blacktailcat:

anaisnein:

ill formed thought:

we’re now working with (arbitrary but useful) separate categories for sexuality, gender, and gender expression.

what may be missing is sexual expression. and maybe kink and poly should be framed as falling under sexual expression. like, these are ways of being SNC, maybe.

of the current three, gender expression is kind of given short shrift in the discourse; there are comprehensible reasons for that and yet it’s not a particularly satisfactory state of affairs. bigtime competing access needs, alas. and presumably the same sorts of issues would arise around how to deal discursively with sexual expression. so my bringing this up may just be doubling/mirroring the can of worms we already have to contend with on that front, i.e., maybe I’m not helping.

but if nothing else it might help some ppl wrap their heads around what these things are even doing in the conversation, why they keep coming up, why there need to be ways to talk about them. like, even if you end up at the conclusion that expression stuff needs to be deprioritized in favor of identity stuff, maybe just in certain contexts, having the lexicon with which to articulate why and acknowledge tradeoffs and so on is going to be useful and might help dial down some of the unthinking contempt.

I’ve been personally categorizing ‘sexual expression’ as a 4th category for a while. It seems like the obvious extrapolation of the general consensus on how to talk about gender vs sexuality. If gender expression is a thing, sexual expression has to be a thing, too. They’re related but can be conceptually separated, and sometimes that’s useful. Especially when you start getting into kinks that are all about presenting as one gender, but being treated as a second one during a scene, crossdressing, stuff like that. And poly, too, of course – including desiring sex with multiple partners at a time, and so forth… that’s all specific expressions of a person’s sexuality, that isn’t necessarily easily expressed by just talking about who you are or who you’re attracted to – it’s also about what you’re attracted to and desire.