This is a thing that helped me, and it helped some other people on Tumblr, so I’m going to turn it into a real blog post.
When you think about your sexuality and gender, think about what you want to signal.
There are basically two reasons to identify as LGBA. First, you might want to signal to prospective romantic partners: you might want to say “I’m bisexual” so cuties of all genders know that you’re into them, or you might want to say “I’m a lesbian” so that men know not to waste their time hitting on you (as tragically unsuccessful a strategy as that might sometimes be). Second, a lot of people want to know who does and doesn’t experience homophobia and compulsory heterosexuality, for a whole bunch of reasons. A lot of LGBA people are more comfortable talking about their experiences with people who share them. Many people will take your opinion more seriously if they know it’s informed by life experience. Groups ranging from health centers to suicide hotlines are primarily open to LGBTA+ people.
So: if you want to signal to guys “hey! Guys! I want to kiss you!”, and you want to signal to girls “hey, girls, not my thing!”, congratulations, you get to identify as a gay dude.
And it’s 100% okay if you want to change your label. Because this isn’t some Basic Reality Of Your Fundamental Being: it’s just a word. It’s just signaling. If you used to be a gay dude and now you’re like “actually, that whole sex thing is not my bag, baby”, you can be asexual– homoromantic, if you still want to signal to boys that you want to hold their hands and get gaymarried (which we can do in all fifty states!), or aromantic if you’ve decided that’s not your bag either.
Similarly, trans shit.
The best advice I got when I was transitioning was stop worrying about your fucking label. A lot of times it’s easier to answer questions like “do I want people to use female pronouns for me? do I want to change my name? do I want to wear makeup or dresses or girl-cut jeans? do I want to tuck or wear falsies? do I want to take hormones? do I want voice therapy? do I want sexual reassignment surgery or electrolysis or facial feminization surgery?” than it is to answer questions like “really, on a fundamental level, do I identify more with men or women?” There is no empirical way you can answer the latter question. On the other hand, if you want to find out whether skirts are fun, you can go out and buy a skirt. Problem solved.
(Skirts are fun, by the way.)
And eventually it’s going to turn out that one set of vocabulary is the easiest to use to explain what’s going on with you. You can say “I’m a crossdresser” if you want to wear falsies and lipstick sometimes but mostly want to be called “he” and wear pants. You can say “I’m a woman” if you want to take HRT and use “she” pronouns and be called “Mary.” You can say “I’m nonbinary” if you like “they/them” and you want a boob job but you’re okay with your current hormone balance. You can say “I’m genderfluid” if your preferences change a lot, or “I’m a demigirl” if you’re mostly female but like “zie/hir” sometimes, or even “I’m cis” if this whole process ended with you going “actually, chest hair and Michael Bay movies are the shit.”
If Deep Essences of Ineffable Whatever are your deal, it’s cool. None of this blog post should be taken to say that you can’t go about having a deep essence of gay if you want to. But if you’re worried about being Fake Trans or Fake Gay or Fake Ace or Fake Bi… it’s fine. It’s just signaling. As long as you’re signaling what you want to signal, you don’t have to worry about whether you count or not. You do.
Thing of Things 
Except…the signaling isn’t just about you, as you point out in your second reason to signal: it’s about gaining admission to spaces – and being taken seriously – as well. If you call yourself a thing you aren’t, that impacts other people as well.
LikeLiked by 6 people
Exactly. I think of a woman I saw who wrote in to an advice columnist who maintained she was a lesbian even though she was in a long term relationship with a man.
I find it problematic to date a man but identify as a lesbian because you happen to like the political signals that ‘lesbian’ brings with it over ‘bisexual’.
LikeLiked by 3 people
And, by the way, liked that relationship, was attracted to him sexually, and wanted it to continue.
LikeLiked by 1 person
In that particular case, I felt that “lesbian” was actually a better description for her than “bisexual”, since she was only attracted and in love with that one single guy. “Bisexual” would imply that she was attracted to men in general and “lesbian” would imply that she was attracted to only women, so both are wrong, but “lesbian” gets it less wrong.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I think that behavior is more than adequately punished by her having to explain “I’m a lesbian. No, that’s my husband. No, I’m definitely attracted to him, this isn’t a beard thing. No–” every time it comes up.
(Presumably, like Kaj said, she wants to signal that she’s nigh-100% into girls and her husband is an odd exception. This is an unusual use of the term but not my circus, not my monkey.)
LikeLiked by 3 people
Okay, but what does “you aren’t” mean here? If a girl wants to date girls and don’t want to date guys, what else does she have to do to become a “real” lesbian? (Homophobes certainly aren’t going to wait around to make sure she Really Counts.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
I wasn’t talking about lesbians in particular, but since you asked, I have an ex-co worker who identifies as a lesbian despite being attracted to men, because in her line of work it’s advantageous to only acknowledge an attraction to women.
Anyway, I’m more concerned with the way your argument contradicts itself than with concrete examples.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I don’t think it contradicts itself. You are signaling (a) whether you want to date people of the same gender and (b) whether you experience homophobia. As it happens, nearly everyone in set (a) also experiences (b) (although not the converse– bisexuals in monogamous heterosexual relationships have still experienced homophobia), so whether you want to date people of the same gender can be a reasonable proxy.
A lesbian who identifies as a lesbian despite being attracted to men for social benefits (and not because she’s a Kinsey 5 and rounding) is not signaling her lack of interest in men, and therefore is not what I’m talking about. (Also… presumably she’s actually attracted to women, so she’s welcome in LGB spaces either which way. That seems more a problem with biphobia in the LGB community than with her self-identification.)
LikeLike
I think your “think about what you want to signal” advice is really good, and probably goes a long way towards answering your last few posts.
There are probably 300+ people in my extended social & work circles. That’s friends + people I kind of recognize and might make small-talk with. I don’t have the bandwidth to have any kind of deep, personal relationship with that many people.
At the same time, I’m happy to make some effort to accommodate people’s preferences.
So, on the receiving end, labels and signal-heavy-queues are great. They give me a way to adapt without requiring me to spend a ton of mental energy tracking things.
The labels vs identity thing seems to get at this. People’s inner life is endlessly complicated. A full exploration could run thousands of pages. Identity is hard.
Labels, on the other hand, just need to queue me to stuff like, “What pronoun do you want me to use?” or “Do you want me to ask about your ‘wife’, ‘husband’ or ‘partner’?”
I could see the need for some 2nd tier of labels for in-group communication where people really do want to get at inner depths. But I think there’s a ton of value in having some labels that just get me to within a 1st approximation.
LikeLiked by 3 people
But like, I’m a bisexual non-passing trans woman and literally my entire experience with homophobia is “kids were mean to me in middle school” and my experience with transphobia is “I got into a big fight with my family once”. I base my opinions on trans and queer issues far more on abstract principles than lived experience, and my lived experience doesn’t help prevent me from saying insensitive things to people on accident. My identity labels completely misrepresent the degree to which I face actual oppression.
LikeLiked by 1 person
For some people that would be plenty! The homo/biphobia I’ve actually faced from actual people in the world (as opposed to internalized or projected inside my head) has been less significant even than that, but because most of it was when I was a shy, insecure, and extremely angsty teenager, it was actually a kind of formative emotional experience. Perhaps you are a very resilient person, at least in this respect. Perhaps your experience could be characterized as “faced homophobia & transphobia but was resilient enough not to be affected that much by it” rather than “only faced a little bit of homophobia & transphobia”. (I mean, I guess it’s a little bit compared to what LGBT people face in some societies, but it’s still definitely more than LGBT people should have to face, in that ideally LGBT people would not need to have more resilience than straight+cis people.)
Obviously you know your experiences better than I do, so I apologize if I have mischaracterized you and/or your life. I’m basing my thoughts only on your very short description.
OTOH, I do think that identity labels shouldn’t have to carry information about how much oppression you’ve faced. It is possible to have a world without homophobia but with gay people, in which the label “gay” shouldn’t carry any oppression-related information at all; or, much closer to reality, it’s possible to have a world in which homophobia exists but not everywhere, and in very different amounts/manifestations in different places, in which case the label “gay” should only carry the information that its bearer is somewhat more likely than a straight person to have experienced relevant oppression.
LikeLiked by 2 people
The problem is as soon as you’ve got a word for some group of people it becomes an identity and people start wanting to take pride in it, or distain it, or police who gets to signal that identity, and make spaces just for people of that identity, and make spaces that exclude people of that identity, and all of it.
Debates tend to line up along identity lines, but the real debate, the one that matters, is the debate is between the essentialists who want to line people up across discrete borders of identity and fight over which identities are Good and deserve more stuff, vs the pluralists who think identities are convenient shorthands at best, and want to let everyone be who they want to be and live in peace.
The essentialists always want to frame it as red vs blue, cis vs het, men vs women, germans vs french, catholic vs protestant, us vs them.
But the frame outside that frame is civilization vs anarchy, order vs chaos, peace vs war, tolerance vs intolerance.
LikeLiked by 1 person
>On the other hand, if you want to find out whether skirts are fun, you can go out and buy a skirt. Problem solved.
Che… OK, I’m not gonna say that, but seriously. For an AMAB person, not socialized and living in a very liberal progressive environment, “go out and buy a skirt” is linked to a crapload of issues, both internal and external. Externally, unless they have the luxury of living alone, and being old enough to have their own credit card for online purchases, any part of that plan exposes them to a risk of encountering someone transphobic, which may include their relatives, with all sorts of consequences, ranging from mild social pressure to being disowned/divorced, kicked out of the home, getting beaten up, etc. Internally, this is associated with a severe blow to self-esteem, linked with such ideas as “I’m not a real man” (and this is bad bad bad for them; “fuck normal people” is not quite their slogan), “I’m a dirty pervert; how would I even look into people’s eyes after that?”, or at very very best “There’s not reason for me to want it other than me being transsexual” and “Sure, I’ll first transition and start passing as a woman, and then wear whatever I want”. Telling them “dude, it’s damn piece of cloth we’re talking about” is about as productive as telling depressed people to cheer up. Questioning the Deep Essences of Ineffable Whatever and writing long posts about it is way easier than going out and buying a skirt. Plus, having a nice identity “not like those other people” is a mental shortcut for validation of such desire. For example, you’ll often see male crossdressers who are incredibly concerned about telling everyone that they’re neither gay nor trans, to distance themselves from those who they believe are guaranteed to have low social status.
LikeLiked by 7 people
Huh, odd to see Ozy writing (some fairly standard) anti-identity stuff. 😛 More indication perhaps that the “identity” people complain about and the “identity” Ozy tells us is a good thing are not actually the same thing.
LikeLike
What if most of the “signaling” we do is actually to ourselves? Convincing ourselves we’re not Fake Gay or Fake (Job Title) or Fake Democrat, etc. Fakes do actually exist, and we’re hardwired to detect signs of fakery/low-commitment behavior in others. Consciousness itself might be a rogue inward turn of social cognition, that turned out to be adaptive for precisely this reason. If that’s the case, reassuring people that they can’t possibly be fakes, which is how I read your sentence as delivered in the generic second person, is futile and possibly even harmful.
LikeLike
Okay. So describe a Fake Gay who wants to have sex with men and doesn’t want to have sex with women. What traits does he possess? A shoddy understanding of musical theater?
LikeLiked by 3 people
It’d be someone who is homosexual without participating in gay culture, enduring the hardships others have to endure for that participation. I’ve seen a lot of backlash recently against “assimilated”, buttoned-down, suburban gays (this Tumblr post is a good example — TW for extremely offensive language), which is a pretty clear example of the label/identity or fake/real tension. “These people are violent oppressors playing pretend compassion” is the money quote.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The fact that you can’t kick people out of the sexual orientation for being conservative seems like more of a feature than a bug.
LikeLiked by 4 people
How is that any better than that “fake geek girl” nonsense?
LikeLike
In an abstractly normative sense, I agree. People shouldn’t be so obsessed with policing the boundaries of identity. However, like most apparently negative behaviors, there are pragmatic reasons for it. Just telling people “Don’t do that,” or worse, “Ignore others who do it,” is not going to be effective.
When it comes to human nature, bugs and features are notoriously hard to disentangle.
LikeLike
They vote republican.
LikeLike
>this Tumblr post
I thought “Fucking normies, REEEEEEEEEEE” was a 4chan meme, TMYK.
LikeLike
‘fucking normies, REEEEEEEE’ was/is a 4chan meme; it got assimilated by tumblr as part of the general tumblr pepe revival of the last year
LikeLike
“Okay. So describe a Fake Gay who wants to have sex with men and doesn’t want to have sex with women. ”
I think the problem is the terminology. You are conflating gay and homosexual.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/05/can_you_be_homosexual_without_being_gay_the_future_of_cruising_drag_and.html
LikeLike
I’m honestly confused why our go-to hypothetical of a Fake Gay is a guy who wants to have sex with men but who doesn’t conform to The Gay Aesthetic or Politics.
I mean, the first hypothetical I imagine is someone who really wants to conform to the aesthetic, but who isn’t actually attracted to men, or who is not a man.
LikeLiked by 3 people
“Okay. So describe a Fake Gay who wants to have sex with men and doesn’t want to have sex with women. What traits does he possess? A shoddy understanding of musical theater?”
What about a Fake Bisexual who has never been in any kind of relationship with a person of the same sex, never had serious romantic feelings for someone of the same sex, never officially “came out” to friends or family, has only had sex or relationships with opposite sex partners.. but, like, totally made out with someone of the same sex while drunk at a party this one time and it was kinda hot?
Or the Fake Genderfluid/Genderqueer/Demigender/Bigender who experiences no gender dysphoria, is totally comfortable with their assumed gender identity and resulting pronouns/treatment/etc, and only brings up their non-cisness when it’s convenient for them to get Progressive Brownie Points for doing so (while, again, never having any serious conversation about it with friends/family or feeling particularly inclined to bring it up when it would not bring them any kind of benefit)?
I think those are the kinds of fakes most people are thinking of.
LikeLike
@Anon: Is the “I’ve never actually done it but I have the potential to” bisexual really any more annoying than the rainbow bedecked, affected lisping, freshly out gay man? The only thing that made the former more annoying, IME, is that the latter wore out his welcome a long time ago while the former was receiving validation – and thus much noisier – much more recently.
There’s value to discussing the people who signal for tribal membership purposes over people who signal for, say, advertising purposes (for the LGB part of the alphabet soup) or to more easily pass as the identity they want to project (for the Ts). Signaling for tribal membership often becomes excessive, and thus obnoxious. But tying it to “fakeness” creates a contrary position of “realness” and that creates even more messes down the line.
(Aside to the trans community, though: The bi community did take some serious PR damage from “allies”. Some of whom were well intentioned but didn’t know when they were doing more harm than good, many of whom were opportunists quick to jump on a trendy cause when it was to their benefit but never around when there was a mess to clean up. Those same types are taking advantage of the counterculture cachet of the trans community right now. And to prevent similar PR problems from happening, smart people really should think about how to mitigate damage from both overzealous allies and opportunistic hangers on.)
LikeLike
It seems pretty trivial to fake being bi? Many people do not change partners very often and some people date only rarely if at all. Even if people only see you dating one sex they will not get suspicious unless you have a ton of different partners.
Claiming to be bi has alot of benefits. You get access to LBGT spaces. You also get some defense against being attacked for having political opinions while being cis-het (though this defense is far from iron clad). Alot of people also enjoy the “culture” of the LBGT community and claiming to be bi means they are more likely to be genuinely welcome (not just an “ally”).
Perhaps this is part of the reason there is stigma against bi-sexuals in the LGBT community. It is, of course, also possible to claim to be homosexual. But if you then ever date someone of the opposite gender people you will have alot of explaining to do!
LikeLiked by 2 people
I will note I am not in favor of questioning bi-sexual people! But I am not personally interested in keeping spaces “queer.” I do not personally like trying to keep people out of spaces because of things they can’t change.
So I have no particular reason to question bi-sexual individuals.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“You also get some defense against being attacked for having political opinions while being cis-het”
On this note, the tumblr status bump you can claim by shifting from “cis male” to “male presenting genderqueer” is hilariously large.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I feel like you’re speaking my own thoughts about identity. Although now that you have written them, they are your thoughts not mine, which opens them up to more critical examination.
I am not so worried about “fakes”, but something more meta. How do we determine what a label signals in the first place? There obviously isn’t a one-to-one correspondence between labels and signals. As noted the other day, different words are used to mean the same things, and some words are used to mean many different things. We don’t come to this situation by everyone simply picking the label that creates the signal they want.
And perhaps more subtly, most of the things we want to signal are not at all straightforward, and are more like a complex rubric of interaction. It’s not like saying, “guys! I want to kiss you.” It’s like saying, “I’m interested in dating guys, unless you find out that I’m already in a monogamous relationship in which case, don’t be surprised by the gender of my partner. Also maybe you shouldn’t ask me whether I have a girlfriend or whether I want kids, or anything else exceedingly heteronormative. Also sometimes I will talk about gay culture, deal with it.”
Most of the labels under discussion correspond to a particular experience, not a particular signal. This is the economical way to do it, since there are just too many different things we want to signal, so many that we don’t even know all the things we want to signal. So we pick a label corresponding to an experience, and slowly, as a community, we figure out what it should signal.
LikeLike
Not to say that each and every person should feel obligated to think about Deep Essences, but that there is a positive social value in picking and creating labels based on internal experiences rather than external signals.
LikeLike
I’ve actually been thinking about this; I feel like using identities as a signal can be dangerous because what an identity signals will vary from person to person. If I say I’m asexual, asexuals will understand what I mean and it usually works out. But around straight people? Everything goes to hell and it seems to signal “I’m broken and you know my feelings better than I do and I should take your word for who I am instead”. And I certainly don’t want to signal “hey I love being casually gas-lighted!”, so that would mean I’m not asexual to straight people.
Basically, using labels as signals gives control of what the label means to the other person in the conversation- and I can guarantee that will be used by some people to invalidate identities and try to insist everyone is “really” straight, and just doesn’t know themselves well enough. Without having the internal experience to fall back on, it becomes very difficult to say “no seriously I mean I’m asexual and you don’t get to decide who I am”. We need the internal experience to build the signal, and only after a particular internal experience becomes accepted by most people can the identity work as a signal.
LikeLiked by 2 people
THANK YOU.
LikeLike
The way I see it, labels are just a tool to simplify information. In this case, possible combinations of what gender you feel like and what you can be sexually, romantically or in some other way attracted to. But if you need a label for every single combination of these parameters, *they fail at their purpose*. They are no more efficient at conveying information than simply listing the parameters. Their only purpose is differentiating the people who learned the whole list of labels from the ones who can’t be arsed to.
And once there is disagreement about what combinations of parameters are true [insert label] and which ones are fake, the labels are worse than useless.
Obligatory link to LW: http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_inside/
LikeLiked by 2 people
I have heard many times from trans people that it is harmful/stressful for them when they suspect (through subtle cues) that those around them are internally misgendering, even when the others’ pronoun usage and so on is correct. Certainly, a lot of rhetoric around trans acceptance is the idea that a female or male identity is necessary and sufficient for a female or male essence.
In other words, it seems to be the case that identity is sometimes not a label in the sense of how a person wants to be treated, but rather a label in the sense of how a person wants to be categorized or perceived. Certain desired actions would then follow from that basic perception (acceptance in GLBT safe spaces or what have you). In the interpersonal domain, identity is often (usually?) used to signal proper thought, not proper action- which is honestly where the whole thing gets a bit creepy, at least for me personally.
LikeLike
From what I have seen, there is definitely a major focus on essence in trans communities. Some of the arguments about privilege depend upon an essentialist argument and the concept of trans since birth is really prevalent. (The claim that all trans men have male socialization or that all trans women have female socialization) Trans communities tend to promote both deconstructionist view points (I learned the “gender is a social construct” from that social sphere) and highly essentialist ones where what essence people have is used by them to judge how you experienced things or how you have suffered/not suffered.
Actions also get weirdly filtered through that essence. Like a trans woman being aggressive is filtered through one lens and a trans man being aggressive in the same context is filtered through another lens. (Even know as I type this I feel “Oh god, people are going to think I’m saying “What about the mens” and then just totally discredit me whereas if a trans woman typed something similar in a progressive/trans friendly space it would be taken more kindly and I’m not even living as a binary trans man anymore.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
Pingback: Linkspam: July 17th, 2015 | The Asexual Agenda
Pingback: Open Thread and Link Farm: The Scream In Context Edition | Alas, a Blog
Pingback: How many asexuals are there? | Eukaryote Writes Blog