The central importance of love
Fundamentalism requires inflexibility… a personal dedication, not only to being anything but fluid, but to the refusal to acknowledge fluidity in those things in which one is invested… as, say, the interchange between sex, sexuality, gender and identity.
Of course, if one were to be “real”, and not a self-manufactured idea of something, then one might be as interesting, complex - as fluid - as that which one claims to be.
As, for instance, a woman:
Sexual Fluidity
Understanding Women’s Love and Desire
Lisa M. DiamondIs love “blind” when it comes to gender? For women, it just might be. This unsettling and original book offers a radical new understanding of the context-dependent nature of female sexuality. Lisa Diamond argues that for some women, love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships.
This perspective clashes with traditional views of sexual orientation as a stable and fixed trait. But that view is based on research conducted almost entirely on men. Diamond is the first to study a large group of women over time. She has tracked one-hundred women for more than ten years as they have emerged from adolescence into adulthood. She summarizes their experiences and reviews research ranging from the psychology of love to the biology of sex differences. Sexual Fluidity offers moving first-person accounts of women falling in and out of love with men or women at different times in their lives. For some, gender becomes irrelevant: “I fall in love with the person, not the gender,” say some respondents.
Sexual Fluidity offers a new understanding of women’s sexuality–and of the central importance of love.
“I fall in love with the person, not the gender.” Something I hear a lot from ciswomen… and from transwomen less politically committed to “being real,” and more, well… just real.
Lisa’s logic resonates with me. I am attracted to men physically, but tbat is just the physical side of desire. I also recognize in me that I am attracted to personality and intellect more than the physical. So given the right circumstances, gender attraction could be overrun. I feel nothing but revulsion for a Big Dumb Alpha Male type. But a smart, funny, relaxed, average looks guy…That does it for me. A woman of equal characteristics would probably lose that contest, but not a guaranteed loss. These feelings and attractions have only recently started to become clear to me.
I’ve been thinking about something said in a comment, I think it was you and I think it was on transadvocate. Something to the extent that people change during their lives, in terms of sexuality and gender identity (and anything else I guess)- and in how serious their gender dysphoria or their need to transition and all that stuff is in different periods in their lives and regardless of treatment.
I think, identity is a very fulid thing until you find some definition that seems to work, at which point most people sort of settle down and crystalise around it. Which is when it becomes a political thing and starts to get in the way of other peoples definitions. Which is why we get transwars and transadvocates and LGBT rights as a plug-in to human rights and so on and so forth. I don’t know anyone who manages to define themselves just on their own observation of themselves. There’s always others opinions and theories involved. Being is a discourse, like.
It seems that everything we do with the higher sentience our species is supposed to be equiped with focuses on a quest for validation of our selves in some form. Isn’t the conceptionalization of creator gods and abstract absolutes the attempt to pre-emptively validate what we find impossible to validate in any other way?
The crystalization Stassa mentions is a good analogy. We become somewhat rigid, britle and fragile in our investment to our personal validation, and more likely to perceive another’s validation as being dangerous or destructive to our own in such a state. It take alot of effort to remain completely fluid. It means denying yourself the certainty of any validation outside your own.
Stassa: “Being is a discourse.” Yes. Exactly. Of course, some would argue that such an idea is postmodern nonsense. But my observation is that people who argue most strongly against trans identity - and indeed, against the complexities of life in general - tend to be very blunt, unimaginative folks with a visible hostility to anything that challenges their flimsy certainties. Their chief mode is to dismiss as “pseudo intellectual” anything which they are too lazy or sclerotic to bother with.
Emma: I find that such brittleness is the sign of a weak constitution, and a lot of fear. Of course, it’s understandable… we are, after all, social animals, and validation/identification is a process of interaction (a “discourse” as above). Who are we but what others agree we are? That’s why fundamentalists believe that gender-baiting is such an effective insult… because nothing could be more horrible than to be anything but precisely what you proclaim and defend.
He he. Nobody can call me a pseudo- intellectual for long… Truth is there’s quite a bit of pseudo-intellectualisering in the world of transpolitics, and on the side of the “good guys” (god make them!) A lot of it revolves around coming up with catchphrases (like mine) instead of honest debate. Which is one reason why I enjoyed our recent tag-team, ’cause you recognise that relying on slogans is lazy-assery too. I’m sad I couldn’t join you in the transadvocate debates btw