I’m coming back to a Pride Blog Challenge that I’ve done before but it’s a solid one. I’ve written about my sexuality and gender before so how am I feeling today?
I’m a cis woman so my gender identity is a pretty simple thing to talk about – isn’t it? Forever I’ve been known to describe myself as ‘culturally a lesbian’ which occasionally really pisses off lesbians. But No Nickname mentioned to me the other day about an idea in more academic spaces defining women loving women as a gender identity, a specific way of moving through the world. It interests me, as an idea it really speaks to me – the idea that The Well of Loneliness is still a part of the experience we call Sapphic rather than solely a precursor to what would become the Trans* movement. The idea that Lesbian is a gender experience/identity makes sense to me – that gender is a much broader spectrum than an imposed sexual binary between male and female is very obvious to me. (And I suspect to the majority of the world even if gender critical people seem to have more money and shout louder).
That sexuality and gender interplay with each other is also obvious but how exactly that happens I’m not sure. Who I find attractive impacts how I perform my gender and also how I perceive my gender – I wonder how it works for asexuals. I think for me it’s broader than trying to attract different individuals in a sexual way, it’s about how I want to interact with people. It’s the play of gender to provoke the reactions, the interactions that I enjoy. I keep thinking about what Roberta Cowell said about sex but I do mean it more broadly than just about sex. She said the difference between heterosexual and homosexual sex is about liking the friction of the different and the coming together of the same. Certainly that’s how I see interactions between people whose genders are more different and similar. (Not sure I agree with her about sex).
So ok, I guess then my sexuality is still bisexual but my gender is lesbian – I’m a lesbian bisexual. Well that’s making me grin a bit.