Labels

In my high school yearbook, I was given the epithet Emma "and my sexuality today is.." [surname]. It's not far wrong; after years of parroting "everyone is bisexual" because Velvet Goldmine and sexual opportunism told me to, it occurred that there are beautiful, vital, and wildly erotic people who do not consider themselves "male" or "female", and identifying as bisexual would seem to exclude them - perhaps omnisexual was a more accurate description? Except that this seemed to imply that I wanted to have sex with everyone at once. Pansexual would have worked, if it wasn't for the fact that I had a good friend called Pandora and that just seemed unecessarily confusing. But hang on - maybe my attraction isn't so equal-opportunities after all - all the men I'm attracted to are fictional and/or gender variant! Perhaps I'm femmesexual, attracted to all kinds of women but only to feminine men?

That's just a taster, a week's worth of navel-gazing lust-gauging. This went on for years.

Recently it's reared its head again, though. I've been describing myself as a Lesbian (capitalised, yesplz), using words like "dyke" and "sapphic" to talk about myself, even though it's not strictly true. And all of a sudden it's making me a little bit sick. Because it puts me, and my sexual partners, into false and upsetting roles. It assumes that I, and everyone I sleep with, identifies as 100% & unequivocally fully female. When I lust after a person, calling myself a Lesbian, I force her to be a woman. This hot person walking past my window - she can't be genderqueer, he can't be a transman, zie can't be bigendered. Equally, when I exist, calling myself a Lesbian, I force myself to be a woman. And I don't want that, actually. I'm lucky enough to exist in a part of the world where my behaving as I see fit with no regard for gender congruency is more-or-less acceptable. In another place or time I would be a lot more genderqueer. Except I probably wouldn't because I don't like torture/death.

The very idea of "homosexual/heterosexual" seems to be to reinforce the gender binary, shove people into roles with which they are not entirely comfortable. While paradigms of homosexual relationships may not be as pervasive and damaging as the masculine > feminine heteronormative structure that destroys many "straight" relationships, they exist, Diva and Attitude force people into playing roles just as much as Cosmo magazine or FHM.

I think I've gorged myself on gender theory since I've arrived in the pridehouse, and made myself sick. This is upsetting me far more than it needs to.