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I think (and I might be in the minority here) that sexuality is a lot more fluid than "political" ideas/identities like gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and all the other variations can cover.
Well, yes... but that leads on to the question of whether these "political" (I'd suggest "taxonomic" as an alternative) terms are trying accurately and completely to describe the sexuality of everyone who uses them. If they are, then it's pretty clear they are failing. So, what's the language for? In the first instance a term like "asexual" can provide a sense of identity (and a rallying point) for people who are not currently adequately served by the currently available sexual terminologies. Like, if nobody was ever expected to be straight, nobody would have needed to come up with the idea of being gay, and onwards.
So, maybe it's a question of how you interact with those labels. If you are confident, you may decide that you don't need the identity or the community of a terminolgoy to describe your sexuality, or you might decide that, whereas none of the terminologies precisely describes you, they do contain useful conceptual elements to help put the picture together.
Your mother seems a good example to work from, DJKM. She was presuambly sexually attracted to and sexually active with men for one part of her life, and subsequently had a long-term relationship which clearly doesn't qualify as a heterosexual relationship. That gives her a lot of options for descriptions of this single set of actions. She could say that she was always a lesbian, and that she was simply not given a chance to find this out for many years (Joanne Russ says something along these lines- that she never realised that she _could_ be a Lesbian, and the therapy that she went to to address her deep unhappiness with her marriage aimed to repair a heterosexuality that was assumed to exist rather than acknowledge the possibility that it didn't). She could say that she identified as and felt straight for that part of her life she spent in relatiionships with men, and now identifies as and feels not-straight, and neither condition invalidates the other. She can say that gender is not a deal-breaker, and it so happens that the qualities she looks for in a partner have been most successfully instantiated by a woman rather than a man. These are all different readings of the same situation, just like Stephen Fry can say "I was asexual (to get back to asexuality) for a long time, then I found out that my lack of sexual desire was a sympton of self-loathing and have no become a sexual being" - that may or may not disqualify him from considering himself previously asexual. |
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