Thread by @sethanikeem

So, it’s #BiAwarenessWeek?

Which raises, for me, some existential questions

When I, sheltered in the Midwest within a white, performatively Catholic family, first learned attraction between people could actually be more than vanilla heterosexed, bisexual seemed to fit

But -

Back in the day when I was reading Dykes to Watch Out For & Hothead Paisan, I encountered the term “Stone Butch” which seemed to better encapsulate how I experienced love & affection for people but rarely any desire for them to get sexy with me (asexual wasn’t widely used)

I was sorting out my orientation in the 1990s & had been given virtually no healthy tools to do so

We didn’t have many terms for that complex trifecta of sex/gender/orientation better understood now

Also, AIDS was a thing & alternative sexuality carried enormous stigma

This was years before I learned I was intersex, which comes with its own set of considerations, complications & nuance

(did I have suspicions? Oh, yes. Confirmations? Those were hard to come by both from family & medical professionals)

So, here I am (one of many GenX people I’m sure), who has gone through a complicated & often painful decades-long personal journey toward identifying, accepting, and understanding what sex, gender, & attraction mean for me

Accepted labels & terminology have evolved around me

The end result being, I really don’t know what label actually fits

#Intersex, sure. That’s a medical fact. There’s a certain comfort in how indisputable that one aspect of my identity is - especially because our words & understanding for so many other things constantly change

Those constant evolutions of how we label, identify, & understand gender, sex, orientation & all of that messy human stuff about attraction -

those changes aren’t bad

many are necessary

but I know I’m not the only elder queer who sometimes feels a bit adrift with them

All of this is to say, at one time I was a loud & proud #bisexual

Certainly, I am attracted to more than one gender

But defining the “sexual” part gets complicated as I am preferentially ace (which does not exclude sensual, dominant, sadistic 😈)

In short: words are hard 🏳️‍🌈

I guess this is me telling everyone in a similar boat: I see you

It’s OK to have mixed feelings about labels

It’s OK to change our relationship with labels

Nothing is more personal than our journey to understand how we relate to our own body and the bodies of others

PS You know what would’ve been easier for every struggling queer kid in my generation?

Growing up in a world where all the breakthroughs & profound experiences recorded in the German Institute of Sexology had not been viciously committed to the flames: hmd.org.uk/resource/6-may…

PPS:

Please PLEASE do not let them do that to us again

They are trying

Everywhere, they are trying

Bent upon erasure. Conversion. Conformity. To make us illegal, invisible, gone.

Do not let them set us back so far again