Trying to Categorize Relationships with Non-binary People as Gay or Straight Doesn't Make Sense?
This is about The Owl House!
But it is also probably silly and pedantic musings about pop math theory and the failure of relationships with non-binary people to fit into classical straight/gay dynamics. I should note here that I am talking about relationships themselves, not the people in them. Because words are complicated, a straight person could be in a relationship that is gay, for instance. I should also note that while I thought I was non-binary for years, I am not now, and I have no intention of telling other non-binary people how they should identify: this is primarily formed from my own perspective when I thought I was non-binary.
Anyway.
The Owl House has a character, Raine, who, to my knowledge, is the first non-binary character in a Disney production. In a discussion about how few hetero/straight relationships there are in the show, someone pointed at Raine (non-binary and they/them pronouns) having dated Eda (female and she/her pronouns). I said that that was not a straight relationship because, as a non-binary person, any relationship Raine is in would be queer. (I noted that I'm in a similar situation as a trans person, though only with people who don't recognize transwomen as women.)
Another person said that I was wrong and that non-binary people can be in a relationship with someone of any gender and that said relationship would still be straight.
That doesn't *feel* right to me. When I thought I was agender, I would have been offended if someone told me that my relationship with someone was straight or gay just because I was AMAB. Or really, for any reason. It would have felt like a dismissal of my identity. That's how I felt about that response about Raine too: it felt like a dismissal of their non-binaryness.
That said, it does seem like some (though not all) of the non-binary community agree with the other poster. It kind of hurts my brain. Are non-binary people multiple genders including binary ones (in which case any relationship with a binary person could be seen as an opposite sex [or same sex!] relationship), or do they have no gender or no binary gender, in which case no relationship they are in could be seen as an opposite sex relationship? (I saw myself as having no gender at all, but of course there are non-binary people who see themselves in all these ways and others. ) I commented to Miriam that there seems to be something analogous to a divide by zero error in all this logic.
Then it struck me that maybe the answer is the same! Since this whole system of someone's identity being straight vs. gay is a relatively modern, Western invention anyway, and people's relationship with gender is far more complicated than can really be encapsulated in labels like gay or straight, it makes sense that many relationships cannot exist within it's arbitrary bounds. Relationships with non-binary people aren't gay or straight: they're undefined, like dividing by zero is!
If I still thought I was non-binary and was forced to categorize my relationships, I would definitely start saying that they are not gay or straight: they are undefined!
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For more thorough, less silly, and more relevant to reality, thoughts about this, I'll recommend this piece by Kravitz Marshall here:
https://aninjusticemag.com/does-liking-a-nonbinary-person-make-you-bi-or-pan-not-necessarily-359241923561
On the other hand, Rachel Williams feels the same way I felt when I thought I was agender.
"I’m not one to police somebody’s identity. But if someone continued to insist they are straight and they want to date me I think I would have to have a series of conversations that explained what it means to date a nonbinary person."
https://medium.com/@transphilosophr/can-you-date-a-nonbinary-person-and-still-be-straight-880b3cd588c2