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Bringing It All Togther
How Do Your Identities Interact?
How Do Your Identities Interact?
One of what I believe to be the most interesting, complex, and admittedly confusing part of understanding LGBTQ+ identities is trying to understand how different identities interact and relate to one another. How can a nonbinary person also be a lesbian? Can I be bisexual and asexual? How can someone's gender change every day?
These questions arise due to the way LGBTQ+ identities challenge the normal binary perspective of gender and sexuality we were raised with: man and women, straight or gay, with little to nothing in-between. As you have now seen, this is not the case! For example, the flag on the left combines the greysexual and lesbian pride flags, which might raise some questions for you.
It's crucial to understand that our gender and sexuality are fluid, complex, and can definitely change over the course of our lives. Your relationship with it is a journey, not a fixed point. Below I will attempt to answer some of the above-listed questions and explain in further detail how gender and sexuality intersect, interact, change, and evolve over time.
Be sure to also read through the Deeper Dives pages for further details and information on individual identities (coming soon).
Your Cocktail of Identities
Your Cocktail of Identities
Your identity as a person is made up of a cocktail of roles, responsibilities, ideas, attractions, and expressions of who you are and what your place is in the world. Throughout your life, you develop, change, and navigate these identities as they relate to you and the world around you. The science associated can be investigated here!
At birth, you are assigned your sex: male, female, or intersex. This is what appears on your birth certificate at the time of birth and what will follow you for the rest of your life, unless and until you one day change your gender legally. Your sex at birth is determined by your genitalia, but in fact your true sex is determined by a complicated blend of sex characteristics, hormones, gonads, chromosomes, and more. Therefire, due to the way your body develops in utero, your biological makeup won't necessarily match the traditional understanding of what is male and female, in which case you would be intersex (What is Intersex?)
This assigned-gender-at-birth (AGAB) is the fixed point at which you define your relationship to your gender, and whether or not you consider yourself cisgender, transgender, or nonbinary in some way.
Your gender is a personal identity describing the way you feel aligned to your AGAB, detailing whether or not you feel like a man or a woman, how closely to either gender you identify with, and how detached you feel from the binary genders altogether. On the Gender Identity page, gender is defined as "a personal identity describing a person's relationship to their biological sex and the concepts of masculinity or femininity, which is determined by brain activity, personal lived experience within a culture, and subjective experience of internal being." The sliding scales above and the chart on the right each show a way you might view your gender, but you can also view your gender based on your relationships to gender roles, stereotypes, and cultural perspectives. Your gender can also change, and might float up and down each scale over time.
Your gender expression is essentially your personal style, and the way gender is reflected in your style of clothing and adornment, hairstyles, accessorizing, and pronouns. Your gender expression doesn't need to match up with the widespread assumptions of what your gender is supposed to look like. You don't need to match any stereotypes or any preconceived notions of what you need to look like. Your gender expression can be fluid and float up and down the scales, just like your gender can change.
Your sexual and emotional attractions are two different sides of how you are drawn to others, using the model of split attraction (What is split attraction?). You can be attracted to different kinds of people in different ways, finding some genders very romantically attractive and other genders sexually attractive. You can also not be attracted to any genders at all.
Terminology and Definitions
Terminology and Definitions
Almost every LGBTQ+ identity has multiple definitions, ranging from very general or broad, to very specific, and every person who uses each identity is going to use a different definition. Most of the complexity in terminology will come down to differences in definition. This is ok! Two people can use the same label while having vastly difference experiences with their identity - it's part of being human. To illustrate this properly, here are some comparative examples of celebrities who share identities but differ in experience or definition.
How Gender and Sexuality Interact
How Gender and Sexuality Interact
Your gender and your sexuality can interact in interesting ways. It's important to note that your gender does not determine who you are attracted to, but it can influence how you describe that attraction and the labels you use.
For example, a ciswoman, a demigirl, and a nonbinary person might all be attracted to feminine people. (This is more than just gender expression, by the way. Feminine-aligned means that your gender leans towards the feminine side of the spectrum, even if you identify as nonbinary in some way.)The ciswoman might call herself a lesbian, the demigirl might call herself neptunic, and the nonbinary person might call themselves trixic. All three sexualities describe attraction to feminine people, but each person's gender identity changed the way they labeled it.
Some sexualities have had their definitions expanded so that more people can use them. The term lesbian, for example, has gone from being strictly defined as "woman-loving-woman", to now being defined as any feminine-aligned person who is only attracted to feminine-aligned people. This means that ciswomen, trans women, demigirls, nonbinary girls, feminine nonbinary people, girlflux people, and feminine genderfluid people can all use the term lesbian, if they are only attracted to other feminine people.
However, the very gendered nature of the word lesbian might encourage nonbinary people to use a different label for their sexuality, even if their attraction meets the definition of a lesbian. Nonbinary people sometimes avoid calling themselves gay in order to avoid the connotation that they themselves are a man or woman, even if they fit the definition. A nonbinary person who is attracted only to masculine-aligned people could call themselves androsexual, toric, uranic, or something else.
Using Multiple Labels
Using Multiple Labels
Note: This section was written before I discovered my identity as a pansexual, transgender man, but I decided to leave it unchanged as the concept described remains the same. The identities described no longer reflect how I identify.
As seen in the previous section, it is very common for a person to fit the definition for multiple different labels, and thus it is not uncommon for one person to use two, three, or more labels to define their gender or their sexuality.
I will use myself as an example. I am a demigirl, but I am also girlflux. This means that I am partially aligned with being a woman and being nonbinary (or in my case, neutrois), and I also shift in the intensity to which I align with my femininity. Due to the duality of my gender, I can also use the terms bigender, neutrois, neutrois/nonbinary woman, genderqueer, and genderfluid to describe my gender. (The flags are listed in order in the bottom left) Due to the complexity of it all, I find it easiest and most comfortable to simply call myself a demigirl, so this is how I introduce my gender to others.
My sexuality is also complex in the same way. I am asexual-flux and queer; I usually don't experience any sexual attraction, but occasionally (or in the right circumstances) I do experience attraction to men and women, in different doses depending on the day. Therefore, I also identify with the terms (brace yourself, this is a lot) : asexual, demisexual, greysexual, bisexual, polysexual, abrosexual, androsexual, gynosexual, toric and trixic. Since these are a lot of terms that are somewhat uncommon, its easiest and most comfortable to simply define myself as queer and asexual, or asexual-flux. (The flags for all of these sexualities are listed on the bottom right)
You'll notice I used both asexual and queer. Aspec identities (those on the asexual spectrum) sometimes leave room for experiencing small amounts of attraction -- for example in orientations like demisexual and greysexual -- allowing the asexual person to use a second label to describe who those small amounts of attraction are towards. This is how I can be aceflux and queer: When my asexuality fluctuated towards being demisexual, I'm suddenly able to find certain people sexually attractive, in which case I find men and women both sexually attractive. Oriented-aroace people or angled-aroace people, have three orientations: a romantic orientation (aromantic), a sexual orientation (asexual), and a third orientation describing attraction in other ways, like platonic or altruistically. You can learn about Split Attraction and Asexuality on these pages.
You can learn more about the different identities described here on any one of these pages:
You can learn more about the different identities described here on any one of these pages:
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