Gender and Sexuality Q&A Round-up

14 March 2024

This post was originally several different posts made on Cohost.

I got really fucking intensely into grooming my facial hair when i was 19 and attempting to be a boy. Like, moustache wax and beard sculpting and everything. It's really baffling to some extent because my facial hair is my biggest source of dysphoria, and i put so much work into getting good at all that.

But also like, in retrospect, i get why i did that. After i was 18 i felt locked in to my gender, and when my ex and i started dating it began to feel vitally important that i fulfill my assigned gender role as best as i possibly could. I would be fucking good at it, god damn it.

And you know what, I was really good at it. Do you know how much i know about male fashion and grooming that a lot of cis guys my age still don't know? It's wild. I hated trying to make myself that way, but I'm proud that i put my best effort in. Even if i was wrong in the end

There's two layers to it. One is fairly utilitarian: if you're trying to hook up for gay sex it's kind of useful to know who's going to be doing what.

The other is that i think a lot of queers don't actually unlearn the harm of sexual binarism and basically recreate the old structures they hated but with fancy fun gay colors instead.

It's fully reasonable to realize your queer identity and breath a huge sigh of relief, to go "wow, I'm so glad I've found a space where I'm not forced to be in that role." But the trap is in taking that relief and moving on without interrogating it.

Why did that suck? Because it hurt you. Okay, true. Why did it hurt you?

A common mistake i see many queers make is that they, feeling an intense resentment to their former enforced identity, respond with "because the identity was bad!"

No. The enforcement was bad. Maybe the enforcement was so bad you can never even approach similar identities again! But it was the enforcement that caused harm.

Gay men who leave enforced heterosexuality may very well turn around and say "heterosexuality was the problem!" And then recreate the most comically misogynistic "women are submissive, men are dominant" dynamics imaginable except with "top" and "bottom" replacing "man" and "woman". Ctrl+F. Because the freedom of homosexuality became about escaping heterosexuality to this strawman, not about escaping the rigid enforcement of heterosexuality.

I think there is a specific intersection of gender and sexuality which are usually encompassed by terms like "lesbian" and "gay (man)" that are what you are picking up here with this thought. It digs a bit into what a large term "gender" really is, and how deeply multifaceted it is once we think about it.

One of the reasons i somewhat disagree with the binary construction of mainstream gender discussion is that it doesn't fully understand what people get out of their gender. A man who enjoys his soft beard and his hearty laugh, and a man who enjoys his rough hands and chisled shoulders are both men. Clearly! But just as we have "butch" and "femme" lesbians, are there not (cis, heterosexual!) men who may find euphoria in their tenderness, and others in their roughness? Can we really claim these two have identical genders?

The truth of gender is that it is a social construction, which means that it is not only very real, but critically real, as it relates to how we view ourselves in relation to the world around us. A lesbian's gender may be more informed by being a lesbian than anything else about them! But it also might not be, and that fluidity is key to answering the question.

So to answer your question: yes, it can be! But whether or not that is the case is highly personal to the persons involved and their relation to their society