely are extremes where it is “good enough” to say that there is no sexual attraction, as in the case for most people towards their parents (sorry Freud). And there really are asexuals (not all people who identify as asexual, though) and other people who not only don’t want to have sex, regardless of the closeness of their relationship with someone, but are not even attracted very much by the thought of sex with anyone. But aside from those extremes, it could be that most attractions among those postpubescent humans who do experience at least some libido involve some kind of amorphous physical or sensual element that could in certain contexts become consciously sexual in the mind, even if that person feeling them has no desire to act on them and even if the attraction has no effect on one’s identity as belonging to one sexual orientation or another.
And that returns me to my earlier statement on this thread that what I think is more interesting to explain is why people say they are not attracted to any gender, rather than why people say they are attracted to any gender. I’m not saying that everyone with a sex drive is a latent pansexual. Rather, I am saying that our sexual orientation identities are not necessarily the same as our attractions as we experience them, and I don’t think that they should be the same either! Identities are a complex mix of biology, upbringing, personal idiosyncrasy, and personal agency.
And finally, going back to @MaryLouise ’s posts above, I think athletics, while not as heavily socially policed a homosocial environment as the military, is also worth discussing as queer people begin to openly participate in them. In the US, high school athletics can take up a huge part of one’s adolescent years, and although I didn’t participate in them personally I knew people who did when I was in high school in the early 2000’s just as, at least in a liberal college town like where I lived (but with a significant socially conservative Evangelical Christian population). What struck me about the male “jocks” that I knew (and a lot of the non-jock straight guys I knew) was how they went out of their way to act out extreme homoerotic performances in front of everyone else (dry humping each other, cuddling and caressing each other, etc). I think in generations before mine these displays would have been to prove to everyone how straight they were (see, I’m so secure in my sexuality that I don’t care if girls see me pretending to be humored by another boy!) but at that point in time I’m not so sure what they meant other than general adolescent exuberance. In college (which was an even more liberal space than my high school), straight guys, including jocks and frat boys, acted out more emotionally complex bromances with sleepovers where they would fall asleep spooning each other and their friends and girlfriends would take pictures of them asleep to post on social media - and not to make fun of them either. I think that at this point homoeroticism and homoromantic feelings were taken as part of being straight. And they honestly could still have been trying to win dates this way by showing their vulnerable side. But, as a queer guy, it always struck me as fake, and somewhat baffling. But maybe I was projecting my own frustrations onto the whole situation.
I think that at this point homoeroticism and homoromantic feelings were taken as part of being straight. And they honestly could still have been trying to win dates this way by showing their vulnerable side. But, as a queer guy, it always struck me as fake, and somewhat baffling. But maybe I was projecting my own frustrations onto the whole situation.
I don't think there's anything erotic (whether homo or otherwise) about the sort of teen boy pile you're talking about here. IME, teen boys hug, wrestle, and so on in an affectionate way all the time, and it's not at all erotic. It always struck me as more about family - families routinely hug each other, watch TV in big cuddle piles under a load of blankets and so on. Why wouldn't you act the same way with people that you thought of as your family?
But IME, these displays were more between groups of teen boys than specific pairs.
@stonespring asexuality just means a lack of sexual attraction, not necessarily being sex-repulsed (and many non-asexual people *are* sex-repulsed). Enjoying the physical sensations of sex is a different thing. Many asexual people have sex, with or without having a romantic relationship.
@stonespring asexuality just means a lack of sexual attraction, not necessarily being sex-repulsed (and many non-asexual people *are* sex-repulsed). Enjoying the physical sensations of sex is a different thing. Many asexual people have sex, with or without having a romantic relationship.
Hence the wording of my post, “And there really are asexuals (not all people who identify as asexual, though) and other people who not only don’t want to have sex, regardless of the closeness of their relationship with someone, but are not even attracted very much by the thought of sex with anyone.” (italics added)
I’ve had a couple of asexual friends, and a very close family member who has come out to me as basically asexual even though she did not use the term. But not being asexual myself, I have to admit my own ignorance on the personal experience of having that identity.
My understanding of a asexuality from the asexuals I have spoken to is that it is a very small to nonexistent desire to have sex (whether or not one is actually repulsed by the thought of it - some asexuals are, but of course many are not, just as some gays are repulsed by the idea of heterosexual sex, whereas others are not). I am not saying that asexuals never have sex - I’m sure many of them occasionally do, just like many heterosexuals occasionally have gay sex in specific contexts but it doesn’t mean they aren’t straight. And many asexuals form romantic or platonic relationships in which sex is not part of the relationship at least most of the time. But given the primacy of consent in sexual ethics, I would expect that if an asexual person had sex with another person, it would be because they wanted to, which means that they experienced some kind of attraction to the act of sex in that moment, whether or not it was an attraction to the body of the person they were having sex. Feeling that attraction for that limited time in that limited context doesn’t make them less asexual. Of course, every person would describe their identity differently, so I’m sure what you are describing aligns with how some asexuals see themselves.
Comments
I like this article from Pink News which supports the term. I think that people who say their gender is lesbian often, like H in the article, identify as nonbinary and women.
Other people find I think it's probably mostly a word problem.
And I know some people are trying to use this issue to attack lesbian culture, and I don't want to be used for that. It's the last thing I want.
I would also say that I am not a woman. I accept that a nonbinary person who is attracted to women, is validly a lesbian if they say they are. However, people who say they are lesbians are excluding the possibility of dating people like me. Which is fine. No one has to date nonbinary people if they're not attracted.
But if they say they are a lesbian and then also date nonbinary afab people, it feels like they are denying that their partners are really nonbinary. And that's real too. I have people, including relatives who refuse to use my pronouns and others who make it (accidentally?) clear that I'm really a woman to them.
If a lesbian, nb or not, is not attracted to any trans women or any amab person, no matter how femme, should they/she try to examine why? (You could ask the same of straight men, as I did earlier or of gay men with regard to trans men and afab persons)? I'm not saying that anyone attracted to women should be attracted to all women, but that we might need to look at some bigger forces at work - other than just individual idiosyncrasies - that help explain our attractions and, as I discussed above, our non-attractions and/or repulsions.
You can look at the example of race in dating. Most people, at least here in the US, and I would imagine in much of the West, now say that they would be open to a relationship with a partner of any race. But metadata from straight dating apps shows that messages sent from certain racial groups such as black people of any gender or Asian men are systematically least likely to receive a response than messages from other racial groups, and that whites are most likely to respond to messages from other white people. The gay hookup app Grindr has said that it is opposed to profiles that say things like "no blacks no femmes no fatties" or do the opposite and put a "++" or "to the front of the line" after the name of racial group, but I would not be surprised if most Grindr users don't have unspoken rules about whom they either will not respond to or will give a polite response to but will eventually stop responding to before actually meeting, and of the people whom they will respond to, who they are most likely to actually meet. And I honestly don't think Grindr users are that much shallower than the general public, gay, straight, or any other orientation. Their shallowness is just more visible, both in what some of them say on their profiles and in the metadata that shows how people actually act.
All that said, I don't think people should be forcing themselves to date people that they don't feel an attraction to. But we should ask ourselves why we aren't attracted to certain people, especially if those people are in a marginalized group but otherwise fall within the "target" of whatever sexual orientation we ourselves claim to be. And, if we allow ourselves to open to the possibility that implicit bias might have something to do with it, we should probably redouble our efforts to reduce all de facto segregation of all marginalized groups and increase the visibility and acceptance of all people with non-normative gender identities and expressions. It won't mean that everyone will be attracted to everyone, but it will probably mean that fewer people feel like they are the factory rejects on the dating market.
Certainly I would agree that it wouldn't be applicable in the latter situations you describe.
Sure, but why say "I have male biology" rather than "I am a man"?
If in your use "I have male biology" and "I have a man" are necessarily equivalent statements, then why would you ever use the former statement rather than the latter? To me, it doesn't make any sense to use the former construction in reference to male gender, because it is functionally equivalent to the latter, much clearer statement. Which is why whenever I personally feel the need to use that kind of construction, the 'male' refers to biological sex and not gender.
It would be convenient for this sort of discussion if we had different words to refer to the two dominant gender clusters and the two dominant biological sex divisions, but we don't (at least, not ones in normal English...)
Yeah. Classification and models simplify things. I never said that a woman's penis was "the same" as a man's penis, but I would certainly say, if you asked me, that it was more like a man's penis than it was like a clitoris or a vagina. By virtue of being a penis. (And if you want to consider an extreme example, consider the penis of a person who has just come to the conclusion that she is a trans woman. Her penis is indistinguishable from a man's penis. Yesterday, she would have called it a man's penis. Nothing has changed about the penis, except that she now calls it a woman's penis.)
I suppose I tend to have a cerebral sort of way of looking at the world. It's the way I analyze myself, and the way I analyze the interactions I have with other people.
And the same goes for discussing labels. Language is only useful if we agree on what the words mean. So saying that you identify with some set of labels only means anything if we agree on what those labels describe. @Gwai said that we have a "word problem", talking about nonbinary lesbians. I don't know whether it's strictly a word problem, or a category problem, but whenever you're drawing lines in continuous spectra, the categorization near boundaries is a little less certain. We can all point at things that are clearly blue, and things that are clearly green, but do we all agree on which of the blue-green boundary colours are "blue" and which are "green"? It doesn't change anything about the colour if one of us calls it blue and the other calls it green - the colour is still the same. And it's not very productive to have an argument about whether a particular turquoise shade is a kind of "blue" or a kind of "green". I think "nonbinary lesbian" communicates quite clearly, to the extent that you can capture anyone's gender identity and orientation in a handful of words - and it doesn't mean that you have to be identical to someone else who describes themselves as a "nonbinary lesbian" - just that that's the closest reasonably understandable few-word phrase.
With any kind of classification of people, there are going to be some people who form the archetype of that group, and others that differ a bit from the archetype on some descriptors. That's normal. You're not of higher status because you land at the centre of a classification cluster rather than on the edge of one. All classification is somewhat arbitrary, after all.
But I want to come back to your comment on gender:
...and because of how intersectionality works, the experience of men who are X is not necessarily the same as the union of the experience of X people and of men. We agree. But I'm not sure I understand what you mean by being trans male "occupies a different gender space" but isn't "a separate kind of maleness" - because to me, those two statements sound pretty close to synonymous. You're talking about experience a lot here - is the sum of your experiences a significant contributor to your self-image? Do you think your experiences largely form your identity? If I reach for my colour analogy again, I suppose you could say that scarlet and crimson occupied different regions of colour space, but were red in the same sense as each other. Is that sort of what you're getting at?
I think part of this is down to taking preferences for attraction and making them into some kind of gender ideal (i.e "these are the women I'm attracted to" becomes "these are really feminine women").
I'm pretty vanilla cis-het male for most consideration. BUT personality bends the hell out of that circumstantially. Totally ignoring the suggested requirements of that label if ever stuck on a desert island with Ryan Reynolds.
She put out some axioms that made many of us pause and reconsider how we described political, public and private identities shaped around transgressive/deviant/conventional desires. I'm just mentioning a few here, rephrased for the 2020s:
* Identical genital acts mean very different things to different people and cultures. The repugnance and disapproval associated with masturbation in Victorian times, for example, now seems laughable. The felt need to spy on, police and control the sexualities of others may in itself signify suppressed forbidden desires.
* Sexuality makes up a large part of how some people perceive their own identity and the identities of others; for others it is negligible. When we are adolescent, we may spend a great deal of time thinking about desire and romantic expressions of desire, then find the interest wanes as we age. We may choose to put erotic energy elsewhere.
* Many people have their richest and most intense intellectual and emotional involvement with sexual acts they don't do or even want to do. Fantasy does not lead to real-life enactment. People may want to imagine bondage or high-risk activities in the safety of the imagination but have no desire to experience anything like it with partners in reality. In the same way that writers may enjoy plotting gruesome murders and have no homicidal inclinations at all.
* For some of us, fulfilling sex is sex embedded in a context of relationship, meaning and ongoing narrative. This may mean that for some of us sex is embedded in a matrix of gendered differentials and preferences. For others of us, sex is just as satisfying alone, or with strangers of any gender and need mean no more than enjoying a takeaway pizza.
* For some of us, the preference for a certain sexual object or act or scenario is so fixed and enduring as to seem innate. For others, sex is varied and aleatory.
* For many of us, the need to avoid abusive or coercive sex is enough to ensure avoidance of sex altogether. The scripts we produce around desire or the absence of desire may be spontaneous or heavily coded or fluid and changeable.
Proust's novels, his own closeted and hidden desire for men, led him to look very closely at creative and necessary lies: the lies we tell ourselves about those we love ("my son isn't queer") and the lies we tell those who love us, the lie as to what we might become if we were free to explore desire: "that lie is one of the few things in the world that can open windows for us on to what is new and unknown, that can awaken in us sleeping senses for the contemplation of universes that otherwise we should never have known."
I think part of the problem I have with reasoning like this is that because of patriarchal structures we don't have a very good baseline of the extent of non-sexual male affection, so it tends to be hard to generalise from material like this in any real way.
Strangely enough, monasteries have historically been a good resource for texts about this - not least because monks themselves have been the ones writing about it. Certainly until the Dissolution in the UK (I am not familiar with monastic culture outside the UK which continued during the Reformation) monks occupied quite a unique place in terms of gendered life.
I know what you mean, but I think a lot of these are fairly culturally specific and have a certain distance from contexts like the family.
A more fraught space, though, and there is a substantial amount of literature on this, has been the military and the move towards more inclusive masculinities that admit the presence of queer or trans people into spaces organised by homosocial relations between men who bond in training, socialise exclusively with other men, develop camaraderie and "brotherly" bonds forged by war or the absence of women. Such spaces and organised hierarchies have a tradition of militarised appropriation of homosociality, often historically shaped by the determination to exclude what they would term feminised behaviours or explicit homoeroticism (what goes beyond bromances?).
I'd like to hear from anyone who has read more in this field or experienced the tensions within the military as it has struggled to transform into a more inclusive environment that doesn't rely on a social code of "Don't ask, don't tell". Traditionally the military in most Western countries (and possibly elsewhere) is a patriarchal institution that has relied on norms of cisheteronormative masculinity allegedly to sustain social cohesion and strict boundaries between fighting units and its collective identity as a brotherhood.
What happens then when somebody who openly identifies as queer joins an institution that has been constructed around myths of hypermasculinity: fearlessness, brotherly loyalty, physical strength, repressed emotions, patterns of father-son mentoring? Homosociality in the army is bound up with living together in close quarters, showering together, rituals of hazing or initiation involving nudity and horseplay, displays of informal wrestling. Newcomers are often subjected to ritualised or feminised humiliations, being sworn at or slapped, made to grovel on the ground or perform simulated sex acts, perform subservient tasks for a superior, endure mockery or degradation without protesting or flinching as a sign of masculine toughening up or invincibility. The ethos and ambience of this environment is profoundly affected when queer men or trans soldiers are expected to undertake the same intimate activities and enter into the same deep and intense comradeship that sustains men who have been through training and war experiences together.
In recent years, there have also been studies and memoirs exploring the tensions that develop when long-term members of the military come out as gay or trans people. A few years back I read Kristin Beck's Warrior Princess, describing how a decorated and acclaimed 'hero' Navy Seal fighter realised s/he was a woman and the shock waves that went through the ranks among former comrades and fellow officers when somebody they had only ever considered cisheterosexual and male exploded the myths around what maleness means.
Yes, and perhaps it is a topic for another thread, but because I'm not sure to what extent these bonds/spaces are in any way "normative" without patriarchy, I don't think you can draw many conclusions from them.
That's even before looking at the cultural specificity of these bonds/spaces.
I’m not suggesting we go as far as Freud and try to contemplate sexual desires in toddlers directed at their parents. But keeping our discussion to what goes on in the minds and bodies of people from puberty onward, I’m not sure that there is a hard barrier between sexual and non sexual/social/platonic attraction. I think there definitely are extremes where it is “good enough” to say that there is no sexual attraction, as in the case for most people towards their parents (sorry Freud). And there really are asexuals (not all people who identify as asexual, though) and other people who not only don’t want to have sex, regardless of the closeness of their relationship with someone, but are not even attracted very much by the thought of sex with anyone. But aside from those extremes, it could be that most attractions among those postpubescent humans who do experience at least some libido involve some kind of amorphous physical or sensual element that could in certain contexts become consciously sexual in the mind, even if that person feeling them has no desire to act on them and even if the attraction has no effect on one’s identity as belonging to one sexual orientation or another.
And that returns me to my earlier statement on this thread that what I think is more interesting to explain is why people say they are not attracted to any gender, rather than why people say they are attracted to any gender. I’m not saying that everyone with a sex drive is a latent pansexual. Rather, I am saying that our sexual orientation identities are not necessarily the same as our attractions as we experience them, and I don’t think that they should be the same either! Identities are a complex mix of biology, upbringing, personal idiosyncrasy, and personal agency.
And finally, going back to @MaryLouise ’s posts above, I think athletics, while not as heavily socially policed a homosocial environment as the military, is also worth discussing as queer people begin to openly participate in them. In the US, high school athletics can take up a huge part of one’s adolescent years, and although I didn’t participate in them personally I knew people who did when I was in high school in the early 2000’s just as, at least in a liberal college town like where I lived (but with a significant socially conservative Evangelical Christian population). What struck me about the male “jocks” that I knew (and a lot of the non-jock straight guys I knew) was how they went out of their way to act out extreme homoerotic performances in front of everyone else (dry humping each other, cuddling and caressing each other, etc). I think in generations before mine these displays would have been to prove to everyone how straight they were (see, I’m so secure in my sexuality that I don’t care if girls see me pretending to be humored by another boy!) but at that point in time I’m not so sure what they meant other than general adolescent exuberance. In college (which was an even more liberal space than my high school), straight guys, including jocks and frat boys, acted out more emotionally complex bromances with sleepovers where they would fall asleep spooning each other and their friends and girlfriends would take pictures of them asleep to post on social media - and not to make fun of them either. I think that at this point homoeroticism and homoromantic feelings were taken as part of being straight. And they honestly could still have been trying to win dates this way by showing their vulnerable side. But, as a queer guy, it always struck me as fake, and somewhat baffling. But maybe I was projecting my own frustrations onto the whole situation.
I don't think there's anything erotic (whether homo or otherwise) about the sort of teen boy pile you're talking about here. IME, teen boys hug, wrestle, and so on in an affectionate way all the time, and it's not at all erotic. It always struck me as more about family - families routinely hug each other, watch TV in big cuddle piles under a load of blankets and so on. Why wouldn't you act the same way with people that you thought of as your family?
But IME, these displays were more between groups of teen boys than specific pairs.
Hence the wording of my post, “And there really are asexuals (not all people who identify as asexual, though) and other people who not only don’t want to have sex, regardless of the closeness of their relationship with someone, but are not even attracted very much by the thought of sex with anyone.” (italics added)
I’ve had a couple of asexual friends, and a very close family member who has come out to me as basically asexual even though she did not use the term. But not being asexual myself, I have to admit my own ignorance on the personal experience of having that identity.
My understanding of a asexuality from the asexuals I have spoken to is that it is a very small to nonexistent desire to have sex (whether or not one is actually repulsed by the thought of it - some asexuals are, but of course many are not, just as some gays are repulsed by the idea of heterosexual sex, whereas others are not). I am not saying that asexuals never have sex - I’m sure many of them occasionally do, just like many heterosexuals occasionally have gay sex in specific contexts but it doesn’t mean they aren’t straight. And many asexuals form romantic or platonic relationships in which sex is not part of the relationship at least most of the time. But given the primacy of consent in sexual ethics, I would expect that if an asexual person had sex with another person, it would be because they wanted to, which means that they experienced some kind of attraction to the act of sex in that moment, whether or not it was an attraction to the body of the person they were having sex. Feeling that attraction for that limited time in that limited context doesn’t make them less asexual. Of course, every person would describe their identity differently, so I’m sure what you are describing aligns with how some asexuals see themselves.