#some of where I'm going with this on a meta-level is that conversations re: aphobia don't make sense without considering embodied experience

[rotten-zucchinis]

Reflections on (my) embodied queerness-- Part 2: confounding queer family members

This is part 2 of a 3-part reflection about some aspects of my own embodied queerness. 

TLDR: This part is about some misunderstandings I’ve had with my lesbian mother and bisexual sister at various points in time, about my queerness. And how experiences of things like homophobia don’t divide up neatly by “identity labels” (or experiences of attraction for that matter). Note: the experiences and reactions of my mother and sister aren’t representative of all lesbians or all bisexual women (or people!)-- I’m talking about them because they’re people in my life, and the whole point is that there *isn’t* a single lesbian, bi and/or asexual experience.

Part 1: Homophobia doesn’t care about “identity” or “attraction” [here]

Part 3: People reading me unpredictably... or as Shaggy from Scooby Doo? [here]

More than a decade ago now, when I first tried to come out to my mother as asexual, she didn’t believe me because I was “obviously queer”. (I’ve written about that more [here].) It took a good while but she now accepts me as both. I think a part of that was her coming to fully accept that I’m still queer, even while I’m also asexual. Coming out as asexual didn’t mean I wasn’t queer and it make me *less* queer. She’s queer too-- she’s a lesbian (she uses both words). She struggled a little to understand that my “queer” is different from hers. 

In some ways she still struggles to understand my queer because my queer life doesn’t look a thing like hers. Her queer life fits neatly into homonormative ideals-- she’s monogamously married to her wife and they’re raising now-teen children. Mine does not. And even after so many years, my mother is still struggling to recognise the important relationships in my life... But at least she’s trying.

Time-skip: A few years back, my gender-conforming bisexual sister (who was just barely coming to a bi / non-hetero identity at the time as she was starting to experience attraction to women for the first time) told me that she’s more “queer” than me and has more of a right to access “queer spaces” than I do *because* she’s had sex with a woman and I haven’t. This conversation came up initially in reference to a particular queer space that she was also claiming was more for her than it was for me (though neither of us ended up participating in it).

It didn’t matter to her that the particular queer space in question was aiming to prioritise trans and/or non-binary folks (like me, and unlike her). And it didn’t matter that I grew up facing all sorts of homophobic bullying in high school (some of which I’ve written about [here] ) ; that I’d been involved in queer spaces for many years, including as a facilitator for a queer youth group; that I’d had long-term intimate partnerships with women and non-binary people (i.e., non-romantic and non-sexual-- QP ones-- which are valid and “still count” as “real relationships”, whatever that means)... Whereas she’d never done any of those things. In her view, she was still more “legitimately queer” and should have “more legitimate access to queer spaces” than me because she’d had sex with a woman once and I hadn’t (and still haven’t).[1] (Incidentally, the space that prompted the discussion was also specifically a Jewish queer space and she recognises that I’m a whole lot more Jewish than she is, but that apparently didn’t matter either.)

I find the criterion of sexual contact to be a particularly strange ticket into queerness. For one thing, does that mean that people who haven’t had sex with anyone don’t belong anywhere? More importantly, it’s private (i.e., the sex itself, though not necessarily the relationship context in which it takes place). But it is something easy to grasp onto or name, and something very specifically tied to a long history of oppression. It just doesn’t work here, in this very different context

Time-skip: The other day, my sister (who is still very new to the world of dating people who aren’t men and who is still coming into a bisexual identity) learned that homophobia still exists. And she brought this up with me, assuming that I wouldn’t already know about it-- apparently since I’m not out there holding anyone’s hand or anything.

Her: “I wanted to tell you something: casual homophobia sill exists! I was on the subway, holding [ partner ]’s hand and people were actually glaring at us!

Me: “Yes, I am quite familiar with the casual homophobia.

Her: “Oh.” [confused] “Well I had no idea.”

Me [thinking quietly to myself]: “Yeah, I know.”

I experience casual homophobia every time I’m out in public. I don’t think I’ve been on the subway in my entire adult life without having someone glare at me, or hold their children a little closer to keep them away from me... I’m not often  out in the world like that with my sister. She hasn’t had many occasions to notice how people look at me first-hand, and hasn’t been ready to understand the kinds of (negative) attention I do garner when she’s seen it. It’s not that I’d never told her-- I had-- but she wasn’t in a position to understand. Not until she experienced it herself.

One of the biggest differences between my sister’s emerging “queer” and my own “queer” is that while hers *can* be private if she wants it to be, mine can’t: mine is publicly visible even when I’m alone. So I face a lot of casual resistance to mine that she doesn’t-- at least at this point in her life. (My queer is also anti-assimilationst and non-homonormative, and while I don’t think that’s a coincidence, that’s also another story.)

The experiences people have facing things like homophobia (or heterosexism or cissexism or transphobia, etc.) out in the world don’t divide up neatly according to “identity”. Asexual people (and aces more generally) are diverse and have a wide range of experiences. Bisexual people are diverse and have a wide range of experiences. Lesbians are diverse and have a wide range of experiences. There are elements of shared experience and solidarity among these identities, but even so, individuals’ personal experiences can vary greatly.

In order to understand the pragmatic realities queer (or otherwise LGBT+) people face in our lives, it’s not enough to understand our queer (or otherwise LGBT+) “identities” or “experiences of attraction”. There needs to be an understanding of how these things are embodied as we move through and interface with the world. And no identity label or string of labels can communicate that on its own.

[1]  The one sexual experience my sister was referencing, by her own description, was in the context of a 3-some involving her, a man she was dating at the time and another woman she was not. While such situations can absolutely be queer, they’re also situations that some heterosexual women sometimes participate in for “non-queer” reasons... So I find that a particularly odd choice of “proof” for someone to deploy in an effort to police “queer legitimacy” based on “same-gender sex”. But then, I don’t believe in a regulatory hierarchy of queer legitimacy based on sex (or anything else), so I’m no expert on where types of sexual experiences should be placed within one. 

Maybe she wasn’t actually trying to talk about the sex per se, but was instead perhaps trying to tap into some “queer” feelings she had about the experience  that made her “legitimately queer”-- feelings that she couldn’t quite express at the time. Even still, that’s not where she went with that in the conversation. And she couldn’t understand the impact because she didn’t really understand how or why I was (and still am) queer or the homophobia I’d been experiencing for so many years.