Eh. Labels.
Yeah, simplistic labels don’t really work here. Both sexuality and gender are on spectra, and when you combine them as in this case, they get exponentially more complicated.
Just roll with it. What Elliot Page and/or his significant others label their sexuality has zero impact on your life.
Labelling people is a generally bad idea. It’s ok for auto parts and the like, but it works poorly with people.
Which is also true of almost every other person on Earth. Hopefully the few people who do have an impact on your life have a positive one.
Good call.
True, although AFAICT it still leaves unclear the question of whether the person is attracted to the gender identity or the biological sex, or both, or some combination of characteristics thereof.
Is someone who’s attracted to a transgender man an androphile? Does the answer to the question change depending on what genitalia the transgender man has? Etc.
If there aren’t clear categorical answers to such questions, and there probably aren’t, then terms like “androphile” and “gynephile” just add one more layer of idiosyncratic complexity and confusion to the complexity and confusion inherent in the terms “gay”, “straight”, “man”, “woman”, etc. Nothing about human sexual biology and psychology can really be neatly broken down into simple mutually exclusive categories.
Absolutely true; any classification scheme will always include some edge cases that don’t fit neatly into any of the categories. Even if you explicitly include an “other” category, there will be some cases on the edge between “other” and one of the previous categories.
But that doesn’t mean that classification schemes are not useful anyway.
One problem with classification systems is the presumption that people have rigid preferences. Some, maybe most, probably do, but others clearly don’t. I wish we’d be less hung up on classify people as “straight” or “gay” and just accept that even someone who the vast majority of their life might have heterosexual relationships could have a homosexual relationship at home point and still be the same person. A lot of people will adhere to a category but should it really matter if they do or don’t?
I guess I don’t see how these classifications imply rigidity.
The classification system seems useful and appropriate to me because a large majority of people do maintain steady orientation (consistently gay/straight/bi) throughout most of their lives; and people who are fluid may also find the terms useful in social interactions, even if their orientation varies over time.
Unless a classification system is simply wrong or inherently bigoted (anything where one category is “normal”!), I don’t think it’s to blame for any misconceptions or bigotry. Many people just have those misconceptions.
Wouldn’t the term bisexual cover these people?
Someone can be consistenty bi throughout their life. Or they can vary over time, often called fluid.
Maybe.
I don’t know - if a person lives 100 years and for 98 of those years only pursues heterosexual relationships but for two years had a same-sex affair… is “bisexual” really the best descriptor? Aren’t they predominantly heterosexual? Maybe it’s not so much they were attracted to someone of the same sex as attracted to that one person. Or maybe they didn’t have an opportunities for their preferred sort of relationship for those two years but still desired intimacy? Or flip it around for someone homosexual for 98 out of 100 years.
It’s not the system so much as how it is used. I do think people are inclined to put other people in boxes because that means they don’t have to do as much thinking. I think the labels have some use, most people do have largely consistent preferences over a lifetime, I also think for a lot of people the walls of those boxes and pigeonholes are a bit porous.
Yes.
Bisexuals can vary considerably in how bisexual they are. Some might have equal preference/attraction to men and women. Some might have attraction for both but still prefer one over the other. Also, sometimes that “bisexuality” has more to do with the social environment a person is in than what they might prefer in a more typical situation. As an example, significant numbers of people who would normally be considered heterosexual will, in a same-sex environment for a long time, engage in homosexual relationships (best known from prisons, but there are other circumstances where that might occur). It’s not so much a preference as there being no other outlet for that sort of urge/relationship. Other people will remain celibate in such circumstances. Is someone in that circumstance truly bisexual or are they lonely and desiring of human touch to the point where they consider pairing off with someone they might not otherwise pair with?
And then it gets all mixed up with prejudice and cultural baggage.
That’s certainly true. Imagine a 20 year old virgin bisexual (let’s say male) who falls in love with a woman and gets married. He’s monogamous, so he doesn’t have sex with anyone, male or female, except his wife. They’re married for 60 years, until he dies. He was bisexual the entire time, but refrained from having sex with males and females simply because he was married.
If people feel free to find their sexuality among all the fluid concepts we will probably have (or already have) the vast majority of people being bisexual by some definition. We are talking about sexual attraction, not all that simple to determine. Some people may have an attraction that does not materialize in actual sexual activity, and attractions that change throughout some peoples lives. Many people categorized as homosexual in the past have already tried sexual activities with members of the ‘opposite’ sex, culture drove people towards permanent heterosexual status and many simply followed along until facing the fact that their sexuality was not aligned with that concept. We should expect to see greater fluidity over time. But we shouldn’t continue to assume there is any category covering the vast majority of people, it likely won’t be permanent lifetime heterosexual and homosexual status.
Which personally I believe is a reason to stop the categorization of sexuality. We don’t need to label sexuality in the way it has been done in the past. Scientific specifications of sexuality will continue I’m sure, but they will just show us that people don’t fit into a few simple categories. My humble opinion that is.
Though are the words I used for a while, but then I used it while talking to a trans person, and they told me that, while they know it’s not bad, they didn’t like the word “gynophile” due to a stupid “scientific transphobia” concept called “autogynophilia.”
I’ve since switched to mixing my Latin and Greek and using femiphile.
There are many people who are deeply invested–whether consciously or unconsciously–in maintaining the hierarchy of gender and/or sex. The sensible ideas you offer here are a direct threat to that hierarchy.
In other words, the forces imposing misery on so many who depart from the average in all these ways relating to both sex and gender, are persistent and political. (And here I mean ‘political’ in the basic sense of ‘relating to power,’ though certainly various political parties do weigh in on these matters for their own purposes.)
IME, younger people in non-conservative social groupings are way more fluid now than they were when I was their age (in a similar non-conservative milieu that was very tolerant of variant sexualities). Way more likely to be nonbinary, or to try on different categories for matching their internal sense. Which is great.
That would also be great, but I don’t see it happening now.
I think that depends where things settle down. If, 50 years from now, the vast majority of people are some combination of genderfluid and attractionfluid, then great. On the other hand, I’d be a bit surprised if there aren’t still enough people who identify primarily as one gender and are attracted primarily to the other gender that “nah, don’t bother setting John up with Jim, John’s pretty darn straight” won’t still be a useful concept to be able to communicate with a single word.
I think they have a perfect opportunity to not make a big deal out of this. They already have triggered numerous butterfly effects through their constant time travel. So, one of the effects just happens to be that Vanya is male now. That allows for the actor’s and the character’s gender to be normalized. If they make a huge plot point out of it, then that risks veering into how badly transgenderism has been handled in Star Trek: Discovery.
I would say that they have an even more perfect opportunity to not make a big deal out of it, by just saying that he transitioned, and that’s it, and not saying any more about it. You know, like we should be doing in our world, even without time travel.