Sexuality is intimately tied to gender identity. For men and women, sexuality primarily centers on penetrative intercourse and the acts of erogenous stimulation. But there’s a whole world of genders out there which have sex differently. And for proof, you only need to look at the sexes of diverse animals in nature. Plants use flowers as sex organs, fish fertilise eggs, and mushrooms are weird. If any of those creatures were intelligent enough to invent gender, their genders would surely involve a different conception of sex.

Certain nonbinary gender identities also have sex weird. For swarmgender and dronegender people, sex is mind-melding. Experiencing oneness of identity with a partner or a collective. I thought I was asexual until the first time I did it, and in fact for a year afterwards until I thought back one day and realised “Wait a fucking minute, that was totally sex!”

Neurotypicals have a hivemind. A very faint and weak one, in comparison to the level of connection I would consider “sex”, but the way everyone is forced to think the same thoughts and be part of a collective is certainly sexual to me. They all have a shared sense of empathy calibrated to one another, and most of them get hostile when it doesn’t work on autistic or narcissistic people. They dehumanise, depersonalise us, or take us to be in bad faith, assuming bad intent. They get violent, at the idea that we will not or cannot at some level mind-meld with them.

And when your sexuality is based on mindmelding, well all of that feels just a bit more personal. Me and my collective don’t let just anyone into our swarm, and I refuse to be part of the neurotypical hive. I used to be, but I don’t know if I even could after discovering myself beyond what neuronormative society will accept as real or possible.

I can take the time to patiently and slowly build a little bridge between myself and one other person, allowing their sense of empathy to work on me. But it’s individualised. The data bandwidth required is too much for a mass broadcast, I need the high fidelity of a personal connection in order to teach someone empathy for any of the strange stuff. So yeah, I have sex with some neurotypicals when they demand to understand me. Their empathy won’t work on me if I don’t fuck them.

But I can’t have sex with everyone. That’s too many people. And there’s times I’m tired, or frustrated, and I don’t want to have sex with someone who’s being rude to me. And then they always come out with “You should be more patient, you should tailor your arguments to me, you shouldn’t call me a transphobe just for spouting rhetoric”.

And, well, I don’t like it when neurotypicals get upset that I won’t fuck them.

  • DroneRights [it/its]@hexbear.netOP
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    1 year ago

    I recommend watching Star Trek: Voyager through a queer lens.

    There aren’t any specific sources on my gender because it’s so uncommon, and so hard to discover about yourself if you do have it. I wouldn’t be surprised if I know more about it than anyone else in the world.

    Try researching “gravity” on the day the apple fell on Newton’s head, and you’ll run into the same problem. Academia and documented science only explore what people have already thought of before and written down. And when it comes to a gender identity that even Hexbear attacked me for having during my first days on the site… yeah, nobody’s gonna publish this stuff and risk all the hate speech they’d receive.

    • Abracadaniel [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Interesting. Why Voyager specifically? Is it because of the isolation of the ships crew, or the presence of 7 of 9 and the exploration of hiveminds/individualilty?

      • DroneRights [it/its]@hexbear.netOP
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        1 year ago

        7/9 and the early borg plotlines. Voyager is crap otherwise. Janeway is transphobic, their native american consultant was a fraud, and I refuse to acknowledge the borg queen as canon given that the borg were explicitly stated to be communists in their first appearance. The entire point of them is they’re communists! But 7/9 is a good drone and watching Janeway misgender it and force it into a species identity it hated is a very good plotline for all the angst and #relatable energy.

        Tuvok also has sex (mind melds) every time they need information or reform out of a criminal, and that’s pretty accurate to my experiences. In TNG they establish it’s a deeply personal experience, and Enterprise uses mind melding as an allegory for being gay, which is actually accurate to my experience. And having the security officer solve every problem with sex is just my life tbh