mostly hetero

my sexuality is basically a huge question mark. because i’m not entirely sure [like at all] about what and who i like, i opt to identify as straight. while i recognize that identifying as hetero as if that were the default is extremely problematic and means that i am not only complicit but actively perpetuating heterosexism, i don’t know how else to identify.

this is perhaps more complicated than my identifying as a woman resisting the binary, more likely than not because i have suppressed a lot of this and haven’t thought through it as much… because it scares me a lot.

i am physically/sexually attracted to some men. whether they are cis or trans does not matter - i like men. i am romantically attracted to some women. whether they are cis or trans does not matter - i like women. i have never really been able to develop romantic attachment to a man, nor have i ever been able to develop sexual attraction to women (physical yes, sexual no.) in part, this is because cunts freak me out. like, maybe it’s how i’ve been socialized as a female and woman. maybe it’s because penises are more accessible. maybe it’s because i’ve only ever been sexually intimate with partners who have a penis. i don’t know. but female genitalia on women freak me out. to clarify, on trans men, female genitalia doesn’t bother me… because they’re men. i don’t really know how to explain this. like, i find androgynous women and plus-sized stylish women of color sexy as hell, but somehow that computes differently than the way i find men sexually attractive. i also am unsure whether the physical attraction i feel towards these women is because i am attracted to them, or because i want to present like them… and i am unsure if this uncertainty is solely a product of living in a society that tells me that as a female, i must be a woman, and as a woman i must be attracted to only cis men. a lot of it doesn’t make sense to me. it doesn’t have to make sense.

i have been toying with the idea of queerness and identifying as queer for a while now in my head. currently, there are a few main reasons i choose not to identify as queer.

as of now, my gender expression has not yet reached a point where i am no longer hetero-passing (as if expression and sexuality even have anything to do with each other…) as much as i am disgusted by the institutions that privilege certain groups of people, i am not ready to give up the privilege that i have in this realm. i believe that, as a “christian”, other christians are more likely to listen to me when i talk about queerness if they believe me to be hetero. is this a problem? yes. but, right now, i am willing to try to work around it and push queerphobic people to become, maybe, a little less queerphobic. even though this means i have to repress certain pieces of myself, and i don’t think that is right, right now i am okay with it. in past conversations with my parents, they have both expressed extreme queerphobia. i am not ready to deal with the fall-out if i were to “come out” to them, or if i were to “come out” to others in general and they found out. there are many areas of my life where i know i have disappointed my parents, and i am not ready to add this to the list of grievances. i don’t want to be the problem child. there are a lot of things i am pretty sure my parents will say that make me uncomfortable and hurt me. i am not ready for this. when i think about the oppression and marginalization of queer folk, i do not think of my own life. to me, it’s still easy to think of it as an “out there” issue that is only personal because it is personal to some of my very close friends. in part, i think that this is me being in denial. but, i think i also hesitate to take on the label because i don’t want people to think of me when they think of queer politics or queer realities or queer anything, really. have i cried many many nights over my own issues in this area? yes. but, as i have never “come out” i have never really had to deal with the fall out. for this reason, it would feel dishonest of me to identify as queer, having never truly experienced most of the types of structural violence inflicted on queer-identifying people. i don’t want to coopt a struggle i have not been a part of. i don’t want to take up space in spaces where i have not been welcomed.

so, when i say that i am mostly hetero, what i mean is that i have no clue how to confine my sexuality into a box. none of the boxes i know of would fit around my attraction and preferences neatly. i don’t think that sexuality needs to be neat, or needs to be define-able. i think that people like who they like, and that’s that. i think that as a woman of color who is resisting the binary, i am already in many ways practicing queerness. maybe it would be helpful for me to also delineate why i don’t identify as a few other labels…

bisexual - the ways in which i am attracted to men and women differ greatly, so i do not feel that bisexuality is an accurate identifier of my sexuality.

pansexual - a person’s gender expression greatly affects whether or not i am attracted. i am not entirely sure that this negates pansexuality as my sexuality, but it is why i do not identify as pansexual.

demisexual - i do not have to form an emotional attachment to the men i am sexually attracted to before being sexually attracted. however, i do have to form some sort of emotional/intellectual attachment with a person before i am willing to act on any attraction/desire… hence i do not do hook-ups.

sapiosexual - while intelligence does play a role in how i am attracted to people, it is not *the* thing that determines my attraction. like, i can look at a person and be plenty attracted without ever having interacted or been exposed to their intellect.

[edit: an anon pointed out that my previous bullet on not being asexual indicated a misunderstanding of asexuality. that point has been removed until i have taken more time to read up on asexuality.]