Avowed Inframaterialist

The thing is, everybody has their own unique relationship to sexual orientation and gender labels. And as a rule, each person feels that relationship really really strongly and might not really understand or even accept others who take a different point of view.

When I was newer into my transition, I found it very dysphoric to date anybody who was lesbian identified. I felt that I was being gendered as a woman by virtue of the person's identity leaning that way. I sought out a lot of sex from gay cis men because I thought I needed them to validate my identity as a gay man.

Now, looking back, a majority of my serious partners in the last several years are in some way lesbian identified, but are also all nonbinary people. And my gender has changed. so a lot of the shit i used to spend a lot of energy worrying about was really just keeping me from being in the moment with the people i was with and just letting us both be ourselves.

Now that I feel a lot more comfortable with myself, I don't really care how somebody identifies. I care about whether or not I like them and I want to fuck them. In the past year I have had sex with gay men, lesbians, enbies, straight men, heteroflexible men UGH, and a whole whole whole lot of bi people. nobody could guess who the fuck was who in that category if you took each one of those people and lined them up. or even if you looked at them in the wild at the events or apps where i met them. you literally could not tell who was what gender or what orientation, not even if you looked at the people they fuck.

it's chaos. none of this shit means anything. and yet it also means a lot to people.

it just is that way. i find the labels mean a lot more and feel more in need of harsh defending when a person is feeling insecure and not seen. once you have an accepting community, a body you can make a home of, a good life, some good sex, how anybody theorizes about it doesn't really matter. but that's me.

You do not need anybody to tell you that you are allowed to identify one way or the other, and you do not need the entire community's sign off to participate in a queer space. and thank fucking god because none of us would belong anywhere if we did. there are no passports required to enter queer fuck ville. no borders no papers no birth certificates no labels that we are trapped under babey. your sexual orientation or gender identity can change in the middle of coitus if you want it to. who da fuck cares.

Instead of thinking of this stuff in terms of pure identity, i like to think of it in terms of behavior. Who are you into? What do you want to do with them? Who is into you? What do they want to do with you? instead of making it all so theoretical let's keep it concrete.

Lots of lesbian identified people have sex with people who are not women. That's just the facts. Lots of lesbians are not women. That's also the facts. some people hate it because they feel like their identities are somehow invalidated by the identities of other people, but that's actually an incredibly fragile and insecure worldview. it is really not anybody's business how another person identifies.

I do appreciate the sentiment but maybe I should rephrase:

can we hurry up and make it normalized to have boobs out in public so that even if it’s legal in your state you don’t risk get arrested anyway and you need to hire an attorney to point out that you were’t breaking any laws.

can we hurry up and make it normalized to have your boobs out in public so it’s weird that it’s legal in some places and not others.

Commission for @lizardperson ! thank you <333

no matter what the situation is, they're always bringing the social interaction to a screeching halt with these jokes. nobody ever wants to participate in this joke with them. nobody agrees with the premise. nobody ever knows what to say afterwards, it's just an awkward moment and a subject change. but they just keep doing it.

Twice in my youth (once in high school and once in college) I was in situations where I was asking someone out and I could tell they were calculating in their heads the risks of rejecting me, and both times I said, out loud, "you can say no, I wouldn't have asked if I wasn't prepared for either answer." And then they said no. This wasn't some spark of special wisdom I had - I knew to do it because feminist conversations among my age group brought it up regularly. This isn't happening nearly enough anymore.

More recently, I was really glad when we got to "rejection sensitive dysphoria" in my IOP program and it was one of those symptoms where the therapists really emphasized how it affects others. Because it does.