Gender Jumper

This put me on a tear on Bsky today: https://lauriepenny.substack.com/p/straight-men-are-now-banned-from. It's so good!

In 2011, I met up with a former mentor, an older cisgay who told me he didn't think straight people should do nonmonogamy. I was indignant, but the only defenses I could offer were about how *I* was doing it right. I kinda agreed about straight men, I just hadn't fully removed the label from myself.

I've known a lot of people who found nonmonogamy after queerness, but I am a rare harbinger whose queerness emerged through nonmonogamy. I'm not saying I always got it right or I never did toxic things, but I always recoiled from them and endeavored to do better. I refused to not be held to account and some of the straightest partners I had at the time became indignant that it was so important to me, that I stayed friends or partners with flawed individuals instead of throwing them away. That I believed in changing myself rather than blaming others and scorching where they trod.

In my master's thesis on caregivers, I cited J. Jack Halberstam's IN A QUEER TIME AND PLACE and embraced his framing that existing outside of normative, consumer-oriented procreation was just as queer as any intimate relationship. It's one's relationship with power that determines queerness.
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Straights who refuse to unpack the power dynamics in their relationships will always falter at polyamory or any other nonmonogamous model. And those who do not refuse seem to, over time, figure out we are not so straight after all.
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If you're worried that I'm conflating unalike concepts, I'll just say it for you: this is the vision of queerness that scares right-wingers most. Behind their pearl-clutching over children and triggers of disgust, they don't want a complex, dynamic world because they can't control it.
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It's not even about profit: diverse human experiences lead to better products and get closer to perpetual growth than any top-down hierarchy every could. There is data on this.

Hierarchies exist because someone wants to outsource difficult decisions & others are eager to assert preference as truth.
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The corporate class want us monogamous & cheating because it fosters loneliness & inarticulate feelings that can be channeled into impulse buying & status protection on a macro scale. Too busy to care.

The queer class just wants to exist and care for each other & figure things out on a micro scale.
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Only one of these visions includes room to care about how our actions affect others beyond our bosses' bottom lines. But it will require constant, recurring introspection until the infrastructure of choice (intimacy, purchase, politics, engagement) makes room for anything else.
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Thanks Laurie Penny for saying what needed to be said: Relationships are always political, & people who are comfortable with their social power make polyamory worse for the rest of us.

Let's save all our sexual and romantic liberation for those whose practice includes liberating others.

ganked from another conversation:

I mean maybe it just reflects that gender is contextual performance, and in some parts of our lives we were performing for the audience and some parts we're performing for ourselves.

I changed my name around the same time I started openly identifying as genderfluid, and even though I treated them as separate journeys they intermingled a lot. I have no problem referring to that earlier version of myself (to whit: I already refer to that era in the third person like another entity rather than a deadname, per se) as a "boy", but explicitly BOY: he was young and naïve and ignored his genderfuckery and a lot of other phenomena that have since come to define me.

I also think (and I've heard this from several other nonbinary folks of various flavors) there's something fluid about youth that is expected to become rigid and playless (antonym of playful that I just made up but should probably use somehow...) that is not available to "men" and "women". Gender constructs are socially prescribed, and I've often felt that cultures who are more rigid about binary genders are creating the need for third genders, whereas if a culture allowed for a less rigid spectrum some portion of trans folks may just be able to vibe within those broader, more flexible categories.

TL;DR: a culture can have a finite number of genders or it can have rigid gender boundaries, but it cannot have both. I envision this as a giant, flexible tent held up with two poles vs. an estate with two locked mansions and thousands of tiny houses being built on the lawn.

Just learned that the person who first coined "neuroqueer" isn't someone whose work I want to be boosting, but I haven't heard any viable alternatives, so I'm wrestling with that.

There is a demonstrated correlation between neurodivergent traits and LGBTQ+ identities, so it only makes sense to have an intersectional term for someone whose neurodivergence affects their interest/ability in performing assigned gender. I doubt she's going to make any money off it at this point, but is that justification enough for continuing to use it?