Thread by @LuxAlptraum

Fell asleep thinking about how I feel about the label “woman” the way I feel about the label “bisexual” which is that they’re the best options for me while also being burdened with a lot of baggage that I find frustrating.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about my gender — probably more than most people who ultimately decide that they’re cis — and for me it always comes back to: I don’t feel dysphoria about my body, I dress in a feminine way, I feel most comfortable with the pronoun she.

To the extent that I personally have any gender trouble it’s that there’s there’s this cultural fiction of A Woman™️ floating around who doesn’t bear much resemblance to me — which was, of course, what my book ultimately wrestled with (#BuyMyBook). sealpress.com/titles/lux-alp…

But whenever I’ve thought about communicating that disconnect through a bespoke gender, I get no relief. I tried using they/them pronouns at one point, I considered IDing as a non-binary woman. I’m very happy for all the people who find comfort in these frames, I did not.

I ultimately concluded that a lot of my tension with womanhood could (somewhat) be resolved through understanding myself as a queer woman, but… that leads me to the whole baggage of being a “bisexual,” which, oof.

I’m a bisexual because I’m attracted to multiple genders. Fine.

And I come back to bisexual because it’s the best of a bunch of bad options — for me it’s def better than pansexual or multisexual or omnisexual or what have you — and because again, my problem is fundamentally *other people’s ideas of who a bi woman is* more than anything else.

Anyway in the grand scheme of things this is all kinda minor, but it’s also just… a perpetual frustration, the way we load all these labels with an idea of a person rather than accepting that they’re rough descriptions of a categories that contain multitudes.