Nothing to Prove
The first time I slept with a woman, I expected to wake the next day with a sense of final validation of my sexuality and a renewed understanding of myself. Upon opening my eyes to the wonder of another woman in my bed, I instead experienced a quiet moment of… nothing. I had not awoken with any new knowledge, but rather with what I had known my entire life: that I loved women, that I was attracted to women, and that I always wanted to love and have sex with women.
As I laid in bed reminiscing about the night before, I felt a growing sense of anger and bewilderment. So many conversations and interactions with my queer community had been hinged on me having a night like the one I had had. The conversations seemed to reduce what I had shared with another woman as transactional. The implication being that I owed this experience to my community, that the wonderful night between the woman cuddled up beside me and myself did not belong to us but was now something I had a duty to report so that I could finally belong.
Queer virginity, like any other virginity, is a construct that has the main function of devaluing a person’s perceived sexual identity, withholding our ability to define ourselves in the context of society until we have crossed a series of haphazard sexual checkpoints.
The fierce pride and sense of arrival we achieve once we find our queer communities is precious and sublime. It is entirely rational, given queer history, to fear the loss of that security. What is not rational, however, is the paranoia and othering that derives from this fear, a paranoia often aimed towards queer people who do not fall into categories that resemble our own. This sentiment coupled with centuries of oppression and exclusionary treatment of queer women that has generated a cabal of our own gatekeepers.
Pan and bisexual women are often seen as less within the parameters of queer social exclusivity and are therefore demoted to a category of patriarchal complicity. Our attraction to men is perceived as a betrayal (remember one of many awful arcs in the L Word where Tina starts sleeping with men again, and her entire friend group ices her out until she ‘returns to her senses’?).
Of course, there are many circumstances in which bisexual and pansexual women (especially cis-gendered women) are afforded privileges that cannot be overlooked. In our relationships with men, we might be perceived as straight-passing and avoid the derision and violence that is a given of the lives of those who are not straight passing. While acknowledging this privilege, there are also some who do not wish to pass, who are proud of their queerness and are not comfortable with being, at a glance, categorized as straight women, even within relationships with men.
Women who love people across the gender spectrum often suffer from “ni-de-aquí-ni-de-allá syndrome”. Our love for women, no matter how honest and radical, is seen as betrayed and invalidated by any love for men. And on the flip side is, of course, the familiar reality of the constant male fetishization and denigration of women’s queer desire. In author and critic Carmen Maria Machado’s new novel, In the Dream House, she writes, “this is the curse of the queer woman–– eternal liminality. You are two things, maybe even more, and you are neither. Heterosexuals have never known what to do with queer people if they think of their existence at all.”
Queer people have not always known what to do with other queer people that aren’t necessarily like them, either. The alarming commonality of transphobia in cisgendered queer groups is a blatant example of this. This is particularly hard to face when the queer community is often presented in media as a safe space to just be, an alternative to the constraints of patriarchal society. The reality of queer social existence is, of course, more complicated than this and affected by its own sets of hierarchies and expectations. There are, as in any community, standards of entry and acceptance, and often for queer women, these are tied to sexual history.
As a pan woman, I have often experienced imposter syndrome in regards to my queerness. Even in happy relationships, I have been beset by feelings of guilt and insufficiency in terms of how I express my queerness–– regardless of the gender of my partner. We are made to feel dishonest when we are with men, and we are made to feel dishonest when we are with women. We are rarely recognized by mainstream media narratives, and even so, we are categorized into the ‘confused’, ‘promiscuous’ or ‘lesbian-in-the-making’ cliches.
Experience itself is a limiting qualifier that is at the forefront of the public queer experience. This framework privileges the sexual before the emotional: it is better to have fucked in higher numbers than to have crushed on women, and it is even better to have dated as well as fucked. The numbers that make up our sexual history are qualifiers, keys to the proverbial kingdom of gays. It is as if after hitting a certain digit we could finally feel safe within that identity which we claim.
These assumptions also implicitly pre-suppose that the experience of sex with ‘each’ gender is inherently empowering or disempowering. If sleeping with women will make a woman queerer, then the inverse must be true. Sleeping with men must make a woman less queer by this logic, which ties into the ridiculous patriarchal conception that a woman loses claim over self-definition based on her sexual decisions.
The thing is, just as much as I love the implicit trust of enacting power over a partner, I just as much enjoy the pleasure of utterly relinquishing control, to women and nonbinary partners as well as to men. And I believe that there is nothing shameful (except shameful in the most delicious way) about this. It does not make me more or less queer.
Being pan is often described in mainstream media as “falling in love with a person, not their gender.'' Although I understand and partially agree with this sentiment, I think there is something reductive about it as well. It strikes me as a relative of “I-don’t-see-race” in its sweeping generality. I contend: I fall in love with a person, including their gender identity. Part of the attraction of another human, for me, includes the wonder of the personal specifics, conscious and subconscious, of their gender identity, no matter where it may fall in the spectrum, or how it might change with time.