Scarleteen

i'm apart of a plural system and have quite a few other headmates. while we aren't the same person, we definitely do feel connected, and we really do embody the whole 'sharing a brain' phrase, because we aren't as separate as other systems may be. we share the same core beliefs and tend to have very similar thoughts and personalities.

our host, lets call him R, has recently decided to identify as a gay lesbian. there's a lot of reasons for this: he is genderfluid/multigender and is both a guy and also sort of a girl, so the label just feels right and comfortable for him. because of our past, and our current community, R is quite attached to the gay man label, even though he doesn't describe himself as being a man or male. he has always loved men and described his sexuality as just being gay, but in the past few years, R has noticed that sometimes he does have attraction to women. for a while, he felt like he was faking it, but eventually he came to terms with it. other labels like bi, pan, omni, etc didn't feel right to R, and didn't really describe what he was feeling. we found people who were similar, who described themselves as gay pansexuals, bisexual lesbians, etc because of one reason or another. it helped R, and frankly all of us in the system, feel much better about ourselves because we weren't alone in having 'contradictory labels'.

another big reason R decided to use the gay lesbian label was because our system has grown to have more members who are attracted to women. we used to have an overwhelming amount of people who weren't interested in women, but now we've grown to have more people who do like women. R in particular feels very connected to everyone in the system, and so he feels a lot of the 'residue' from when people fronted last and such. he has had interest in women before, but his feelings have definitely been amplified/increased now that we have more people attracted to women in our system (most of whom are sapphic).

we're still insecure about it, as we have other people in our system who use similar 'contradictory labels', and it's been hard on us (especially during pride month) to see a bunch of people online wish death upon m-spec lesbians/gays or anyone who uses sexuality labels 'incorrectly', even though they say they are 'inclusive'. we all feel very connected to one another, and that includes our sexualities, and it just sucks to have to see people commenting 'kys' on posts about m-spec lesbian/gay pride.

i don't really know what i want in a response to this. i guess i just wanted to say how much it just sucks to know that the queer community keep fighting about who gets to what label and other stupid things that don't really matter. i just wish it wasn't like this and that i don't have to be afraid to say im XYZ no matter how 'weird' it may be.

Hey queerlink,

This sounds tough!

I wonder if it'd help to recall that the queer community' is faaaar from a singular thing. Some queer spaces/people can be super accepting of a wide range of identities and open to whatever... whereas some can frankly be down right regressive.

Fundamentally, you don't "have to" engage with any platform, group or person that doesn't give you space to explore your own identity and the language you use to describe it.

I figure that if there are apps that need deleting or servers that need leaving so beit!

You do get to choose who your community is, even if that's just a small circle of close friends, who you trust to be good to eachother.

hiya queerlink!!

if it makes you guys feel any better, we’re a system too who also uses loads of “contradictory” labels!

we can definitely empathize with how hard it is when everyone is treating your identities like they’re the worst thing ever when you’re just sort of chilling. its really tough, especially as a system.

also, sort of piggybacking off of what jacob said, what helped us when it comes to finding more inclusive queer spaces on social media, is mainly engaging in radinclus/critinclus spaces and things similar to it (radinclus being short for radically inclusive, and critinclus being short for critically inclusive). although depending on what your beliefs are when it comes to certain topics, the radinclus tags (at least on sites like tumblr) might include some unsavory or potentially triggering things, so just be cautious (i can elaborate more if you’d like ^^).

sites like tumblr are also great because you can really curate your experience and block tags you dont like.

(if you’ve already done those things tho you can disregard the last 2 paragraphs)

i hope this helped atleast a little bit!! :]