Why I can’t just accept that my sexuality and gender identity are fluid?

Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nz

Dear Hera,

I came out (by dating a girl for the first time) at 13 years old. I personally only came out as dating a girl, but people around me decided that I was bisexual. About a year later, I talked to a close friend about being attracted to lots of different people, and they suggested I might be pansexual. Another year later, for the first time in my journey as someone with a queer identity, I felt held by identifying myself as takatāpui (tēnā koe AI – Ancestral Intelligence).

Throughout my time in university, as the seasons would transition from winter to spring, a cloud would loom over me for weeks at a time, incessantly asking: am I lesbian? Which was distracting and stressful. I wanted to understand myself better, probably wanted other people to understand me better, and thought maybe a label would do that. About a year ago I started to identify as a lesbian, and started using she/they pronouns. For the first time in this decade-long (thus far) journey, I breathed a sigh of relief, of knowing, all while still feeling comforted by identifying my gender and my sexuality as takatāpui – all at the same time as finally deciding to stop stressing myself out about my identity.

Fast forward to the transition from winter just gone to this current spring, and I find myself with a massive crush on a man. I work with him. He has a hard exterior, he is very observant, full of kind things to say about people, knows how to comfort others, and is objectively so hot. While it is stressful to feel like a giddy teenager in my very serious corporate environment, it does make the long work days a bit more exciting and is something to have a giggle about with my friends.

The crush feels fleeting and fun for the moment, so the crush itself is not really a concern for me. However, Hera, I truly do not know why I can’t just accept that my sexuality and gender identity are fluid. I deeply believe that these things are fluid, really I believe they are colonised ways of viewing ourselves and each other that don’t actually exist – but for some reason I can’t accept this for myself.

Please help!

Stressed out takatāpui, lesbian (?), she/they

PS I’m leaving my job soon. Do I try to sleep with him???

Dear Stressed, 

You’ve spent your life trying to find a label that describes your sexuality. But like a dog that keeps breaking out of the Manawatū Canine Centre and roaming around the nearby shopping mall, you cannot be contained! This is not a problem with your sexuality, but a failure of taxonomy. 

I love a meaningless category as much as the next Capricorn (Gemini rising). Humans are categorical thinkers, experts at pattern recognition and sorting things into types in order to reduce the cognitive load. Ever since the heady days of the school playground, haggling over which Spice Girl to be in the school talent quest, we’ve become talented at inventing cultural shorthands that attempt to describe our experiences. But these categories are notoriously flimsy. As any biologist knows, nature doesn’t bend to theory. Putting everything with gills into one zoological category and everything with eight legs into another is all well and good, until someone discovers the Bolivian Scorpionfish and we have to yet again rewrite the encyclopaedia. 

The same goes for labelling sexuality. Admittedly we’ve come a long way in a short time. A century ago, most lesbians were simply described as “Aunt Sylvia, who lives with her good friend Carol.” Now you can have as many caveats and acronyms as you can fit into an email signature. But somehow it makes the whole situation seem more fraught and complicated than ever. 

A sociologist might say that categories and identities are important, because they allow us to build community and recognise specific patterns of marginalisation that might otherwise go ignored without the language to describe them. 

An amateur Buddhist might say that all identity is empty and impermanent, and forming attachments to an illusory sense of self is an unwise way to live.

A child might say “my favourite colour is BLUE and my favourite animal is a HORSE.” 

I agree with all of the above statements, but I’m mostly with the child on this one. Questions of political strategy aside, shopping around for identities is just good fun. Why shouldn’t gay people enjoy their labels? Straight people have the Myers-Briggs. Women have horoscopes. Republicans have T-shirts that say “I’m a BACARDI-drinking, HORSE-loving STEELY DAN fan, who shoots trespassers on sight!!!”

Even if you abstain from labelling yourself, you’re still not immune from categorisation, because advertisers will just do it for you. I’ve never been more aware of approaching 40, as my targeted YouTube ads become increasingly geared towards probiotic yoghurts and sanitary solutions for light incontinence.

I think one of the reasons people worry so much about choosing the right label is they’re scared of being audited, as evidenced by “fake bisexual” discourse. Now that being gay is cool again, any mention of being queer is interpreted as a sly form of boasting, and here in New Zealand we really hate boasting. If you’ve always identified as a lesbian and suddenly start sleeping with a man, there’s always the possibility that someone in desperate need of a real hobby is going to start accusing you of stolen LGBTQ valour. But in my experience, the worst offenders tend to be terminally online straight women who can only conceptualise having a flexible sexuality as a kind of disingenuous, attention-seeking behaviour, which is sad for them. 

Categories should be for us and they should make us happy. Or at least, allow us the maximum amount of personal freedom. If you find yourself attracted to someone outside your usual wheelhouse, that’s fine. John Waters isn’t going to come to your apartment and confiscate your feather boas. 

My feeling is that labels ought to be aspirational – an attempt to describe the kind of person you want to be in the world, or the life you want to live. The moment you feel like they’re limiting your potential freedom or happiness, they have outlived their usefulness. 

I don’t think I can tell you anything you don’t already know. But maybe it would help to think about your sexuality, not as a problem to be solved by language, but a kind of lifelong philosophical quest for understanding that you will answer variously at different points in your life. That doesn’t mean you have to stop thinking about it, as the idea of finding a label is obviously meaningful for you. But if you think of it as an open-ended question it might give you a greater sense of peace and freedom to explore what you want, instead of seeking to define it, or paying allegiance to someone else’s idea of what it means to be queer. 

You can attempt to answer this question however you like. In private, between the sheets. With a complicated series of diagrams and charts. You could even make an informative powerpoint presentation. 

I personally identify with a quote from pre-eminent Western philosopher and host of Survivor, Jeff Probst, who once said (when I asked him if he believed in ghosts)  “depends on the day… and the ghost.” 

Your coworker sounds like perfect crush material. My advice is to go out there and get thoroughly haunted.