The labels have the character’s name followed by 受 (uke), which means being the receptive or passive partner, or in BL slang means the bottom. Most underrated organizational system ever by the way. Please show this to anyone who claims that “unwoke” Japan doesn’t “shoehorn queerness into everything”.
I’m not really sure what you’re saying here. Society reduces gender to anatomy, therefore the two are completely unrelated, actually? Are you saying it’s wrong for trans people to want bottom surgery?
Wow, that’s a way worse reply than I was expecting! Way to twist what I said about disfiguring “corrective” surgery into transphobia, very pleasant. Not ridiculous at all.
The two are unrelated because the conflation of genitalia and gender is entirely a construction of our society. So in a way, yes.
I wasn’t talking about intersex surgeries, sorry that was unclear.
Look, it’s obvious you and I just don’t mean the same thing by “X is/isn’t inherently gendered”. If genitalia are not gendered, then nothing is, and also any queer labels are all meaningless including straightness and cisness. Which I happen to believe, generally speaking.
But as long as we’re having a conversation about something “being gay” or whatever, then it’s silly to pretend like society doesn’t actually view genitals as associated with gender.
Okay, I was. It’s a good reference point for the concept of anatomy being gendered.
Yes; labels are also constructed things exclusively used simply by people to describe themselves. No one trait of a human is inherently gendered; nothing is. “Cis” and “straight” still have meaning, in fact all queer labels do. Descriptive meanings.
Right but that’s entirely on the person (in this case, the weird sad cis het man) doing the objectifying & presumable agonising about his sexuality. It’s not like it’s impossible that this man could simply be gay and coping weird, but inherently there is nothing gay about his attraction. The anatomy is only gendered in his goofyass mind.
But that’s exactly my point; society does gender anatomy. Society genders a bunch of other things, too. I’m not being prescriptive about it. I’m not saying I think that’s a good thing and we should do it more.
As for whether it’s gay to like dicks, I believe it is at least a little gay, but also I don’t care. Like I said, I think once we start trying to draw form boundaries around queer labels then inevitably people will start to get confused because nobody views it exactly the same way. For example, is a ftm4mtf relationship straight? Yeah, I guess. But it’s also queer. It follows, then, that queerness and straightness are not mutually exclusive, so something can be straight but also a little gay. Or very gay. It’s whatever.
Societal definition doesn’t count as anything like “inherent”…
A trans man in a relationship with a trans woman is undeniably straight, because it is a man and a woman. Whether or not it’s queer is more nuanced, most people would probably say it is, but some trans people don’t want to identify as “queer”. I think straight trans people balking at the queer label might be assimilationist, but I’m also just one person.
Of course you can be both straight and queer. This was a big heady topic until you started seeing more heteroromantic asexual people, who are straight, but asexuality is undoubtedly queer.
You’re sure allowed to believe that a man liking cock is “at least a little gay” based on the fact that straight society deems it so, if you want. But given that cock isn’t actually related to any gender at all, and that men can like cock without being attracted to other men at all, I think that’s a pretty poor stance.
Then nothing can be “inherently gendered” because gender is a social construct.
Yeah, that’s right! Gender Outlaw is a pretty cool book.
Ok sure, I just feel similarly towards sexuality, too. Like if nothing is inherently gendered, then I think sexuality is reduced to just having one’s “type” be a collection of traits. And so queer labels only exist for communicating to others what one’s “type” is.
And if nothing is inherently gendered, then there is nothing real about a person that indicates their gender besides their own feelings which are, at least to some degree, totally unique to their own experience. So “being gay” must be based on people’s internal feelings of gender, and has nothing to do with physical traits. That pretty much is how I feel about it; it’s much more of a vibe than anything real and concrete. I think that’s why people would clock me as gay or even a lesbian before my egg ever cracked.
But I don’t think that’s very useful, so I also consider “being gay” to be shorthand for being into certain physical traits. So men who are into women regardless of their anatomy can absolutely be straight. But chasers who are specifically into our dicks? A little bit gay.