i don’t think the solution to the feeling that “these labels don’t capture how everyone feels about their identity” is the construction of 1000 new identity labels because you’re inevitably going to run into the same problem with the new labels, and also because looking at this big long list of labels is intimidating and also confusing for people who are either questioning or don’t conceive of their sexuality in any of these ways. when you’re looking through all of the labels on mogai-archive or whatever, and none of them seem to describe you, where does that leave you? (no, the creation of another label for people who “don’t understand the difference between attractions” doesn’t solve that problem; it naturalizes the idea that there is a concrete “difference between attractions” that exists to be understood.)
human sexuality and human relationships are complex and all of us relate to each other in different ways, and those ways have the potential to change constantly. when i say i’m a lesbian i might mean something entirely different from another woman who says she’s a lesbian. maybe she thinks of her lesbianism as intimately related to her sex life, while i have issues relating to people sexually and think of my lesbian as much more interpersonal. maybe she’s known she was a lesbian since she was small, while i thought i was straight for most of my life… and if you’d asked me years ago about my orientation i’d have said i was straight, but i would have meant something different than most straight girls, i think. and maybe my friend is bisexual and she says that means she’s “down for whatever,” but my other friend who is also bisexual is very much predominantly interested in women and nonbinary people, and considers her interest in men incidental.
if i wanted to, i could go through a list like that and choose a bunch of labels that might possibly describe me. i could say i’m like, a grey-homo-romantic, uh, demi-cupio-apothis-sexual? or, i could say that i’m a lesbian.
here’s the thing: existing as a lesbian locates me in a certain social position. it changes the way i relate to people, the way i think of women, and the way i think of myself as a woman. the particulars of the attraction i feel, to whom i feel it, when and where i feel it, whether i act on it, whether it’s “sexual” or “romantic”? no one is entitled to know all of that about me. hell, it’s something i don’t have a concrete understanding of, even after years of therapy, of sitting every week and talking about intimacy.
claiming my identity as a lesbian is of drastic importance to my life because it affects the way i experience the world internally and externally, it affects my future, it affects my family, it affects where i can be safe and where i can have a job, it affects who avoids me and who reaches out to me. and meanwhile there is a big long huge rich history of lesbian and bisexual and other women-attracted women who have experienced their attractions in infinite different ways…
there’s no– there’s no one way to be a lesbian, is what i’m saying. and when i think that young people are given this imperative to understand and relate to all these different and relatively new conceptualizations of sexual identity, i just worry that they’ll think there’s something wrong or missing in them if they can’t understand “the difference between attractions,” or if they can’t find something that describes them to a tee, so they must be like, an entirely new breed of sexual person that no one’s ever heard of….
i want to emphasize that it’s normal to not understand all the complex ways that attraction functions for you– that’s something i think most people struggle to understand for their entire lives– and it’s normal for the way you relate to people to change as you grow and come to new understandings of yourself. and if having a thousand definitions out there to choose from is helpful to you somehow that’s also fine, but it’s not imperative to like, divulge to people the particular way you experience sexuality. particularly if you are a minor. ok this is so messy and the product of procrastination im done
