Thread by @eigenrobot

i dont talk about gender and sexuality variation much because it makes people mad (at me) in boring ways

however

one thing ive been chewing on today is the likelihood that popular models of such things are excessively and inappropriately platonic

what do i mean by this. well let us review the received paradigm

the dominant model of gender or sexual variation involves a single-dimensional binary (or perhaps a spectrum in some cases)

ex, one can be "gay" or "straight" in a binary, or varying degrees of "bisexual" according to ones level of attraction to ones own sex relative to others

the three most important binaries to this discourse are

1. male / female
2. gay / straight
3. cis / trans

as mentioned before, gay/straight is more often seen as a spectrum than the others.

"genderqueer" theory treats male/female and cis/trans as spectrums but afaict its as accessible to the typical person's intuition as is fractional calculus

for simplicity and for now im going to focus on the binary cases of each axis, and instead consider the interactions of different axes

and in particular how well our 2 x 2 x 2 system really does in cleaving reality at the joints

one final element of this prevailing world model that i want to highlight is the notion that people are "born this way"

that is, each person is assigned an immutable value in each of three fields

m/f, gay/straight, and cis/trans statuses may be /discovered/ but not /developed/

so. what is my complaint

my main issue is that this taxonomy is not a helpful one and that it lumps together some groups which may be very different in important ways, explicitly or by implied symmetry; and that it further creates false distinctions btwn alike groups

i will caveat here and say that i am straight, male, and cis. incredibly straight. im basically an @ElectionLegal-level alpha male.

so my knowledge is somewhat superficial and derived from nights spent in close quarters with asstd queer people learning about their sexualities

1. some groups that _may_ be inappropriately lumped by explicit categorization

- cis gay male tops and bottoms
- cis lesbian femmes and butches

in our base model these groups are placed in the same respective octants, but seem to be noticeably separable in meaningful ways

2. gay men and lesbians--once more setting aside trans status--are often treated as symmetrical groups. this makes sense in a high-level behavioral outcome sort of way (attraction to the same gender). however,

anecdotally there seem to be differences in patterns of "discovery," intensity, and persistence of same-sex preferences across these groups

so maybe thinking about eg lesbians as being "gay but its women" (mutatis mutandis) is misleading in some important way or ways

3. possible inappropriate splitting

some time ago @kittypurrzog observed at @sullydish that many women who in previous years would probably have identified as lesbians are instead transitioning FTM or taking on various genderqueer/nonbinary identities
andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/where-have-a…

accepting this arguendo (and there is some evidence; eg, the number of lesbian bars in the US has dropped an order of magnitude in recent years) this _might_ suggest that "being a cis lesbian" and "being a trans man" could be placed in a meaningful common taxonomic group

the main point is I suspect the 2^n binary map of identity on offer is not a particularly good guide to the territory of "what humans are like;" and this isnt bc these binaries are "actually" spectrums, but bc theyre not good descriptors of the latent phenomena

it IS however a useful model for identifying classes of people who might be (depending on how you see things) privileged, persecuted, or exploited

if you just want to *identify* members of minority classes and have no interest in understanding the phenomena this is totally fine

given the prevalence of the 2^n model you can probably draw some conclusions about where the modal institution's priorities lie

the end