This is part 2 of my series of posts where I came out as bi/pan/queer. Describing what happened to me is weird and complicated and language does not do a great job of letting me say what I mean. Note here that when I say attracted in this post I mean sexually, not platonically / aesthetically or otherwise.
The most obvious example is that I now describe myself as bisexual because I started being attracted to men. Seems fairly obvious, but men refers to a gender, and gender has never been a thing that affected my attractions. For a while I have used Christina Hendricks (a curvy, conventionally attractive actress) as my model of the physical ideal, in terms of my attraction. If she asked me for sex I would sure say yes, and if she followed up with 'also, I am a man' I would say 'sure thing sir, shall we smash genitals then?' Pronouns, clothes, roles, performance, all that stuff that is part of gender simply doesn't register. Bodies, on the other hand, do.
Okay, so I could say instead that I wasn't attracted to males, and now I am. Still, then we run into the problem that I don't mean XY chromosomes, because I don't know anybody's chromosomes, and I don't mean what gender someone was assigned at birth, because that doesn't matter to me. How a person appears now matters, but how they appeared in the past isn't a factor. Sex and gender are complicated, and while they have a bimodal distribution, they sure aren't binary.
To be actually precise I would have said in the past that my attraction was strongly oriented towards people that have the set of physical secondary sex characteristics common in female humans. That doesn't exactly roll off the tongue though, and I am sure some people would find it offensive that I reduce my attractions to simple body parts. Clearly there is a lot more to it than that, as the brain is always the sexiest thing.
So this helps some in describing what changes have occurred in me. Nowadays I could say that there are still bodies I am attracted to and others I am not so much, but the ones I am into don't conveniently correlate with biological sex or gender.
All this mess and struggle is why I aesthetically like queer as a descriptor. It says I don't roll the way the standard man does, which is true, but it doesn't make any attempt to narrow it down.
On the other hand, the word bisexual gives the average person a pretty accurate picture of what I am like. It just has all this stupid baggage that irritates me.
I am attracted to some humans and not others. There are patterns in who I am attracted to, but those patterns are complicated and finicky and I don't even know what they are, not really. English (and every other language, I think) simply doesn't handle that stuff well at all. Each attraction is different, and so maybe I need a word for each one, which obviously is stupid and impossible.
The key takeaway here is that every time I use a word for an orientation, gender, or set of characteristics you can be sure there is a whole blog post of backstory and clarification behind it, and I just can't possibly fit all that stuff in. I want to communicate, and English is the tool I have, so I am going to try to do communication with it, even when it is messy and wrong. I really want a society where gender and sex and orientation just aren't a big deal so if our words are slightly inaccurate that doesn't matter much. I want them to be like colours - sure, 'dark blue' isn't super accurate, but mostly we get what it means, so whatever, no problem.
That isn't the society we live in now though, so for the moment I am stuck obsessing over terminology surrounding attraction and knowing that no matter which thing I choose it is going to be wrong somehow. There is no right answer, no matter how hard I look. I know what I like, I just don't know how to tell people what that is!
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