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Oct. 11th, 2012 11:56 amA few years ago, I started writing posts for National Coming Out Day on Facebook. On Livejournal, I have some anonymity, but Facebook was more open than I was used to being. With friends, with immediate family, in other venues, I'd been entirely open about who I was for a long time. But going a step further and speaking openly about my departure from the mainstream in a way that's very public and under my real name made me nervous. Would it cause me future harm in terms of securing employment? Less likely but still possible, would family outside my parents and brothers react negatively?
It's because I still have those thoughts and this is still a world where those worries are valid, that it continues to be important to share details about my life this way. Ideally, details of my personal life wouldn't matter enough to make public for their own sake. They would be uninteresting and irrelevant to people who don't know me personally. But in reality it does matter. When people are stigmatized in the abstract for no other reason, publicizing those aspects is a valid response. Connecting the abstract to the individual, personalizing something unknown and scary, might be cause to reexamine that stigma. It's easier to stereotype a group when no one you know is a member. If discrimination is against not just a nebulous group of people, but against a real live individual, I believe the merit of that discrimination is much more subject to reconsideration.
I identify as bisexual. At the risk of tangenting into sexual identity politics, I do like the terms 'pansexual' and 'omnisexual', but have consciously chosen bisexual as a better personal descriptor, for reasons I'd be happy to discuss in another conversation. Since my partners are both women and it would be easy for me to 'pass' as heterosexual, I think stating my orientation is important.
As could be inferred from the above,I am also polyamorous. I'm oversimplifying a bit due to space constraints, but in short, I am open to being involved with/dating more than one person concurrently, under a system that all people involved are aware of and content with. And they, of course, are free to find partners of their own. While there may be the occasional bit of jealousy, that's true in monogamous relationships as well. And when someone I care about is happy and loved, it makes me happy too.
A final topic that I have not addressed publicly before (so it's a little scary to do so now, though again, less so here where there's some level of anonymity) is that I identify as genderqueer. It's a difficult thing for me to explain succinctly. But key is the understanding of the difference between sex, a biological characteristic, and gender, a social construct. While sex is not strictly binary, gender is even less so. I analogize it to the Kinsey scale of sexual preference: just as there are more subtleties than 'straight', 'gay', and 'bisexual', there are more gender constructions than 'male' and 'female'. Like bisexuality, this is an easy societal dodge. But like sexual preference, gender ambiguity has led to violence and death targeting people who do not conform to popular categorical conceptions. I hope small gestures like this will be part of someday bringing such tragedy to an end.
It's because I still have those thoughts and this is still a world where those worries are valid, that it continues to be important to share details about my life this way. Ideally, details of my personal life wouldn't matter enough to make public for their own sake. They would be uninteresting and irrelevant to people who don't know me personally. But in reality it does matter. When people are stigmatized in the abstract for no other reason, publicizing those aspects is a valid response. Connecting the abstract to the individual, personalizing something unknown and scary, might be cause to reexamine that stigma. It's easier to stereotype a group when no one you know is a member. If discrimination is against not just a nebulous group of people, but against a real live individual, I believe the merit of that discrimination is much more subject to reconsideration.
I identify as bisexual. At the risk of tangenting into sexual identity politics, I do like the terms 'pansexual' and 'omnisexual', but have consciously chosen bisexual as a better personal descriptor, for reasons I'd be happy to discuss in another conversation. Since my partners are both women and it would be easy for me to 'pass' as heterosexual, I think stating my orientation is important.
As could be inferred from the above,I am also polyamorous. I'm oversimplifying a bit due to space constraints, but in short, I am open to being involved with/dating more than one person concurrently, under a system that all people involved are aware of and content with. And they, of course, are free to find partners of their own. While there may be the occasional bit of jealousy, that's true in monogamous relationships as well. And when someone I care about is happy and loved, it makes me happy too.
A final topic that I have not addressed publicly before (so it's a little scary to do so now, though again, less so here where there's some level of anonymity) is that I identify as genderqueer. It's a difficult thing for me to explain succinctly. But key is the understanding of the difference between sex, a biological characteristic, and gender, a social construct. While sex is not strictly binary, gender is even less so. I analogize it to the Kinsey scale of sexual preference: just as there are more subtleties than 'straight', 'gay', and 'bisexual', there are more gender constructions than 'male' and 'female'. Like bisexuality, this is an easy societal dodge. But like sexual preference, gender ambiguity has led to violence and death targeting people who do not conform to popular categorical conceptions. I hope small gestures like this will be part of someday bringing such tragedy to an end.
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