Demisexual

A demisexual is a person who does not experience sexual attraction
unless they form a emotional connection. It's more commonly seen in,
but by no means confined, to romantic relationships. The term
demisexual comes from the orientation being "halfway between" sexual
and asexual.

I first encountered the term "demisexual" in online forums for genderqueer and other gender-variant people. It was as new to me as my own identifying term ("gender invert") is to most people in the LGBTQ scene. I'd heard of demigirl and demiboy (terms used by some genderqueer folks) but demisexual was one I hadn't encountered before.

DEMI means "half" or "halfway" -- so a demigirl would be someone halfway between gender-neutral and feminine, for example. When applied to sexual, though, it was less obvious to me what it would mean to be half-sexual, in addition to which the people who identified as such didn't appear to be using it to mean they were less sexual than most other people; instead they seemed to be using it to mean their sexual interests were confined to relationships in which they had a meaningful emotional connection.

It struck me as a pattern strongly associated with feminine sexuality. We have the cultural notion that women and girls want to have a relationship with a boyfriend, and within that context, to have good sex. That the sexuality of boys and men, by comparison, is considerably less constrained to situations where there's that kind of intimate connection. Female exceptions may exist, but where they do, their femininity is cast into some degree of dubiety by the fact that they are willing to jump into no-strings casual sex with the same non-demi enthusiasm as a typical male. Such women are often assumed to lack appropriate amounts of self-esteem (a suspicion less often aimed at promiscuous male people) and they are tagged with epithets and descriptors like "slut" and "wanton" and "easy" and a host of other nouns and adjectives that all underline their lack of normalcy, their deviance, the fundamental wrongness of them being that way.

It's reasonable to say that being demisexual is prescriptive for women, whether it is accurately descriptive or not. Girls and women are under a great deal of social pressure to take on the trappings of being demisexual, to give it lip service and keep up the superficial appearance of being that way.

It's also reasonable to point out that we have plenty of cultural images of women's sexuality as reactive to sexual attention, in such a way that a popular depiction of the very un-demi male sexuality takes the form of the seducer, the sexual pursuer who elicits female sexual participation not by connecting to women with an emotional bond but by circumventing her obligatory pretense of being demisexual and appealing to her rather non-demi susceptibility to sexual opportunities.




It certainly seems useful to split off the specific notion of being demisexual from the culturally conventional notion of femininity, because there are other characteristics that are also deemed to be part of femininity (and of feminine sexuality), such that a person could participate in being feminine without being demisexual. It gives us specificity; it lets us zero in on one aspect of a person's nature instead of referencing a huge library of loosely-associated characteristics.

I'm not sure I quite qualify as demisexual, myself. I've never craved sexual activity that was deliberately lacking in emotional connection, that's for sure, and I've always wanted to have a close intimate caring relationship. But that's not quite the same as saying I'm utterly without any sexual attraction to a stranger, a casual acquaintance, someone I don't have an emotional connection to. I can have such attractions, and I do. Acting on them is messy and complicated and more trouble than it's worth, and I hate that perpetual accusation that insofar as I'm a male I only care about sex and not for loving relationships. But once again, that's not the same thing as saying I'm incapable of finding someone quite enticingly appetizing, entirely delicious on visual and other superficial grounds. My disinclination to actually engage in casual sex isn't due to a lack of appetite outside of emotionally connected relationships.

That makes me wonder how many self-identified demisexual folks would say much the same thing: whether they'd say they completely do not feel any attraction outside of relationships, or would instead say that satisfying sexual experiences seem to be tied to caring connections and therefore they are uninclined to act on attractions outside of them.

And, because it's kind of one of those fabled living-room elephants, how being demisexual as a female-bodied person differs from being demisexual as a person who presents as male. Because the cultural context is going to paint them quite differently.

And as a gender invert, I'm especially curious about how demisexual male people who are attracted to female folks experience their sexual lives, their sexual orientation, and their gender identity. Because I found that being even as demisexual as I am to be entirely polarizing and gender-invalidating, and a big part of how I came to identify as a gender invert.

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Physical Morphology, Assigned Sex, and the Binary

The transgender community isn't quite monolithic but in general, within trans groups there's not much welcome for a lot of focus (prurient or otherwise) on a person's physical sex. Sexual morphology. Plumbing. Whatever you want to call it.

Within recent months I've been in conversations where trans (and occasionally nonbinary) folks have said:

• Sex is a social construct. The notion that it exists as something separate from gender identity is mostly bullshit. If your identity is that you are a woman, then your body is female.

• The only relevant way to designate the difference between a transgender person and a cisgender person is that in the case of a transgender person a misidentification was made, assigning them to the wrong sex instead of getting it right, back when they were born: assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth.

• Anyone who would consider another person's genital configuration a dealbreaker in dating or sex is prejudiced and all wrapped up in transphobic thinking; there's no defensible legitimate reason to make an issue of that, or to want to know their date's erogenous-zone plumbing in advance, or to express a preference.

I'm not on board with all that and sometimes I feel erased by it. This LGBTQ rainbow is supposed to accommodate variation and diversity, and some of this "party line" on physical morphology isn't accommodating me worth a shit, and I'm theoretically part of this rainbow, dammit. Can we talk?

OK, you want to talk about social constructs, let's examine the social construct of clothing, and the ubiquitous use of it. No, I don't mean dresses versus arrow shirts and suit jackets, I mean clothes period, as opposed to not wearing them. Ever been to a naturist enclave? Yeah, that's the environment formerly known as a "nudist camp". Imagine one. Lots of people, no clothings.

Let's watch some other things getting socially constructed in this environment. Starting with me, upon my arrival. And you, upon yours, if you're willing.

"Assigned male at birth" and "assigned female at birth" make it sound like all the assigning is done by an OB/GYN doctor who makes a pronouncement between clamping off the umbilical cord and recording the Apgar score, and then wraps the identifying merchandise in a diaper and from then on no one does any assigning, they just rely on the original that the doctor made in the delivery-room pronouncement.

But that's not how it works, and it's certainly not what's happening now as we step forth into the naturist preserve. One thousand sighted naturists take a glance and make an assessment. Just like folks out there in the clothed world, they assign most of the people they encounter to the category "male" or to the category "female". This isn't gender identity. This is assigned sex. They haven't asked you about your pronouns yet. They dont' know if you conceptualize yourself as a man, a woman, or something else. They're assigning you in their heads based on what they can see. Unlike the folks in the clothed world, they're relying directly on your physical morphology. Basics.

Yes it's social. Yes, they're relying on categories they learned from the society surrounding them. But their assessment relies on a generalization, and at the level of generalization a two-value categorical system works for the overwhelming majority of folks who walk in this door. Let's take a step back. How'd they get this categorical system they're using? They just soaked it up from our culture, right? Well, let's pretend they didn't, and start them off from scratch, no preconceived notions about the existence of sexes. What's going to happen?

Generalization's going to happen. It's how our minds work; we're good at it. We categorize stuff. Generalization isn't politically evil -- despicable shitty attitudes towards the exceptions to the rule are entirely optional and not an inherent part of generalizing.

I don't think it's inevitable that they'll develop a two-category system. For example, they might create a four-category system, based on the physical differences between prepubescent people and adults as well as the penis versus vagina thing, for instance. But I think a two-category system is probably more likely than anything else. After awhile the naturists are going to notice some of the exceptions, the people whose morphological configuration doesn't categorize simply and easily into either of those two groups -- and in the absense of clothing to hide it and make it stay hidden, there would come the recognition of intersex people. (Not that all intersex people are visually identifiable even in a naturist setting, but some would be).

And into this environment strolls a transgender person. A visual assessment is made and along with it an assignment. Regardless of outcome, our naturist population is not "getting it wrong" when they do this: we're talking about assigned sex, not gender identity. That which is attributed to us by others is a part of our experience, and each attributor is not merely imposing a value, they're recognizing the value most likely imposed by a huge host of other people and realizing you've been perceived as such.

A binary transgender person who pursues the stereotypical path of transitioning is a person who seeks morphological reassignment in order to obtain categorical reassignment. Such a person changes their body, which changes its visual aspects and causes the naturists to categorize them differently.

In the clothed world, there are more options for how to present in such a way as to be categorically assigned differently, but the underlying premise is the same.

So what's all this about? What's the color and shape of the axe I brought to this grinding wheel?

I'm a gender invert. Male girl person. My gender identity is entirely feminine. I wasn't a boy. I'm not a man. You can understand a lot about me simply by assuming I'm a woman and treating me accordingly. In general I would say to the world: I wish you would. But the world has not done so because the world harbors notions about what my male body means, and projects those notions onto me. They're wrong, but the fact that they've done so all my life has given me a different set of experiences. A lot of those experiences have been vividly unpleasant, which is why I would opt to talk about them, to make an issue of them, a social issue, a political issue. But I can't do that if I can only identify myself as a woman. They aren't the experiences of a woman, generally speaking. They're the specific experiences of a male woman, a person who perpetually gets assigned by others as male, because of my physical morphology. Meanwhile, they also aren't the experiences of a male, generally speaking, either. They're the specific experiences of a male woman, a femme, a sissyboy, a girlyboy, someone markedly different from the other males.

I can't talk about my stuff if I'm in a social environment where I'm not supposed to refer to my body parts, my physical morphology (and the resulting assigned sex that people foist onto me) as relevant parts of my identity and experience. I am silenced if transgender people insist that "male" is identity, not morphology, that "penis" is what you choose to designate whatever morphological part you wish to identify as such with no morphological definition to constrain it, that no one has any business rummaging around between the legs of people rhetorically and categorically because none of that is anyone's damn business. It silences me and erases me and prevents me from speaking from my own experience as a genderqueer person, an LGBTQ person with my own concerns and considerations.

I don't think intersex people find it welcoming to be told that a person's morphology isn't politically or socially relevant, either, and many of them have told me so and given me support on this, and I appreciate that. They, too, get silenced and subsumed in dialogs about gender and physical sex and operations and choice and so on. But they're probably sick and tired of people who aren't them who point to them to make a rhetorical point, as if they were an interesting concept instead of real people and so on, so I shouldn't dwell further on that aside from recommending that you listen to them too.

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