It is a truth often cited in LGBTQ spaces that queer and trans people have existed throughout history and around the globe, that wherever you go, there we are. And whenever I hear that statement I want to say, “Yes, but with an asterisk.”
Because while it is definitely true that there have always been people who are attracted to their own gender, and there have always been people whose genders don’t correspond to the expectations laid out for them at birth, to call all of these people “queer” and “trans” (let alone gay or lesbian or bi) feels a little bit reductive, insomuch as it ignores the fact that queer and trans and all the rest are oppositional terms, defining themselves against a “norm” that positions itself as default and correct. For many of us, the very idea of what it is to be LGBTQ is bound up in struggle, in minority identity, in oppression: yet none of these things are automatically associated with, you know, being attracted to your own gender or being a woman with a penis. So much of what we see as inherent to queerness and transness is simply a factor of experiencing these identities within a Western framework, one that locks us in to a limited idea of a gender binary, one that sees same gender attraction as aberrant rather than normal variation as mundane as, say, having red hair or green eyes.
I should clarify what I mean by “the West” here, because I don’t quite mean the collection of countries referred to as the Global North, or Europe — not exactly. The sad truth is, you’ll find Western ideas about “normal” sexuality and gender in pretty much all of the globe, thanks to a little thing called colonialism. Over centuries of violent conquest, European settlers enforced their own ideas about bodies and sex and relationships onto people around the world, sometimes through (frequently coercive) conversion to Christianity, other times through laws like section 377. In a way, you could argue that colonialism created global queerness by penalizing and othering what had previously been simple human variation. And the legacy of that colonial enforcement of Western sexuality and gender norms has created a situation where many countries that once accepted and even celebrated what we now call queerness now aggressively punish it (see, for instance, India).*
It’s a useful thought exercise, I think, to learn about constructions of gender and sexuality outside of the current Western norms; to understand that, for instance, in Ancient Greece pederasty was seen as socially acceptable, to learn about the variety of cultures that have made space for non-binary genders. I don’t say this because I think you should start copying what ancient cultures found acceptable (please do not do pederasty) or because I think you should treat global sexual identities like some buffet for you to pick and choose from (if you’re not Indigenous don’t co-opt the identity two spirit), but simply because I think it is good to expand your mind beyond what society has led you to believe is possible, to understand that sexuality and gender are not a paint by numbers game that requires you to fit each color into tiny little pre-defined slots, but rather a blank canvas where you can just be.
[A brief digression, because I have marriage on the mind: An under discussed aspect of our bowdlerized understanding of sexuality and gender is the way that many of us cannot comprehend sex and love outside of something that is intended to lead to a committed, probably monogamous partnership — i.e. marriage — that we see that specific relationship configuration as the purest, most natural form that all of us should aspire to. Except that read ignores that throughout history, marriage has a) not been about love or sexual attraction and b) mostly been a way for families to create alliances that were sealed with the birth of children. Queerness and marriage have been utterly separate for the same reasons love and marriage were separate: marriage was not about what you wanted, but about public duty. Obviously it’s shifted over time, and we have love and queer marriages now and it all means something different. But to say, for instance, well where were the queer marriages in ancient society is to miss that they would have been unfathomable, not because queerness was taboo, but because it was in conflict with the whole purpose of marriage — i.e., making babies in an era before advance reproductive tech.]
Over the past few years — ever since my “wait am I homoromantic?” awakening kicked off a major period of self reflection — I’ve had to ask myself who I am, where I fit in, thinking of my identity in bits and pieces as I try to create a composite whole. Sometimes I think of myself as a lesbian who also enjoys sex with men — the easiest way to explain to people that, yeah, I’m bi, but no, I don’t want a boyfriend — but that feels wrong given that I am absolutely capable of passionate feelings for men, that it’s rarely “just sex,” that the lack within me is a lack of desire to take on the responsibilities, the baggage, of being a “girlfriend” to a man. And while I feel on some level that I’d be more equipped to fill that role with a woman due to the significant differences in how I emotionally relate to women (the differences that were part of what led me to start identifying as sapphic), I also don’t know. Maybe I’ve been aromantic this whole time, if romantic feelings are supposed to be what lead us to want hearts and flowers and babies and merged lives. (I don’t think I’m aromantic, personally, given the intensity of my feels for folks.) Maybe I’m just a selfish loner who can love other people deeply, but only on her terms and when she’s given adequate space. (This feels more likely.) There is no map for me, there is no predetermined outline I can slide into and be handed a readymade printout of how I’m supposed to live my life. I have to figure it out for myself — and it’s terrifying, but also… I think that’s okay?
The point here is that all these words we talk about — straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, cis, etc etc etc — they’re just words that someone made up to flag a general feeling. And unlike, say, “cat,”** these words aren’t pointing to some concrete object that we can see and feel and hold and understand the essential catness of. They are attempting to describe vague, sometimes ephemeral, feelings that live in our brains and genitals. No wonder it’s confusing.
And of course it’s more confusing if you’re bi, because by having multigender attractions you’ve betrayed one of the most basic rules of Western ideas of sex and love. But it’s also more freeing because, you, more than anyone else, do not have to follow the rules. You have the freedom to figure it out for yourself, the same way that I have been doing, to abandon all the assumptions that the UK and other colonizers enforced across the globe, to get out of the Western mindset and just be, you know, you.
Is that scary? Absolutely. But everything worth doing is, I think.
* There’s a whole discussion to be had about the recent World Cup-inspired protests about Qatar and LGBTQ rights. It is not lost on me that many of the loudest voices are coming from places that were responsible for Arab countries abandoning their historic tolerance of same gender love (even as many of these countries frowned on anal sex between men, they still celebrated other expressions of intimacy we’d now call queer). Feels very “sure we made a mess but now we’re pissed that you didn’t clean it up” mixed with enlightened white savior vs backwards savage narratives. But we can talk about that another time.
** Yes my cat is sitting next to me as I write this
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Thank you for writing this. It was very affirming to read.
There is a great article I read this year about the West's tendency to flatten anything not in a rigid binary in other cultures as evidence kd queerness or transness. It's well-meaning but still imposing Western ideals on cultures outside of that. This post made me think of that, so thanks for this!