So my boyfriend came out as trans last night and I realized something… back when we first started dating we identified as lesbians, then I came out as trans and consequently realized I’m bisexual, and now I’m in a gay relationship. So what I’m trying to say is that I have actually been LGBT as a singular person. Every single acronym. I have ascended and reached gay nirvana

What Queerness Means to Me | Tranarchism  (via transformfeminism)

sectioning personal thoughts about sex that have nothing to actually do with where you’re placed in society concerning gender and sexuality (gay bi or straight etc) is a completely useless endeavor and a liberal dead end of obsession with meaningless identity labels

to be frank, most of the plethora of labels created are either confusingly worded and generic, dismissive of gay people, and implying behaving a certain way in a relationship = the q slur you’re all obsessed with

placiosexual “you’re ok with your sexual feelings not being reciprocated” not only doesn’t even Sound like anything to do with being asexual at all, it’s also implying that 1. being a decent person is a sexuality and 2. being a horrible person about rejection is a sexuality

people have said “oh but it means you’d like to give but not receive!” that information is 1000% not supposed to be public. it’s funny how some (EMPHASIS SOME) members of the ace community, usually straight ones, love to imply that gay and bi not-ace-identifying people only ever blab about sex when it’s them who literally create new words in order to make sure everybody is immediately aware of their personal private sexual feelings

a lot of these specifications aren’t even shit strangers need to know. like ok, saying you’re gay or bi doesn’t automatically imply anything about you sexually, just who you love or seek relationships with (although straights love to argue that it means we are sex hungry demons by default lol)

but making up a word for, oh i don’t know, “i only want sex if _______” or “i only feel sexual attraction sometimes” or whatever is fundamentally useless and also tmi

the only person who needs to know that is your partner if you’re at that level and you don’t need a word for your feelings, just talk about your feelings. we don’t need worthless nouns for every single slightly different human experience it’s incoherent badly-written-latin-or-whatever-botched-language nonsense and you can all do better than this

thanks rome for articulating this, i didn’t want to make many posts replying to the plethora of remarks made criticizing me for the post on “placiosexual” as an illegitimate label bc i didn’t want to draw attention to it but yeah here take this guys.

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

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (via moral-disorder)

easy fixes for your offensive over-generalizations

sexuality is fluid!

my experience of sexuality is fluid

romantic and sexual attraction are completely different things!

I experience romantic and sexual attraction as distinct events

labels are for soup cans!

I do not need or want to label my attractions

time to play “music theory or sexuality label”

My sexuality is plagal

I love the label "queer" because if I tell you I'm queer, the only thing I've told you is that I'm not heterosexual

PSA: Please try not to overuse mental illness “labels.” I know it’s tempting to call everything PTSD or anxiety or depression or whatever, but by trivializing the diseases, you’re actually increasing the stigma.

I’m never, ever, ever, ever, ever going to tell someone that they way they identify and/or understand themselves is wrong, but please be mindful of the fact that some people get rhinovirus (a cold) and they call it “the flu” but other people get influenza and end up in the hospital for weeks, but if everyone thinks flus are “just colds,” then the people with H5N1, for example, may not get the treatment and recognition they need to survive.

Also, also, also, also, also it’s about the severity of the symptoms, not the severity of the trauma. Some people go through event X, feel bad for a bit, then are fine. Some people go through event X and are really really really not fine. Some people go through event X, are reasonably fine at the time, but then years later it all goes pear-shaped.

For that matter, plenty of people suffer from mental illness for no discernible “reason” – sometimes episodes are triggered by something, but by no means is this always true.

Everyone’s brain is different.

Be kind.

Fight stigma.

When I explain a queer term to a queer person:

When I explain a queer term to a non-queer person:

A note on labels

As I am sure any cat owner will be able to tell you, someone else putting you in a box is entirely different from getting into a box yourself.

This is the most brilliant, concise, cute, and disarming response to the “but laaaaaaaabels are baaaaaaad” argument that gets used against people trying to self-identify as something as a way of making sure their boundaries are understood and respected.

The Fight To Keep "Femme" Lesbian Exclusive

I want to keep this simple, but personal; butch lesbians, bless their souls, have been having this argument with queer theorists for much too long now, and I wanted to give them a break by giving my opinion as a femme lesbian, myself. Lesbians, females attracted to females exclusively, are deemed gender nonconforming from the moment that they come out. No matter how much makeup they apply, or how long their hair is, they will be targeted based on their sexual orientation; I have been the victim of such, and I promise, no amount of lipstick could save me from the harassment and abuse. When it comes to lesbians, femininity can not be defined with just basic criteria such as hair length or clothing of choice, it runs much deeper. Femme lesbianism has a history and a culture; leather jackets and picket signs standing right next to our butch sisters. “Femme” is a word that denotes that we do not perform for the male gaze, that our physical presentation is not to influence the advances of men. While lesbians are still subject to the abuse of capitalism and gender roles, femme lesbians are able to sit back and say with more honesty than nonlesbian women, “this isn’t for men, this won’t be for men, you can’t have this under any circumstance.” It comes with the package of being a dyke, we aren’t delicate prizes to be won by a male audience. But what modern queer theorists have brought to our table is something vicious and unsafe; nonlesbian women have taken the history of excluding men from lesbian femininity and repackaged it so that men can devour it whole. “Mascara so great I can bat my lashes on his dick,” “ribbons on my underwear so he can unwrap my present,” “put my hair in braids for him to pull,” these are the vomit inducing slogans being spit from the mouths of those who wish to cater to men. “Femme” was a small revolution for me, it was being able to accept myself and deny the male gaze, it was something beautiful in my own sentimental way. And now I have to watch as nonlesbian women cater to men, just as women are fucking conditioned to do, and call it a “rebellion,” they scream “empowerment,” when they aren’t doing anything different than what we have been forced to do for our entire lives.

so like ineedtothinkofatitle said, your gender identity is something that only you can ultimately figure out. fwiw, tho, a lot of what you're describing resonates v strongly with my own feelings about gender, which is one of the reasons i like the term "agender" as an identity label. i was assigned male at birth, but i've never really felt that connected to masculinity/maleness, and i also don't feel super connected to femaleness either, tho my presentation definitely tilts in the feminine direction. "agender" captures this for me: i'm not male, and i'm not female, and i don't want to be either. maybe this is somewhat helpful for you? idk, feel free to message me if you want to talk more...

Brandon Wint (via ethiopienne)