Sex should never be something you “give in to”. Actually, ANY physical intimacy shouldn’t be something you give into. No matter how “gentle” the pressure, if you at all feel like you are “giving in” when you participate in a physical act, it is wrong. Sexuality is a gift. It’s beautiful when you give it to someone and they should be amazed by the fact that you are trusting them with something so precious. Pressure for sex is like someone coming up to you and pressuring you to give them a gift. It’s evidence that they care more about what you can give them than you yourself. It takes all the joy out of giving it and turns sexuality into a conquest instead of mutual joy.
Is there any incorrect or iffy information?? If so please send me an ask to let me know!!
EDIT 5: MOST UPDATED AS OF MAY 9TH 2015!
It is important to note that these infographs do not have every gender or sexuality as I had to leave multiple out due to either not recalling what they were at the time or lack of space. Some that have been pointed out to me as being missing that I highly suggest you look up are:
Bigender
Pangender
Graysexual/Grayromantic
I may make another infograph at a later point to include more genders and sexualities but I’m not sure if I will. Please reblog from the source post as it will always be the most updated version of this post. Thank you.
great infographic! and I’d note that you can have different romantic and sexual attraction, like you can be asexual and homoromantic or you can be bisexual and heteromantix, etc. :)
Be part of an important study on the genetics of sexual orientation
Have you had your DNA analyzed by 23andMe or Ancestry? Are you 18 years or older?
If you answered YES to these questions, you are eligible to participate in a study on sexual orientation.
The purpose of this research study is to understand how genetics may influence people’s personalities and sexual orientation. If you take part in this online study, we will instruct you how to find your genetic data file on your 23andMe account and upload it to our secure website. We will also ask you to complete a series of questionnaires on your personality and sexual behavior.
Time required to complete the study should be about 15-25 minutes.
Anyone 18 years or older who has been sexually active and has had a 23andMe or Ancestry analysis is eligible to participate, regardless of sexual orientation.
This study is being conducted by the Department of Anthropology at Penn State University, 409 Carpenter Building, University Park, PA.
Please contact the study coordinator Heather Self ([email protected]) or the principal investigator David Puts ([email protected]) for further information.
Be part of an important study on the genetics of sexual orientation
· Have you had your DNA analyzed by 23andMe or Ancestry?
· Are you 18 years or older?
If you answered YES to these questions, you are eligible to participate in a study on sexual orientation.
The purpose of this research study is to understand how genetics may influence people’s personalities and sexual orientation. If you take part in this online study, we will instruct you how to find your genetic data file on your 23andMe account and upload it to our secure website. We will also ask you to complete a series of questionnaires on your personality and sexual behavior.
Time required to complete the study should be about 15-25 minutes.
Anyone 18 years or older who has been sexually active and has had a 23andMe or Ancestry analysis is eligible to participate, regardless of sexual orientation.
This study is being conducted by the Department of Anthropology at Penn State University, 409 Carpenter Building, University Park, PA.
Please contact the study coordinator Heather Self ([email protected]) or the principal investigator David Puts ([email protected]) for further information.
Be part of an important study on the genetics of sexual orientation
· Have you had your DNA analyzed by 23andMe or Ancestry?
· Are you 18 years or older?
If you answered YES to these questions, you are eligible to participate in a study on sexual orientation.
The purpose of this research study is to understand how genetics may influence people’s personalities and sexual orientation. If you take part in this online study, we will instruct you how to find your genetic data file on your 23andMe account and upload it to our secure website. We will also ask you to complete a series of questionnaires on your personality and sexual behavior.
Time required to complete the study should be about 15-25 minutes.
Anyone 18 years or older who has been sexually active and has had a 23andMe or Ancestry analysis is eligible to participate, regardless of sexual orientation.
This study is being conducted by the Department of Anthropology at Penn State University, 409 Carpenter Building, University Park, PA.
Please contact the study coordinator Heather Self ([email protected]) or the principal investigator David Puts ([email protected]) for further information.
Be part of an important study on the genetics of sexual orientation
· Have you had your DNA analyzed by 23andMe or Ancestry?
· Are you 18 years or older?
If you answered YES to these questions, you are eligible to participate in a study on sexual orientation.
The purpose of this research study is to understand how genetics may influence people’s personalities and sexual orientation. If you take part in this online study, we will instruct you how to find your genetic data file on your 23andMe account and upload it to our secure website. We will also ask you to complete a series of questionnaires on your personality and sexual behavior.
Time required to complete the study should be about 15-25 minutes.
Anyone 18 years or older who has been sexually active and has had a 23andMe or Ancestry analysis is eligible to participate, regardless of sexual orientation.
This study is being conducted by the Department of Anthropology at Penn State University, 409 Carpenter Building, University Park, PA.
Please contact the study coordinator Heather Self ([email protected]) or the principal investigator David Puts ([email protected]) for further information.
labels, names and pronouns are like clothes. try them on if they sound nice. keep them as long as you’re comfortable with them. experiment with new styles you haven’t thought about before. always be ready to change.
“It’s often unhealthy to hyper-analyze your sexuality to the point where how you experience it changes where you belong. This is why the idea that broader terms are somehow more restrictive is baffling. Continuously breaking labels down and creating terminology for each facet of one’s identity shrinks communities until it’s just one person convinced that they’re the only one who relates to their experiences. It isolates people and ignores the importance of individuality within a collective identity.”
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hey there LGBTQ kids who are also Christian/Jewish! If you feel like you’re disobeying God, questioning your faith, or feel wrong and dirty for loving who you love, there’s this fantastic site I found today called hoperemains that accurately and thoroughly combs through scripture and its (many) mistranslations, validates your orientation, and basically let’s you know that you’re not pissing off God. It’s insanely thorough and after reading through every page on the entire site it’s super helpful. Go check it out!
hoperemains is completely from a Christian perspective, and not pluralistic or interfaith at all.
If you reblogged the first post from me please reblog this amendment so the Jewish peeps can access this resource too!
Trans Jewish kids, you can go to TransTorah as well!
Muslim LGBTQ kids, you can go to iamnotharaam! It’s run by a mod squad of different genders and orientations, and they take submissions from everybody!
–BB
MAY ANYONE WHO REBLOGS THIS BE ELEVATED TO THE EQUIVALENT OF SAINTHOOD IN THEIR RELIGION BLESS ALL OF YOU OH MY GOD.
The New York Times magazine recently published an article about an Orthodox Jewish sex therapist who helps women in the Orthodox community (they spoke mostly of her Haredi clientele) with intimacy issues. Besides the troubling word choices used by the author, like “tainted” to describe how Orthodox Jews consider a woman who’s in niddahand“semi-quarantine,” to describe the period where a husband and wife are separated, the article also gave the impression that many Orthodox Jews have repressed sex lives. While it was clear from the piece that sex between a husband and wife (in the proper time) is considered something positive, it spoke of the Orthodox approach to sex — across the gamut, from Modern Orthodox to Hasidic — in a way that made it seem as though it was very restrictive, when the basic halacha (Jewish law) on the subject is anything but, as long as we’re talking about a married couple.
Too many assumptions are made about people who are polyamorous. You can be having sex with one person and be poly. You can be having sex with NONE persons and be poly. You can go six years having sex with the same person and still consider yourself to be existing in an open relationship with that person. These things HAPPEN. A LOT. You can share love with multiple people in vastly different ways. Polyamorous doesn’t always (or even usually, in my expereince) mean “I fuck a bunch of people all the time.” Polyamorous doesn’t even have to mean a person ever has sex. The term “amorous” doesn’t specifically denote sexual activity at all. Sexuality and intimacy come in infinite and unimaginably diverse forms. All (consensual ones) are valid and worthy of respect and privacy if so desired by those involved. Unless someone chooses to share this particular variety of magic with you, IT’S NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. And why do people care anyway? How is it actually negatively affecting their own life enough to take the time out of their day to make broad assumptions and spread bullshit and shame people? Stop the assumptions. Stop the shame. Stop the hate.
basically you guys need to stop acting so weird about having sex with men. fucking a man is not a political statement it’s not an act of emasculating a man if you peg him or fuck him with your dick. it’s literally just sex. consensual sex is just sex. like i know it’s an online insult to say you people aren’t having sex but genuinely you people either do not have sex or have a seriously unhealthy relationship with sex. i’m so tired of hearing these absolutely shit takes about sex with men. you guys are seriously tweaked.
This is literally how misogynistic men often see sex with women. They see being penetrated as inherently shameful/humiliation and submission, and they think less of women who allow men to “do that to them”. They use sex as an act of using someone, violence, domination. Also ties into homophobia. I get the rage and the resentment, and it can feel good to “give it back”. But let’s not do the same gross bs that men do to us.
Yes god please. This is such a good post. Also like…
This is so common in straight kink spaces where people assume “top”=dom and “bottom”=sub to the point that they’re used *interchangeably*.
There’s nothing inherently submissive about being penetrated and nothing inherently dominant about penetrating.
can I add that yes, actually young people now are not having sex. (or, having a lot less of it).
and from what I’ve seen it’s coincided with more conservative attitudes about sex
this is going to be a very long post. it has to be, because i know a lot of people are going to disagree with it, and i dislike arguing so i am trying to lay out everything, pre-empt all possible questions and challenges, right from the beginning. i am sorry if you have trouble reading it. i will probably not explain much. it’s about a difficult subject, one I do not enjoy talking about it.
it’s about genital preference, which for those of you out of the loop, is the idea that in addition to only dating people of certain genders, some people will only date people with certain genital configurations, or in other words, of a particular coercively assigned sex. if you havent figured it out by now, this usually means they dont date trans people. or sometimes that they date based on coercively assigned sex at birth, regardless of gender. this post is going to focus on trans women and cis lesbians because that is my experience. if you find anything i say rings true for other groups, great, but if you want to talk about that further then make your own post.
the discourse is this: some people think this is an apolitical stance, just a quirk of human sexuality - some people like their partners with X genitals and thats just the way it is. others believe this is a product of the way society encodes meaning into bodies - its not really about the shape of the genitals, its about what they represent. if the second one is true then we would have to understand this preference as being influenced by transmisogyny, because transmisogyny is present in the way society encodes meaning into bodies.
when i talk about transmisogyny like this, i mean it in a material sense. i mean that something has a measurable, negative impact on trans women, on our quality of life, on our access to community, on how we are treated, and regarded, and talked about, or that it is a consequence of these things. i am not talking about an ideological transmisogyny i.e., one that is merely about how people feel. i think that a lot of the people who express this preference probably dont hate trans women. i think they think of us as women, they think of us as an oppressed and exploited minority, i think a lot of them want to be good allies to us. i dont doubt that. but i think they also think of their sexual preferences as unrelated to that, which is where we disagree.
so that’s the subject matter, and just a few of the disclaimers i feel i have to make before diving into this. now here’s my take -
if a cis lesbian knows that she is uncomfortable with trans women’s genitalia, acknowledges that this is probably a product of the way patriarchy coercively assigns meaning to bodies and, although potentially also a product of her own traumas, is ultimately a result of transmisogyny, and not an innate biological urge or otherwise something that trans women have no right to question, but is still actively committed to materially supporting and defending trans women in her life, then like, whatever. we can probably still work together.
now i want to be very clear. this is not about sex. this is not about me, or any other trans woman, wanting to have sex with anyone. im mostly interested in other trans women anyway. i am dating one cis woman currently, and i hope to be with her for the rest of my life, but if we break up i consider it very unlikely i will date a cis woman again. so it’s not about sex. it isn’t about that. but it’s still important.
since we know that there is a clear and measurable exclusion of trans lesbians from lesbian spaces, communities, organisations, that there is a clear and measurable lack of friendships between and social circles that include both cis lesbians and trans lesbians, compared to what you would expect given our shared lesbianism and relative numbers. given that lesbian groups and women’s groups generally, where they exist, are by and large hostile to the inclusion of trans women, not always openly hostile, but materially hostile -
then who would deny this is a consequence of transmisogyny? you cannot argue that is just biology or innate preference. and yet, when it comes to who cis lesbians date, we are supposed to believe it has nothing to do with who we can see they would rather be friends with? or who they would rather organise with, or live with, or talk to, or, like, play sports with? that is an absurd claim. an unsupportable claim. if the trends the previous paragraph describes are undeniably transmisogynist, and genital preference is undeniably both a consequence of those trends and a contributor to them, which it is, then genital preference is transmisogynist. it’s transmisogynist because it has both the effect of and is a consequence of isolating and othering trans women. it’s transmisogynist because it’s a product of the way patriarchy coercively assigns meaning to bodies. it’s a product of transmisogyny. it’s by definition transmisogynist. intent doesnt come into that. cis lesbians’ internal experience of it doesnt come into that. if your preference is traumatic in origin then it is a trauma shaped by transmisogyny. our traumatic responses are not immune to criticism.
even supposing some individuals might still possess this preference in a genderless society, since we cannot knowthis, assuming this and basing your politics around it is not a position you can possibly defend as materialist since we already know that patriarchy and transmisogyny are also shaping even our most private responses. to pretend like that’s not the case - to pretend like you can knowthat’s not the case, is to live in a transmisogynist fiction.
but the question this raises then, presumably, is does this reaction by cis women not in fact betray something deeper, that they must not really believe trans women are women, or care about us, or some such. and i would only say that wantingto fuck us does not rule out this possibility either.all it really tells us is that they, like all cis people, has internalised the value system that is transmisogyny. but we already knew that. that’s a given. we havent acquired any new information.
what i find really condemnable is defending this position as value-neutral, or demanding trans women reassure you about the way you see our bodies. what is also obviously unacceptable is pretending that trans women’s objection and discomfort with your preference comes from a place of “pressuring lesbians to have sex with trans women,” and not in fact from a place of trauma and exhaustion with the way we are seen and treated across all facets of our lives, not just sexual. if you tell a trans woman about your preference and she reacts badly, she does so because she is upsetwith you, not because she wants to fuck you. get over yourself. all of this is a mark of far greater transmisogyny than your initial reaction to our bodies.
like, here’s the thing. i have never seen a justification for genital preference by a cis lesbian that did not misgender trans women and our bodies (with words like dick, vagina, male & female, see this post for clarity), that did not subtly demonise us, that did not portray us as sexual aggressors, that was not patronising,that did not show a supreme lack of empathy for us, or that showed any attempt to understand how this is a traumatic subject for usas well. if it was not already deducible from the nature of genital preference that it was a transmisogynist position then it would still be obvious from the way cis lesbians talk about it.
to act like all these trans women, for all these years, offering all these analyses of this situation are all wrong, or misguided, or irrational or over-emotional or predatory, that is what betrays your real feelings towards us. that is not a defendable position. not without denying transmisogyny, not without denying the power cis women wield over trans women and trans women’s position as an oppressed and exploited group, not without denying our humanity, our subjectivity, our basic ability to understand and talk about our situation.
and if you do feel this way, and you recognise its origins in transmisogyny, and you’re just not sure how to change it or if you can, the correct thing to do is to keep it to yourself. no public confessional, no “i feel like i should tell you this to be accountable.” you literally just dont tell us. if you keep your sexual preferences private, like you should be doing anyway, and commit yourself to combatting transmisogyny in all other respects, including in yourself, then your preferences become irrelevant. in that situation i literally dont care.
this includes making posts on your blog about it. this includes talking privately to other cis lesbians about it and sharing how you think we are being unreasonable. (this does not necessarily preclude the possibility of anydiscussion on the subject between cis women, cis women should, after all, talk about transmisogyny and combatting transmisogyny amongst each other, as well.)
and oh my god does this ever include tagging or replying to this post with some shit about how it applies to you and you want to do better. dont do that! i dont want to know. if you really want to change then all of the above advice is probably how you do that. the way to unlearn the dehumanising responses you have to trans women is to treat us like human beings, and that includes not exposing us to your harmful beliefs about us and that especially includes not asking us to process those feelings for you. if you can do that, and treat us that way, maybe change is inevitable consciousness follows material events.
if you think any of that’s unreasonable, consider that this is how you should be approaching anyoppressive attitude or reflex you recognise in yourself. you dont make it the problem of those people the belief hurts. you commit yourself to the struggle and deal with it privately.
and like, i do not want you to feel ashamed. i dont want that. shame doesnt help me. shame doesnt allow change, or growth, or healing. it actually hurts me. it hurts me the same way it hurts trans women when people feel ashamed *because* they’re attracted to us. shame leads to lashing out. shame leads to the kind of diatribe against trans women from up-til-then good allies i have seen too many times already. none of us are trying to shame you. we’re not doing that. we’re not in a position to do that. you’re doing that. it is cis people’s ideas about who and how trans women are that produces the shame you feel about how you relate to us, however that might be. stop blaming us.
anyway that’s like, literally the most compassionate take i can offer on this. anything else would demean myself.
and, can i add, finally, that as a trans woman, who has not always known she was trans, who did not always know trans women even existed, but who has never the less alwaysbeen a lesbian: i’ve been there? i grew up thinking i was only attracted to cis women too. even after transitioning i had to learn to look past the ingrained responses i had to trans women’s bodies. like, you aren’t that special. you’re not having some secret lesbian reaction that only cis women will understand. i’ve been there. i unlearned it. it wasn’t innate. there’s a reason this “preference” is so common among cis lesbians but virtually non-existent among trans lesbians. its not a lesbian thing. stop hiding behind that. we’re lesbians too. stop forgetting we’re lesbians too. not less lesbians. not lesbians with any other qualifier. lesbians as much as you are, exactly the way you are.
[Tweet from @/fozmeadows: “human gender and sexuality are very much like animal taxonomy, in that both look structured and simple on the surface, but once you start investigating, it turns out there’s actually no such thing as a fish despite the fact that we all know what a fish is, and that’s okay”]
As a biologist, that is a fantasticcomparison.
We talk about “fish” (which, cladistically, do not exist, there is no monophyletic group of “fish” that simultaneously includes all organisms we understand to be “fish”-like while also excluding, say, humans) because, despite the utter fiction that is fish, it’s still a useful label when we talk about certain features that “fish” tend to have in common.
13 year old me was soooo damn proud of not being like other girls because I wasn’t “‘‘‘‘‘boy crazy’‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘ hooty hoo dumbass there’s a reason for that
