I'm a Big Strong Pheromone Factory

gormanda:

pheromonefactory:

ephemeralcat:

lipstick-feminists:

Interesting!

I don’t like this. Sexuality is not linear (no room for trisexual/polysexual/pansexual/asexual etc people) and neither is gender identity (though adding more colors than pink and blue is a nice improvement, but not all non-binary people identify as genderqueer). I don’t know how I feel about biological sex being linear either, as if intersex people are just gradations of male and female.

These things are aimed and are more targeted to people who are just beginning to understand that gender and sexuality are a spectrum.  And visually I can see it being difficult to portray a spectrum of all these identities.  We need these diagrams as stepping stones to get individuals to a more advanced understanding of the identity spectrums.

I feel like, though, these are the kinds of graphics that lead people to do things like ask bisexuals for their “percents.”  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked that, and I’m never sure how to answer. I don’t half- like girls and half-like guys.  I like them both 100%, really and truly (and I like non-binary folks 100% too, where does that fit in?) I feel like this reinforces the whole ‘not gay enough to be gay, not straight enough to be straight’ vibe :/ I can imagine there are similar issues for the other “in-between” labels.  Also, there’s really no reason to leave asexual out, since it’s not any harder to understand than any other identity…and I kind of feel like it was left out just because there’s no neat little line you could draw for it.  Having a common simple language as a stepping stone is awesome and should definitely be a goal, but oversimplifying things for a graphic at the sake of misconstruing people’s identities concerns me, especially if its the kind of graphic aimed for people who are new to thinking about these things.

I am not condoning them leaving out asexual that is problematic. But again no matter what graphic we use there will always be an identity that will be left out. It’s like a science book being published, and after being out for a year a new edition has to to be published. Because facts are always changing and the same is with sexual and gender identities. We have to recognize that these graphics are good at beginning to educate people who aren’t so versed in the vocabulary of the community. We also have remember that we are very privlidged in being apart of a queer community that is so active, incusive, and very knowledgable about many of the identies.