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.