this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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For me, it's not the gender dependent part that makes it confusing. It's more that I've got split attraction.
I'm panromantic, but heterosexual. Which in theory means that I'd be happier dating men, but as a relatively cis passing trans woman, being in a public relationship with a man basically erases my queerness. Still, I called myself straight to challenge the whole "you're gay if you date a trans woman" narrative, but at the same time, I felt like calling myself straight was just further erasing my queerness.
And honestly, my relationships with women are for more connected, queer and emotionally rich. Those relationships feed my soul in a way that relationships with men never have.
So, I don't call myself straight anymore. I don't call myself bisexual or pansexual, because they don't fit either, and "Panromantic heterosexual" just doesn't mean anything to most people.
So "Queer" is where I ended up. And whilst I value my queerness, I feel like it lacks something as a complete label for my orientation
Oh definitely split attraction further complicates things.
For myself, I quite like queer as a general label. It feels like a rejection of sexuality, gender, and relationships as they're presented in cisheteronormative society. And then if need be, we can use the more specific terms like "panromantic heterosexual" to further explain stuff to those cool people in the know.
And I know you already know this on an intellectual level, but it never hurts to have a reminder: one's queerness is not dependent on who they're currently in a relationship/having sex with!
What I'm looking for isn't so much an internal sense of my own queerness, but more of the "queer as in fuck you" queerness, where my visible existence challenges the norms around me.
To misquote Tales From the City, "If two queers walk down a street and no one notices, are they even queer?"
That's what I need my queerness to be. Not an internal feeling, but an active and explicit middle finger to the heteronormative bullshit that society puts on us that makes so many of us repress and hide from ourselves. And when I was just seen as another unqueer face in a crowd with an unqueer partner, I didn't feel like I was challenging heteronormative bullshit. I felt like I was involuntarily assimilating in to it, and losing myself all over.
When I'm with my girlfriend, I get all of that. I love her, and I love that our happiness is a middle finger to the people who have told us we shouldn't be who we are. Our little polycule is very much "queer as in fuck you". But, I'm navigating my relationship with her around split attraction, and in some ways, trying to capture all of that with the single word "queer" feels like it loses something :)
This is all a very interesting perspective, thanks for sharing! For what it's worth, I think living your true self is in itself "queer as in fuck you".
Also related song suggestion for anyone reading who's into queer punk: Queer as in Fuck You - Dog Park Dissidents
Living your true self is the most powerful thing you can do. But for me, my true self apparently needs to be visibly queer. I felt like I was losing myself when that wasn't the case.
In my case, the "fuck you" part is in being able to give a shit eating grin to people who are uncomfortable with my existence, as opposed to those people just assuming I'm one of them. I want them to know that I am not :)