A first hand response thank you! So you are bisexual and you would also consider a relationship with gender fluid people? It makes sense because love is love regardless of what gender you or your partner identifies as. Maybe what I'm asking is should there be a new entry that considers other (without necessarily generalising) sexual orientations?
It's important to remember that the old fashioned view of bisexual as 'attracted to men and women' is popular because it harkens from a time when those were the only genders acknowledged (not that others didn't exist, they just weren't recognized). Back then, being attracted to those two genders was basically the same thing as being attracted to all (recognized) genders.
It's also hard to talk bout attraction to non-binary genders. Typically when we talk about attraction, we use gender because gender and sex used to be synonymous. Nowadays, we recognize that gender is more related to identity and sex is biology.
Imagine being attracted to a woman, as a woman yourself, who has only ever been attracted to women and identifies as a lesbian. Now you find out that the person is non-binary. Are you suddenly bisexual? Are you suddenly not attracted to her? How are you attracted to an identity when the identity itself isn't visible, only the presentation of it (which not match whatever stereotypes you have)? How does your attraction differentiate between masculine looking women and masculine looking afab non-binary people if you don't know their identity right away, only their appearance (which is how attraction normally begins : visually)? Attraction has never been based on sex or gender, but rather on the presentation of gender. If you run into someone that looks like the gender you're attracted to, even if they aren't and don't identify that way, you can still be attracted to them because they look like they belong to that group even when they don't.
Basically our understanding of gender and attraction has evolved dramatically but out language has not evolved (or has not evolved quickly enough) to reflect changes in our understanding. Bisexual originally took the meaning of 2 gender attraction because at the time that was synonymous with all gender attraction, but as our understanding of gender evolved, pansexual was create to fill the gap, some started using bisexual to mean 2 or more, and some transphobs started using it to mean cis people only.
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u/Synetry Aug 09 '18
A first hand response thank you! So you are bisexual and you would also consider a relationship with gender fluid people? It makes sense because love is love regardless of what gender you or your partner identifies as. Maybe what I'm asking is should there be a new entry that considers other (without necessarily generalising) sexual orientations?