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Family-avoidance interlude

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As I’ve alluded to before, there are things I haven’t been mentioning on the blog, in part because my [...]]]> Dear family: please stop reading. Auntie (!!!), and SIL, and brother, and mom, and dad, this means you. Really. Please. Stop. If you want me to keep blogging, ever, stop reading, right now.

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Family-avoidance interlude

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As I’ve alluded to before, there are things I haven’t been mentioning on the blog, in part because my family reads here.

When I’m not saying anything about those things, I find it hard to say much of anything at all. Which can, without exaggeration, drive me crazy.

So here they are:

I’m trying to make a book. And we’re trying to make a baby.

I have, in fact, conceived the book (the one I alluded to recently, Martyrdom Not Required: Attachment Parenting in the Real World). And I did, in fact, conceive a pregnancy.

The book might yet, if I am very, very lucky (and very, very diligent), make it to fruition.

The pregnancy did not.

It was not, you might be surprised to hear, the most recent cycle, nor the cycle that I missed blogging about. Nor was it the cycle where my back went out. No, it was the one before that, and it was so very, very short that I hardly feel justified in calling it a miscarriage. We never had a chance to fully confirm, much less celebrate, even privately, before there was nothing to celebrate, and the confirmation was a resounding “not this time”.

This was not the first miscarriage I’d ever had — not even the only I’d ever known about.

I was seventeen, The Man was nineteen, and I was known for having long, heavy, irregularly timed periods. But one was later still than my unusual-usual. I didn’t suspect anything — I had no particular reason to, and I was as bad about tracking my periods as my body was at regulating them. But when I bled, finally, it was harder than anything before. And there was… something. Something very, very small. Maybe the size of my pinky fingernail, in memory. Probably even smaller than that, if we try to factor out memory’s magnifying focus. But there was something unusual, something unexpected, something I hadn’t seen before nor since, resting atop the plastic pad, when all the rest of the blood and serum and fluid had soaked in.

I didn’t tell anyone, not for years. I still answer “one” when filling in number of pregnancies on medical forms. After all, I don’t “know”. There was no stick with multiple lines, no disturbing, distorted black and white films from an ultrasound, no diagnoses scribbled near illegibly in an official medical chart somewhere. I don’t “know”. Just as I don’t “know” this time, this so much earlier time, with even less physical evidence for support.

But I know.

Three times now, my body has been home, temporarily, to DNA that was of me but was not mine. One became a baby, now a bubbly, blond, aggravating, adorable child. Two… didn’t. Once, over a decade ago, it was a strange, spikey knowledge — something unasked for and unwanted disappearing, without my having to do anything about it. This time, it was pain I didn’t let myself feel for a month, when finally, bleeding again, I sobbed on the floor in part from pain in my back and in part because I was surrounded by fecundity, by women with proven fertility, and I should have been one, I should have been like them, I so wanted to be and almost was like them and it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair, and it hurt so much. And so I cried, and sobbed, and gulped for air and breath, and keened with anger and grief and fear and envy and so many kinds of pain.

But everywhere else, with all but a very small few, I was silent.

I don’t know if I can explain my silence, because I’m not sure I understand it. About everything else, I am vested in full disclosure. I’ll write about craziness, self-injury, pelvic organ prolapse, the -isms I am infected with. I’ll write about mundanities and profanities and even, if you ask nicely, the time I talked to Jesus. But this? This desire for baby-baby-now? This trying and trying and waiting and trying and the interminable months of failure? This I have a hard time disclosing.

I think I want to present a fait accompli — I don’t want the kibitzing and second-hand second-guessing along the way. I want the congratulations — I don’t want the commiserations that it takes us so damn long. I want, in one area of my life, to not be made to feel that I am damaged, deficient, that nothing will come easily to me, or for me.

Neither do I want to publicly perform pious self-pity. I don’t want to be anyone’s maybe-baby show. I don’t want to declare woe-is-me when so many have it so much worse, require hard-to-access technological intervention in order to reproduce, or are not able to at all. What right have I do bemoan my circumstance when odds are decent that, eventually, a pregnancy will stick, virtually free, and societally approved?

I think also that I don’t want to have to explain or defend or justify my desire or my timing or any other part of this. I don’t want to try to explain to the childfree what this compulsion feels like, nor defend from the childless my grief over the loss when I’ve already had a baby, nor justify to the environmentalists or the anti-child feminists the decision to try to bring yet another person into the world.

With both the baby and the book, I think I want to be able to quit quietly. I want to be able to fail, without failing anyone. I want to be able to give up, without being seen to. I want perfection — mission accomplished, see what I made! — or to pretend I never wanted it in the first place. (I admit: as coping mechanisms go, I could perhaps find healthier.)

And I really, really don’t want my family to say one damn thing to me about it, good or bad or anything. (If you’ve ignored my previous warnings, family dearest, you’ve only yourself to blame.)

Yet… I’m tired of silence. I’m tired of Not Talking about something that matters to me. I’m tired of not being able to write because I’m not writing what’s most pressing to me. I’m tired of my desire for privacy from my sometimes-draining family blocking off the soul-sustaining support of my friends (whether I’ve been blessed to meet you in person yet or not). I don’t want this to become a baby-making or book-hocking blog, but I don’t want to have to censor every impulse I have to mention a major undertaking — which informs almost every area of my life — either.

So that’s it. Baby, book: gimme. I don’t know how I’ll manage, I don’t know whence the time and energy and space in my life will come, but I don’t care, because I’m doing it anyway. And I’m not going to keep it a secret any longer.

Except from my family.

But most of the rest of me? Was so, so relieved.

I loved nursing him. I loved [...]]]> The Boychick weaned sometime between Christmas and his birthday. I’m pretty sure he was still nursing at Christmas, and I know he was done by his birthday, because part of me was sad we didn’t make it to three years.

But most of the rest of me? Was so, so relieved.

I loved nursing him. I loved being able to look at him for the first seven and a half months of his life and know that, aside from a few thyroid molecules, every atom of his being had come from me. He made himself, but he made himself from my body, and my milk. I loved snuggling him close, and I loved calming him, and I loved never having to worry about hydration or nutrition when he was sick, and I loved that I could help him sleep, and I loved the symbiosis of full breast, empty baby leading to happy me and happy him. I loved nursing him.

I also hated it.

Not all the time, but more and more as he got older, as my period returned, as my milk dwindled. I felt sexual sensations, which would have been fine, except I loathed it. There were times when nothing but my breast would do, and I was crying while nursing him, chanting “make it stop, make it stop, make it stop”. There were times when nothing but my breast would do, and I couldn’t do it, and he and I both cried. And in the end, that was what lead to his weaning. It was at his pace, but accelerated by my need for ever shorter, ever more infrequent nursing sessions.

So when Twitter and the lactivist blogosphere exploded over an op-ed from the UK that, among other things, said breastfeeding felt “creepy”, I cringed.¹

Breastfeeding isn’t creepy — except for me, it is, a bit.

Breastfeeding isn’t sexual — except it is, for me and people like me, and for many people for whom those feelings aren’t a bad thing, and they’re not perverted or child molesters, they’re just normal women with a functioning sexual system.

Breasts are sexualized in our culture, exaggerated into caricatures of themselves, used to sell cars and movies and everything else, and that’s a problem. But, breasts are also sexual. Not just because our society says so, though that “helps”, and not just because all the body is sexual, though it is, but specifically, actually sexual; nipple stimulation releases the hormones of love, of sexuality, of life-giving. It contracts the uterus, floods the brain with prolactin and oxytocin, sends blood to the genitals. It can start or augment labor, it can stop postpartum bleeding, it can, all by itself in some women (not me, alas), bring about orgasm. Breasts. Are. Sexual.

Some breasts. Some of the time.

When I say breastfeeding is creepy, I’m not insulting those (including myself) who breastfeed. There is nothing wrong with breastfeeding, and I wish more women would do it, and for longer — we would all be a lot better off, as individuals, as a society. Even more, I wish that all women who wanted to (which is most women) had the support and the lack of “booby traps” to nurse for as long as she and her child(ren) wanted. I smile when I see women nursing in public, when I see pictures of a child in a lap, held close, both parties obviously content.

But when I see a beautiful, naked, close-up picture, when I think too hard about it, when I am reminded of the feelings in my body of the last months of nursing when I had little milk, of the early months of nursing when he suckled for hours, when I think about having a child suck on my breast — I get the creepy crawlies.

And I hate that. I wish I did not feel this way. But I do.

So when I hear someone say that they didn’t breastfeed because it “feels creepy”, I get angry. I get angry at a culture that says breastfeeding is perverted. I get angry at a culture that says my breasts are not my own but my lover’s, exclusively. I get angry that breasts are so sexualized and breastfeeding is so controversial that the only way one can admit in a major publication that the thought of suckling a child feels creepy is by saying that, therefore, she wouldn’t dream of doing it.

And I get angry at the lactivists who have declared that breasts are not sexual, that people who think so are the ones who are perverted, that my breasts are not my own but my baby’s, exclusively. I get angry that I hear her feelings, which are so like mine, dismissed as “disgusting”, and I wonder, what would they think if I told them I felt the same? Would I get a gold star for persevering anyway? What if I’d stopped at fourteen months, when my period returned, and it got a lot harder? What if I’d stopped at two weeks, when I handed him to his father to latch on because it was that or self-harm to the point of permanent injury? What if I, long-time breastfeeding supporter, never started at all? Would I be disgusting? Or would I be OK, because I was on “the right side”, even if I was “broken”?

I am not broken. I don’t know why I feel the way I do while breastfeeding, and while I suspect fewer people would feel the way I do if our culture normalized breastfeeding and decentralized breasts in sex, I might still feel the same. Or I might not. Maybe “wires are crossed” in my brain, maybe I trained myself into it with nearly a decade of using my breasts to help me achieve orgasm before having a child (yet was I supposed to be anorgasmic?), maybe I was just born this way. Frankly, I don’t care, and I don’t want to hear anyone who does not feel this way theorize about why, especially not in a way that pathologizes and Others me and ignores what I have to say about my experiences.

What I want is to be allowed to talk about it. I want to not be shoved into a corner, head patted and gold star decorated, and told to shut up because my feelings might make the job of “selling” breastfeeding to the masses harder, might give ammunition to anti-breastfeeders who will use anything to call us perverted, any excuse to avoid nursing. What I want is to never, ever hear someone called disgusting for not being able to — or not wanting to — reconcile a lifetime of having a lover at her breast with the thought of having a baby there. What I want is to be part of a movement that doesn’t debase itself to use any means to achieve its goal, no matter how worthy that goal is; what I want is to be part of a movement that honors women and our multitude of feelings, that works not to control our actions but to give us the freedom to do as we wish.

Until we can talk about all the experiences of breastfeeding, until we can recognize that a woman’s breasts are not for sex nor for feeding babies nor for decoration but for whatever the hell she wants to use them for, people will continue to think that breastfeeding is creepy, and thus won’t do it. Those of us who feel this way — a minority even of people who don’t breastfeed, perhaps, but how large or small we don’t know — will continue to get defensive and toss out any excuse to not try and attack and belittle those who do; to reach in tears for a bottle and for the socially-sanctioned fallacy of “I didn’t have enough milk”; to grit their teeth and not seek help and fall into darkest depression; to soldier through and hurt themselves so as not to hurt their babies; to question whether they really want another child if it means going through all that again, alone. We have to be able to talk about it — we, those few (but not so few as you might think) who feel this way — so we can get past it, and get to peace. Whether we choose to breastfeed for nearly three years, or some, or not at all, if we cannot talk, we will be alone, and we will not find resolution.

So make the space. When someone says she didn’t breastfeed because it was creepy, listen to her. When someone doesn’t want to tell you why she didn’t breastfeed, or gives you a reason you know to be false, realize you don’t know the whole story, and grant her her privacy. When someone says she didn’t love every damn minute of nursing, don’t assume she’s anti-breastfeeding.

Mostly, shut up and listen. There are worlds of nuance that are being missed in the all-or-nothing shouting match as it stands, and I can’t stand it anymore.

Just listen.

Sex ed is every day.

Sex ed is teaching children, of any age, that their bodies are their own; it is making sure they know [...]]]> Sex ed is not something we do once. It’s not something we talk about “when they’re old enough“. It’s really not something to leave exclusively to schools, or chance, or experiential learning.

Sex ed is every day.

Sex ed is teaching children, of any age, that their bodies are their own; it is making sure they know what bodily autonomy is (whether or not they know the word), and that they have it, and everyone else has it too.

Sex ed is answering their questions about pubic hair, and armpit hair, and facial hair, and breasts, and penises, and vulvas. (Sex ed is making sure they know words like breast and penis and vulva because they’re a part of your every day vocabulary.)

Sex ed is telling kids that most women have vulvas but some don’t, that most men have penises but some don’t. (Sex ed is telling them that penises and vulvas and men and women aren’t the only ways to be.)

Sex ed is telling them that pads and sponges and tampons and cups are for catching menstrual fluid; sex ed is telling them what menstrual fluid is.

Sex ed is knowing that when a kid is cranky and you need a moment’s respite, YouTube has abundant birth videos as well as cartoons.

Sex ed is setting boundaries around your body: “Yes, you may kiss my face, but please don’t lick my mouth; yes, you may pat my breasts but don’t brush my nipple; yes, you may watch me pee, but don’t touch my genitals.”

Sex ed is setting boundaries around behavior: “It’s fine to touch your penis/vulva/clitoris/testicles, but not while nursing/on the plane/in public/in front of your Grandparents.”

Sex ed is exposing children to the multitude ways of building a family: sex, and IVF, and adoption, and blending, and donors. It’s exposing children to the multitude variations of what family means: two parents of different genders or same, one parent, more parents, grandparents, others; families without children, families without blood relation, families without legal protection.

Sex ed is kissing: the way we kiss our kids, the way we kiss our partners, the way we kiss our parents; it’s the kissing they see in movies and the kissing they see on the streets and the kissing the see when we leave the door open, or they hear and wonder about in the dark. Sex ed is what we tell them about all the ways of kissing.

Sex ed is the other things they hear in the dark, and in the day time; sex ed is in where and how much and when we enact our sex lives, or not. Sex ed is the bed-side drawer we keep off limits (or don’t), and it’s the answers we give to what’s in there.

Sex ed is demonstrating that our bodies can give us pleasure; it’s hugs and back rubs and gentle touches. Sex ed is never teaching them to accept unwanted pain.

Sex ed is honoring their nos; sex ed is teaching them how to say yes.

Children are always learning; they are learning from what we say, and from what we don’t. If we say nothing, they are not learning nothing, they are learning that some things are unspeakable. Sex ed is not a one time course (though those can be great); sex ed is not a conversation to schedule, or put off, or plan out: sex ed is every day.

Do it well.

*****

Sex and sexuality education resources. Learn, so you can teach your kids:

Scarleteen (highly recommended)

Go Ask Alice

girl2girl

Now to my topic, which is [...]]]> First, the good news: Tiwonge and Steven have been pardoned! (Warning on link for misgendering.) Although psychological violence continues to be done to Tiwonge via misgendering, and their life is likely to continue to be hard, I am glad that these two are being spared, and I wish them well.

Now to my topic, which is not so much about them as about the conversation we in the West are having about them:

Tiwonge Chimbalanga is a woman. (Whether she’s a trans woman or an intersex woman or a woman according to her own cultural ideas that Western thought is not capable of understanding is irrelevant to this particular conversation: she is a woman, and that is all we need to know here.) Steven Monjeza is a man. Therefore, calling them a “gay couple” (much less “Malawi’s first openly gay couple”) is both inaccurate and highly offensive.

But.

I’ve been seeing a lot of commentary, on Twitter (with its limitations on characters) especially, calling them, therefore, a “straight couple”.

I have a problem with this.

Acknowledging that Western¹ ideas of sexuality and gender are not universal and therefore are likely to be inadequate to conceptualize or express this couple’s reality, how we talk about them reflects on us. And the language of “gay couple” and “straight couple” doesn’t reflect very well.

Our best information on Steven, from his own words, is this: “I have never had sexual feelings for ladies, but I had them with Tiwo”². To Western understanding, this implies either asexuality or homo/bisexuality³ — which is to say, not straight. And as a not-straight person, I really, really hate being referred to as being part of a “straight couple”. It’s not a matter of denying the reality or privilege of my relationship, or wanting to score “queer points”, but that it feels wrong, and, intentionally or not, erases my identity.

The problem is that we use the same words for orientation as for relationships. Unquestionably I am a part of a woman/man couple, and I have abundant privilege therefore — but I am not straight, my relationship is not the same as it would be if all parties were straight, and I do not, as “straight relationship” implies, have straight privilege. We need a way to talk about relationships which does not by implication of orientation erase the identities of people like me, like Steven — for never is there a “bisexual couple”, or a “pansexual relationship” or a “queer relationship” (unless the genders of one or more participants is understood to be “queer”, or outside the binary). No where in “straight couple” or “gay couple” do we allow for anyone who does not fit neatly into the gender binary, for that matter⁴.

None of the alternatives I’ve encountered have seemed satisfactory. My so-far favorite — male/female/mixed relationship — is a step up, but still highly problematic in that it assumes binary gender, and would lump together relationships involving people with nonbinary genders (who do not, generally, receive societal approval and relationship privilege) with binary woman/man relationships (who do).

What I want are new words, words which allow us to describe the ways in which some relationships are privileged above others⁵ but which do not state or imply anything about the orientations of the people involved, which do not assume one man and one woman as the default (nor casts them as diametrically opposed, as does “opposite-sex couple”), which acknowledge that man and woman are not the only genders possible.

Given the beautiful complexity of humanity, I’m not sure that entirely unproblematic language is possible, but I am completely convinced we can do better than this. We have to.

Here are the basics of the story, from Questioning Transphobia:

Today [20 May 2010], Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga, whom the media calls “Malawi’s first openly gay couple” even though Tiwonge identifies as a woman and her partner as her husband, were given a maximum [...]]]> Trigger warning for descriptions of misgendering, violence, and degrading situations.

Here are the basics of the story, from Questioning Transphobia:

Today [20 May 2010], Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga, whom the media calls “Malawi’s first openly gay couple” even though Tiwonge identifies as a woman and her partner as her husband, were given a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison with hard labour after being convicted of gross indecency and unnatural acts.

This is being reported everywhere as a “gay issue” — and to be sure, any group purporting to care about LGBTQIA¹ rights (which is to say human rights) should damn well care about what’s happening to these two people — but what this is, among other things, is a woman’s issue.

It is a woman, sent to a men’s jail, who:

…arrived in court noticeably ill. [Her] lawyers said [she] had contracted malaria in the hideously overcrowded jail, though the defendant later blamed guards for trying to beat [her] into a confession.

(Pronouns corrected, quote from New York Times, Feb 13 2010)

It is a woman who was made to strip completely in front of her employer:

Jean Kamphale, [Ms] Chimbalanga’s boss at a Blantyre lodge, testified that she accepted “Auntie Tiwo” as a woman and assigned her cooking and cleaning chores. But after the article in The Nation appeared, she made her employee disrobe and refused to let [her] stop until [she] was naked from the waist down…

(Pronouns corrected, bolding added²)

It is a woman who not only has been arrested, beaten, had her partner renounce his love for her, and sentenced to hard labor, but has been consistently misgendered by news media, both mainstream and “alternative” (trigger warnings on both those links). Even when she is quoted as saying “I am a complete woman”, writers continue to use inappropriate language and gender, to declare her given name “real” rather than the name she lives with daily, to misrepresent her gender and her sexuality.

Some activists, defending their misgendering, have said that as Westerners, we cannot impose our concepts of “gender identity” on to Tiwonge — and it is true that our concepts of gender and transsexuality do not directly translate, but it is no less true that our concepts of sexuality and homosexuality do not directly translate. We have to make do with what we have, and what we have is her saying, repeatedly, that she is a woman.³

Given that the Malawi government has also been consistently misgendering her, is homophobia at play here? Yes, indubitably.⁴ But homophobia only becomes an issue because transphobia has erased her gender. And when that psychological violence is perpetrated against a woman, that’s a woman’s issue.

Should that matter? Shouldn’t it be enough that this is a LGBTQIA issue, a trans issue — and, most simply, an egregious human rights violation? Of course. But while mainstream media and the majority of queer activists are making this out to be about “gay rights”, it is important to remember that at the center of this storm are a woman, and her man, who are being punished simply for wanting their relationship recognized.

There are many ills being done here. Don’t add to them: honor Tiwonge’s womanhood, and insist that your news sources do as well. It may be little comfort to her at this point, but it means so much to so many women, all over the globe.

*****

Further reading:

Questioning Transphobia — Be sure to watch the video, if you are able. (There’s no transcript of it as of yet that I am aware of.)

Gender DynamiX

Akimbo

TransGriot

Not everyone struggles with the times when their lovers — their beloved, committed, beautiful partners — don’t feel like they have the right shape/right reactions/right gender, though they feel so very right at other times.

I was surprised at the reaction it got [...]]]> One of the points of the post Why I loathe “Everyone’s bi” was this:

Not everyone struggles with the times when their lovers — their beloved, committed, beautiful partners — don’t feel like they have the right shape/right reactions/right gender, though they feel so very right at other times.

I was surprised at the reaction it got — to me, this is one of the more obvious, fundamental and problematical parts of bisexual monogamy. Not because we can’t be monogamous, not because we cheat any more often than anyone else does (and on the flip side, not because I have been brainwashed against polyamory), but because of the very nature of sexuality, and non-monosexuality in particular. The nature of my sexuality.

Sexual dissonance

Inspired by the term gender dissonance¹, the term sexual dissonance attempts to describe the experience of not-rightness that some people experience when in (or imagining) a sexual situation with someone of a nonpreferred gender. Monosexual queer people (such as gays and lesbians) might have experienced this trying to be “straight”. Straight folk might have if they tried “experimenting”². And, though it’s not quite the same as monosexual dissonance, nonmonosexuals can too.

This is complicated — because while nonmonosexual people can experience it, not all do. Not all monosexual people have any idea what I’m talking about either. And it’s a feeling that’s so very hard to put into words:

Kissing. Touching. Loving. Wanting. Panting playful sweaty messy fun-having. But… not-right-ness. Wrong shape, wrong smell, wrong feel, wrong reactions, wrong movements, wrong… something, when everything was so right before, last week, last month, last year.

Sexuality fluctuates

Where does this come from, in those of us who are attracted to multiple or many or all genders? If we’re bisexual, surely we should be immune to sexual dissonance, right?

Sexuality fluctuates. It changes over months, over years, over days. Some — most? me, anyway — nonmonosexuals are familiar with this, with our attraction to any gender, or to variations on expressions of that gender, changing over time. More for some than for others, sometimes imperceptibly, but it does; it dances and weaves and sways, like a lover on display, back and forth like lovers joined. And for those of us in the middle, as it were, we can dance and weave right out of attraction to the gender of our current partners.

I joke (and it is a joke because sexuality doesn’t work quite like this and gender definitely isn’t a binary but in a very important way it’s also not a joke at all) that 5% of the time I wish The Man were a woman, and 5% of the time I’m really glad he’s a man, and 90% of the time I just want to get off — which makes him perfect for me 95% of the time. And really, who can ask for better than that?

Working around it

We work around that 5%, The Man and I. We can work around it, because I am nonmonosexual and his gender isn’t repulsive to me sexually, even then. We can work around it because when it comes right down to it what I want is him, the person I’ve loved for my entire adult life, even if he’s not always exactly right for me. We can work around it because he’s known about my sexuality since before I told him, since before we were together. We can work around it because he gets it, as much as any monosexual person can, and respects that he can’t ever get it more than that. We can work around it because he has no jealousies, no hang ups about gender or machismo, no feeling like he has to be everything to me all the time. We can work around it because he has a lower sex drive than I do, and he doesn’t complain when I just don’t initiate. We can work around it because my frustration during those 5% times is met with sympathy and creativity from him, not shaming or anger.

Monogamy isn’t something I feel particularly attached to, but loyalty to The Man is, and he is monogamous. Polyamory can be a workable option for some nonmonosexual people who experience flux like this and sexual dissonance from it, but it isn’t the only one.

We’re all really queer

I’ve talked to a lot of really clever nonmonosexual folk³ about this phenomenon. Some have known almost instantly what I was talking about — and some of them were relieved that it wasn’t just them, that it didn’t mean something was wrong with them that they felt this wrongness sometimes. Some have no idea what I mean, and while they don’t doubt it, they don’t get it, either, even when explained to them. I haven’t been able to discern any patterns in who experiences it and who doesn’t. Male-partnered, female-partnered, non-binary-partnered; doesn’t seem to matter. One relationship for life or serial monogamy, all one gender partners or “one of each” — those who’ve experienced it and those who haven’t seem spread across the board.

But we — all of us monogamous nonmonosexuals, whether we have experienced sexual dissonance or not — are all queer.⁴ We are all bisexual, or pansexual, or whatever term we prefer. We are no less queer because we have/n’t felt this even when monogamous for years, or for a lifetime.

“I don’t see gender”

Sometimes nonmonosexual people — especially those who have never experienced sexual dissonance — say something like “I don’t see gender” or “gender doesn’t matter to me”. And I get it. I’m bisexual/pansexual/multisexual. I get where that comes from, because, frankly, I do not understand how someone can simply NEVER be attracted to a given gender, can not EVER be attracted to someone because of their gender. I don’t understand monosexuality, because I’m not monosexual. (I accept it, and respect its validity — but I don’t understand it.)

But here’s the thing — gender is real. Gender does matter. Maybe you don’t discriminate against someone because of their gender, even in sexual attraction, maybe you find yourself attracted to people of all sorts of gender, maybe you really will shag anything that moves, but still? Gender matters. We all have gender, even if it isn’t a big deal to us personally, even if it isn’t binary or singular, even if it isn’t what society expects us to have based on our bodies at birth. And to say gender doesn’t matter, or that you don’t “see” gender, is dismissive, insulting, and hurtful, especially to those of us who experience dissonance from gender, in ourselves or in our partners. It’s saying you don’t see us, don’t see our pain, don’t see our triumphs, don’t see our work, don’t see our lives.

Not everyone experiences sexual (or gender) dissonance. Not everyone cares what gender their partner is, in general or ever. Not everyone gets what the big deal is. That’s ok.

But gender is still real. See it.

Why does this matter?

I don’t ever hear anyone talk about this. From some of the reactions I’ve gotten from other bisexual people in monogamous relationships, they haven’t heard anyone else say it before either. For whatever reason — fear of rejection, self-doubt, invisibility of bisexuality itself — we don’t talk about this. But it happens. For some of us, because we don’t talk about it — because we can’t talk about it because we don’t even have the language⁵ — it’s a really big deal. It can bring self-recriminations or break marriages.

And it shouldn’t. There’s no valid reason it should. Only kyriarchy. Only bigotry. Only ignorance. Only silence.

I was afraid of putting this post up. I was afraid of contributing to stereotypes about bisexuals, of giving fuel to the idea that we are incapable of monogamy or are more likely to be unfaithful. Because I have to say that sometimes — during that 5% especially, yes — monogamy is hard. But (for us, I speak only for us) it is worth it, in the end. Its very difficulty, coupled with honesty, with working through it and around it, strengthens our relationship. He knows exactly what I put aside for him; I know exactly what he’ll do for me.

I won’t call sexual dissonance a blessing, exactly, but neither does it have to harm a relationship.

Get honest. Then get creative.

The following can be blamed in its entirety on Shiny. Also on the trouble-making dear folk on Twitter who responded to my plea for topic ideas. You know who you are.

Also, THIS POST IS NOT SAFE FOR FAMILY. If you are related to me [...]]]>

Torn between cynicism and seeing sweetness, this time I choose... sweet

The following can be blamed in its entirety on Shiny. Also on the trouble-making dear folk on Twitter who responded to my plea for topic ideas. You know who you are.

Also, THIS POST IS NOT SAFE FOR FAMILY. If you are related to me by blood, or by marriage to anyone related to me by blood, navigate away now. I will never acknowledge or admit to anything herein should you ignore this warning. So just don’t read it. Bye!

What goals, if any, do you have in life?

Travel in a TARDIS, have another baby and do all those baby things again, publish a book (or several), become successful and highly paid as a maternity-focus massage therapist, catch babies (or be in the room when their parents catch them), get professional photos done in which I look smashingly gorgeous, pose nude for art (wait, done that one), own a tortoise, keep chickens, learn to garden, perform cunnilingus (right up there with travel in a TARDIS in likelihood it’ll ever happen — and as its happening is predicated most probably on the death of The Man, I’m ok with that), be on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, give a talk at a conference (without fainting), go for a full year without having a migraine, live to be at least 99, and simultaneously die in a plane/in my sleep/having sex with The Man.

So, y’know, not much.

When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be a doctor, like my mom. Or an actress — I wasn’t too bad. Well, ok, yeah, I was half bad, but just good enough that I had delusions of professionalism. Other aspirations (mostly later) were linguist, journalist, professional student (almost managing that one, despite, or perhaps because of, never making it through more than one class at college at a time) — but never, ever a mother. Actually, I still don’t want to be A Mother. Though I do quite like having a kid.

First kiss

My first kiss, the one I don’t count, was with another five year old girl under my parents’ bed. I wanted her, as much as a five year old can want anyone (which is more than adults like to admit to, I think) — not that I knew WHAT it was I wanted (I “knew” about sex, but, again, about as much as a five year old can know, and didn’t know anything other than the heterosexual procreative model), but I definitely knew I wanted something.

The kiss I do count, over a decade later (nothing in the intervening years) was in the back seat of The Man’s sister’s car, which he’d borrowed to take me and several of our friends to the Rocky Horror Picture Show in Berkeley, CA. For the record, I kissed him first — so, it was only a brush of the lips, but damnit, when you’re 16 and in the back of a car and have just tickled your best friend into submission in your lap, that counts.

Favorite cocktail

This is an interesting one, because I don’t drink. I was raised by a teetotaler and an adult child of alcoholics, we never had alcohol in the house (except for one bottle of rum used — in 2-tablespoon increments — to make our annual Christmas eggnog), and I grew up pretty convinced drink was Of The Devil. Or The Patriarchy. Or, well, something bad. And while I’ve since given up a hard line stance against it, and have even imbibed on rare occasion (and been drunk once, which, to his everlasting annoyance, The Man was not around for), I still don’t drink. I don’t like the taste of alcohol (and I can taste it, in the most minute amounts, no matter what else is in it), with my migraines and mood disorder alcohol would not be the wisest drug to use, and with a family history of and personal predilection toward addiction, I find it most prudent to simply abstain. And given that I get emotional contact highs from being around others who are partaking, I don’t find I’m missing much.

What are your weaknesses?

My ankles. My moods. My rage. My massive ego, and the truly ridiculous self-effacement I’ve cultivated to counter it. My inability to promote myself without either a) 10,000 qualifiers or b) going to unhealthily grandiose places in my mind. My addiction to chai, to Doctor Who, to being addicted. My inability to follow through. My fear of change. My introversion. My extroversion. My self-sabotage. My sedentary middle-class American lifestyle. I could countinue, but this isn’t much fun for me. Moving right along…

First memory

Probably my first memory is grabbing our special pillow and climbing up into my mother’s lap. I only remember that one snippet, and the feeling of love and happiness and belonging that goes with it, but talking with my mom, the pillow was our nursing pillow, and I wasn’t yet two years old, because I weaned on my second birthday. I have several other memories from my early years (including reminiscing with my father when I was about two and a half about “the good old days” when we were driving during the move from SoCal to the Bay Area), and by age four or five have started remembering a narrative of my life with lots of long-film memories.

Best imaginary friend growing up

Oh gods… I hate you two for asking this one. Ok, here’s the thing: I am probably pathologically imaginative. At any moment, I am here, but I am also likely… not-here. And I’m not sure whether this is something that everyone does and no one talks about, or I’m just… fucking bugnut crazy. But anyway. Growing up, I was a, um, pretty big Star Trek: The Next Generation fan, so my imaginary friends were Wesley, Data, Guinan, Picard, Troi, and so on. One day I realized that Q felt more real to me than God did. (The next day — or month, or something like that –, though, She tapped me on the shoulder, and we had a little conversation, so that’s alright. But that’s a story for another day.) We’ll not talk about my best imaginary friends of today.

***

So here’s where I’m supposed to tap three more bloggers and hand them a pretty picture and make them do this too. But, um… no. Though there are a couple people who don’t blog regularly who I would love to see go through this little exercise (ahem, Jenn and Susannah). But mostly I’m ok having this and all other chains end at me.

What’d you think? Any surprises? Anything else you’re dying to know about me? Any good stories this inspires you to share about yourself (please do!)?

Like in this oh so [...]]]> Sexual identity? Does not actually come from “who you fuck”.  See, this is one of those misconceptions which lead to all sorts of misunderstandings, from backing up the assertion that “everyone is bi” (because so many people have had sexual contact with more than one gender) to dismissing sexual identities altogether.

Like in this oh so lovely comment (doomed to forever remain an unpublished reply to Why I loathe “Everyone’s bi”):

We’re being told that our identities — who we are, in a real, fundamental way — are false.

Who you bone is not who you are.

If you define yourself by who you fuck, well, that’s kind of sad to me.

I define who I am by a lot broader criteria than who’s genitals touch my genitals.

…really. Who I bone (nice heteronormative phrase, there, by the way) is not who I am? I never would have guessed. I always thought I was The-Man-sexual, since I’ve only ever had sex with one person other than myself. Or perhaps I am, as Recursive Paradox says, vibesexual (shout out to Good Vibrations and It’s My Pleasure). Or, mostly, digisexual (hat tip to Lucy). Bisexual? Well, I’ve never had sex with a woman, so I certainly can’t be that.

…oh wait.

Because that wasn’t actually what I was saying. Y’know, what with pointing out that monogamy and bisexuality (or other nonmonosexualities) are not, contrary to popular belief, incompatible. For that matter, neither are celibacy and bisexuality. Or a history of sex with multiple genders and monosexuality. Because who we bone, as the commenter said, is not, in fact, who we are.

But our sexual identity? Yeah, that is sort of who we are. It surely feels fundamental to me: like a limb¹, or a layer of fascia that twines around everything inside me and holds me together. It feels as bound with myself as my bones, my flesh, my fat, my skin — or my humanity, my womanhood, my age.

Except, apparently, I am denying those parts of myself when I proclaim my bisexuality. I am not, according to the above commenter, also bipolar, or fat, or white, or a mother, or a sister, or a daughter, or a lover, or a writer, or a blogger, or a student, or a knitter, or kind, or compassionate, or passionate, or opinionated, or any of the multitude of other aspects of my self which I’ve talked about, here and elsewhere. No, apparently by asserting my sexual identity, by saying it is fundamental to who I am, I am reducing the whole of my self to this one aspect of me. And if I don’t want some random internet douche to interpret assertions of my sexual orientation that way, then I should damn well shut my mouth.

And become invisible. Again. Still. Always.

But that’s not marginalization or oppression, oh no. That’s just being more evolved, because who needs sexual identity? For that matter, who needs race, really — we should all be colorblind. And gender? The so-evolved all know that’s just a social construct.

Each of these arguments is achingly familiar to those of us who have been erased — who have had those arguments used against us — by oppressive communities. “You’re not bisexual; it’s silly to define yourself by “who you fuck”, I don’t care who you sleep with, just don’t tell me about it, don’t ask for “special rights” because of it. I don’t need to acknowledge the ways in which you have historically and systematically been oppressed because of your race — we’ve moved past that, can’t you angry “minority” types stop playing “the race card” all the time? Gender isn’t real: you’re just “a man in a dress”, and that’s all you’ll ever be, you’ll never know what it’s like to really be a woman.”

This is hate speech, y’all. This excuses murder, and assault, and abuse, and a hundred smaller, subtler forms of oppression. This is how we are told not to find each other, not to stand in solidarity, not to work together to dismantle the oppressions we face — so that we can be picked off one by one for the very identities we’re told aren’t real.

So I say no. I say there’s a lot more — and a lot less — to identities than popularly conceived of. There’s a lot more value, a lot more depth, a lot more nuance — and a lot less checklists and gatekeepers and policing. Identity, especially a nonmonosexual identity, is highly complex, and breathtakingly simple. It’s not about who I bone, and it’s not for you to define for me. It is about who I want and what I feel, and it is for me to declare, if I so choose.

And I? I so choose.

I am bisexual/queer/pan/nonmonosexual/not-even-slightly-straight. And it matters.