#masculine constructs

Still here? Cool. It's not that we didn't HAVE a whole ass Kinsey scale but it only goes 1-6. Straight. Heteroflexible or Will Experiment At Parties. Bi. Homoflexible or Gay For Play. Gay. Supergay. That's ... what we had, in the day. I'm actually a 2.5 probably. And for years we did, we used numbers if we were smart enough to read the whole damn thing. And gender identity was like, you're cis or you're trans. That was it. And yes. "Queer" was a pejorative. A slur. A word we saw spray-painted on underpasses and sometimes school lockers. "Gay" implied pederasty, practically, but "queer" would get your ass beat in public and not an adult would stop it. And with the advent of the HIV Plague, to which I lost every damn one of the drag queens who raised me, we got even more hate. Girls less than guys, I think, but the history is not a pretty one. You know this. We of Gen X and older are all too aware. For those who have seen "Paris Is Burning" that was kinda my life for awhile, add intensive ballet. And most of those people are dead. What we have now, in the West particularly, is a smorgasbord of options. Literally if we can dream it up someone else already has and there's probably a flag. Like, it makes me feel old and out of touch. I don't even know how to call myself half the time. Am I bi? Pan? Sapiosexual? Demisexual because I don't put out on the first date? There are TOO MANY OPTIONS FOR MY SMALL ASS. I NEED A BETTER ASS TO HANDLE MY DECISIONS. And I see why too many options and too many classifications might almost feel regressive. Like, cis men are not always traditionally masculine beefy guys who like auto racing and American football. Many cis men like pretty things too. Most drag queens are cis men, actually. But femme guys are often seen, now, as other-gendered and not just other-oriented, because that's AN OPTION NOW. And the opposite is true. My cis lesbian BFF looks and acts like a guy. I have had people tell me she seems trans to them. SHE ISN'T. G-Money loves being a woman. She also loves auto racing and weightlifting and American football and her mohawk, let her live, right? Even I really waited for her to come out as trans or at least NB and IT AIN'T HAPPENED YET. She's 47.

I understand the issue of people feeling triggered by the Q word. I do. I get it. And I respect your choice not to use it or have it used at you - if I knew your user name I'd make a note :) And I get how just seeing it feels weird and wrong. I'm getting more used to it, it doesn't bother me as much as it did a few years ago. We used to call it genderfuck and honestly that makes as much sense. Now, to the guys (we're gonna go ahead and call them guys): my reasoning for thinking Jimin might be bigender is because he has all but told us that gender is a fluid construct for him. Yes, he identifies publicly as male, but even in interviews has openly said he feels more comfortable with the feminine parts of his personality in the last few years. That doesn't mean he isn't a man. And he may well be coding bisexuality - the issue there is that he so rarely has even appeared to show any interest in women, and he has openly coded for both sexes as gender (Illecebra and Arcanus). As to Jungkook, I think he's a gay cis male who also likes to feel pretty sometimes. Hell, he and Jimin both could easily fit that descriptor. And that's basically what they've said in public if you leave Filter out of it. But to be fair, these are men who have yet to come out. We forget that sometimes. THEY HAVE NOT COME OUT. Either of them. As far as we can prove they are cis straight men who like to sleep together and stay up all night and go on dates and give each other hickeys and kiss each other and hold hands and have inside jokes about "you are me I am you" and "we don't know what we do but we do stuff" and and and. I mean okay, we're not blind and my Korean source is telling me they are pretty damn open, just nobody talks about it, in Korea. But we have to remember that until they SAY something we can't PROVE anything. I mean until the sex tape leaks. ANYWAY I have blabbered on long enough, but thank you for your words and the transparency you had to share them with me.