Comments | buzzruth: Gender and sexuality

buzzruth

Gender and sexuality

May 29, 2011 01:25

This is a slightly rambling, possibly unintentionally insulting post. I apologise for both from the offset - the first is because its stream of consciousness, and the second I assure you is not what I’m trying to do and is simply misguided comments arising from trying to learn and understand ( Read more... )

Comments 8

Part 1 of 3 nezumiko May 29 2011, 03:09:43 UTC

Hey Ruth. You have lots of good questions here. Let me see if I can shed some light, maybe?

Your Questions
You're not being offensive. I don't get that from you at all. Gender identity and sexuality are insanely tricky, deeply personal topics, and I think especially if you've lived your life without any major variance from the expected societal norm (you have a female body and feel like a female, and you are attracted to males) it makes it that much harder to understand what it must be like to fall outside of that experience. I think for some people it's as hard to imagine being attracted to someone of the same sex, or to have a gender identity different from their physical sex as it is to imagine having a second head.

I really value that you're willing to ask questions and approach the issue with an open mind and a loving heart.

PronounsDon't even get me started. I can sort of, sometimes, tolerate ze (and I agree zir, not hir), but they're inadequate at best. I can kind of get my head around them in writing, but spoken they don't ( ... )

part 2 of 3 nezumiko May 29 2011, 03:12:04 UTC

Heteronormative
I can see how this is troublesome, especially because it tends to get used in queer-positive literature as a pejorative term. I think that is mostly because it's being contrasted with older ways of looking at queerness in its many forms that labeled it "deviant".

If you are having a conversation where it's important to make it clear that you are a person with a female body who identifies as female, and are attracted exclusively to males, then calling you a cis-gendered, heterosexual woman makes sense. If I'm just talking about my friend Ruth who lives in the UK, I'd use "woman" and leave it at that. The gender books you've been readingare dealing with aspects of gender identity, so they're using the more specific language.

Does gay + surgery = straight?Sometimes. Not always. Sometimes sexual orientation is more fluid than than we might think. Sometimes life experience will bring about a shift we weren't expecting. Sometimes, especially for transgendered people, allowing themselves to live as the gender they've always ( ... )

Part 3 of 3 nezumiko May 29 2011, 03:12:49 UTC

Born this wayThere are two sides to this issue: is being gay/straight/bisexual/transgendered/ genderqueer/ asexual, etc an innate tendency, or a choice, like whether to get a tattoo or how much bacon you eat. When the people who have a problem with queers call it a "lifestyle choice" they are equating sexual orientation and gender identity to being a vegetarian or a hipster, or a smoker. It's not that simple ( ... )

buzzruth May 29 2011, 19:14:31 UTC

I actually really appreciate the long response. A lot of what you said has been echoed or mentioned by DK when I've spoken to him, and some of it is new to me and does add a bit of clarification as well as the odd bit of 'thats what I was trying to say' and the occassional 'I just don't get it'. I think there are some things I will never get though because, as you said, I don't vary from the norm so I don't know that it's even possible to 'get' it ( ... )

Born This Way nezumiko May 31 2011, 07:46:18 UTC

Hey again. I talked to DK and got a sense from him that Ash is mostly being a snotty little brother with his "it" nonsense. So... I'll turn a blind eye, for now. If he does it not in jest, though, black belt or not, I will help with the beatdown.

I'm glad I managed to explain things a little, even if I made some waters murkier for you.

I choose to be straight because thats what feels natural, and I wouldn't choose to be gay because the idea goes through meThat doesn't sound homophobic, that sounds like exactly what all the "born this way" proponents are saying about themselves regardless of their sexual orientation. Actually, I think you're probably coming to the question from a position of already believing in the "born this way" scenario. You were born straight, and so you act straight, because acting straight is what feels most natural to you. And I was born queer so I act queer because acting queer is what feels most natural to me. That doesn't sound homophobic in the least ( ... )

Re: Born This Way buzzruth May 31 2011, 21:31:15 UTC

Interesting. It seems that what you see as born with it I do see as a choice, but we both look at it in the exact same way. I still don't think I'm in the born this way catagory, but there's a whole bunch of learned behaviour vs natural instinct stuff that I would be interesting to look into further just to see if I really am and not realising!

I guessed that the prejudice is the reason that people are against finding the gay whatever, and yeah with the still there it's an ethical blackspot to actually do anything. Which is a shame because it would be interesting to know. Although that would take away the straight / gay idenitity a bit. The fun of discovering as it were.

Intersexed Conditions and Lady Gaga nezumiko May 31 2011, 07:55:12 UTC

Clitoroidectomy I think this is the technical term for the surgery because in most intersexed people born with ambiguous genitalia, the structure in question is larger than an ordinary clitoris, but much smaller and often differently shaped than an ordinary penis. Since it's not obviously a penis, and since the default for fetal development is to have female genitalia unless there is sufficient testosterone, the medical term that gets used is clitoris, even though the structure isn't actually quite a clitoris either. Perhaps this reflects some fairly deeply entrenched misogyny ( ... )

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