I’m bisexual, and if a lesbian turned me down because I still have an attraction to men, I would 100% understand. But you have to know this: lesbians’ boundaries are to be respected, regardless of whether or not it personally affects you. There are several reasons a lesbian might not want to date a bisexual woman, and NONE of those reasons include some kind of hatred against bi women. Reasons I’ve heard are: don’t want sexual exposure to men (STIs, HPV), not having their relationship taken seriously, want to date another lesbian who will understand her experiences, etc etc. Ask a lesbian for more reasons. Regardless, you can’t take rejection personally and call it “-phobia.”
we’ve taught girls to romanticise nearly everything a boy does. when i was younger i thought it was cute that boys chased the girl even after she said no. i loved it when after a girl moved away from a kiss, the guy would pull her back and force it on. i thought a guy saying ‘i won’t take a no for an answer’ was passionate and romantic. we’re literally always teaching girls to romanticise abusive traits.
Mesobinary is a term for people who feel like their gender identity and/or experience is related to both binary genders in some way.
It’s mainly a term for discussing the issues of having such an identity, while living in an exorsexist society that constantly tells/forces/etc. people to pick one binary gender.
You can read more about it and the system it’s in here, here and/or here.
Mesobinary, and other alibinary system terms, are not genders, or gender alignments, or ways to group specific gender identities. One can identify as mesobinary for being a man/woman bigender person or a man/woman androgyne, but one can also be a librandrogyne, an altefluid person, an ambonec, a millegender person, a genderfae person, a nonbinary person without further labels, and so on, and identify as mesobinary.
Meso means middle. My intention in coining mesobinary as such has to do with how mesobinary people are often asked/forced to “pick a side” between labels for men and labels for women, groups for men and groups for women, and so on, when they /do/ have ties to both of these groups, and thus they are in a way “in-between” those choices, regardless of their actual gender identity, or regardless of their actual preferences regarding those choices (man, woman, both, neither or in-between when that’s possible).
I’m using meso here to give people a starting point to remember this term. The same goes for exobinary, ideobinary and viabinary. These are just okay-ish prefixes, and not necessarily accurate depictions of the gender identities people in each of those groups use.
However, someone asked me (it’s on this blog) about changing the term or using an alternate term, because people who relate to being both men and women in some way while not relating to being “in-between” binary genders may think mesobinary can’t describe them accurately.
I talked with other people about this, and one of them asked me to make this post, separate from the ask, so people can see the context before responding.
Basically, the question is: do you feel like mesobinary is too inaccurate a word to describe people who may not feel any connection to being in-between binary genders? Do you feel like ambisobinary would be a better word, even if it may not be so intuitive?
I don’t think there’s a need for substituting the word (when meso- is more known), anfisobinary seemed to be an alternate good term (as in anfisian with Greek etymology).
My experience with mesobinary: I do have some connections to binary-ness, but my womanhood and manhood are kymenian xenine pixelgenders (I’m attraflux, sometimes they grow up into semigenders, magigenders, nanogenders, antigenders, but never fully comgenders, supragenders nor ultragenders). I’m more like otherly gendered than non-binary I’d say, because some of my genders are adherent to the gender binary (it makes sense that I am anonbinary, beyond binarity and non-binarity). But that’s my intrapersonal world, I know I fall as well in abinary and alibinary systems. It’s really hard to me that all my gendered-ness part is divided in (demi)agender and (demi)comgender.
Sure male-female genders are nonbinary, but not as in nonbinary monogender / suptilian is mostly represented. For example, instead of «just» putting the “other” or “X” gender options in documents sometimes I’d «also» like to choose male AND female in formularies.
I HAVE MASCULINE TRAITS AND FEMININE TRAITS IM SO SPECIAL AND UNIQUE !!
Oh wait, literally everyone who exists has a combination 🤭🤭🤭
i’ve been thinking of that video, you know, the one where she burns her face for the sake of an even skin tone. i watched it at 2 AM after having nightmares about churches. i thought i was still dreaming. she put chemicals on her body and fries in them. undoes in them. what a perfect metaphor for beauty worship.
is this girlhood?
oh we wanted to laugh. dumb bitch! in the comments. but i went back to sleep and i dreamed, not nightmare but not comfortable, of the cakes i will not let myself eat because of the cost of their calories. i started crying, woke up drenched in sweat, worried i’d somehow transported to the kitchen, worried i’d fucked up and actually done it. god, how terrifying. i remember the wave of gratefulness – no, no, this belly is empty, and it is good to be empty, like this.
how is it different. i’m not a dumb bitch; i’m a refined and self-controlled bitch, up on her shit. it is not dumb-bitch to starve yourself. to restrict. it is a respectable lady thing.
i think of her skin, swollen in the first week, while i go to work in heels and a jacket. my male coworker wears jeans. i think of her, waving at her face, while my hair goes up into professional-bun, stays there long after the headache. i think of her, watery-eyed and turning, bird-like, to look upon the damage she’d done – and i think of me, of my sunday-night facemask that “burns, but like, it works.”
razors and waxing and eyebrow tweezers and picking at skin and sucking in and sitting properly and suffocating and curling smaller and self-denying and eyelash extensions and taping the second toe to the third so you can’t feel your shoes anymore and destroying, destroying, destroying
2 AM heard the first words i said that morning, softly.
Justine Troondeau 