r u str8?
2014-06-24
one interesting thing that ChellA pointed out to me (that i had noticed but wasn”t really thinking about much up until that moment) was the the network gathering had a lot of queer and/or lesbians attending. which is super cool.
but it also led to this weird thing (note: this isn”t about ChellA anymore, since I”m just referencing her remark and how it got me thinking and not about anything she did), where ppl kept asking me if i was straight whenever i”d mention my bf.
i do get why…
but it was also sort of frustrating because (as far as i know) we never really did a whole “i”m a transpinay, but really i ID as bakla” thing. or never really got deep into talking about trans womanhood beyond the binary (whcih i know some of the people who attended really wanted to talk about this but, idk, we just didn”t end up doing it).
i guess it was mostly weird because while ‘trans woman of colour” doesn”t necessarily equal a queer identity, nor does ‘trans woman of colour” necessarily equal a binary identity.
so when i”d pose the question: does ‘nonbinary” twoc dating a cis man = straight, i”d usually get a ‘no”.
more to the point, i would have to explain that for my ppl/self, sexuality and gender are the same thing. which also means that i refuse to slot myself into pure sexuality discourse.
my gender is bakla.
my sexuality is bakla.
my expression is cozy femme.
my desire is most often for men.
how gay am i?
how straight?
and i”d imagine that some will think “well… cozy femme + man = straight appearing relationship and all the privilege that this entails” which sure. yeah. maybe sometimes. i can own up to this…
but also
that basic assumption (for those who”ve never met me or seen me) is that i regularly read for cis…
which is…
not really a thing for me. i don”t always (or even often, i”d say) read as a cis woman. for me, these days, it is more rare for people to correctly read my gender expression vs. the almost constant and certainly daily misgendering i deal with.
i guess it was just an interesting question to be constantly possed to me, when connecting with other trans women of colour. since, yeah, we can talk until we are blue about colonialism, gender, and oppression, but we still have internalized so much of this discourse that questions like this seem just a-ok to ask, particularly when it wasn”t really relevant to the discussion (like we definitely weren”t talking about sexuality and how it impacts how trans women of colour experience oppression).
just thoughts…</p>