Sex on the Hill: Genderwassit?

I’m tired of writing light-hearted pieces for Sex on the Hill. So, here’s to trying something new.

When you have sex with people like me, leave gender at the door. At the immense risk of speaking for an unmistakably diverse population, let me introduce you to what it’s like to fuck someone who is genderqueer.

Genderwhat? I would guess that most people have never heard of the term. You might have heard of trans individuals, or transgender-identified people, individuals who identify as the opposite gender to which they were assigned to in correlation with their biological sex.

Well, genderqueer folks have a problem with one key word in that definition of trans: opposite. What opposite gender? If you’ve never been introduced to the fact that gender is a social construction, this might be completely confusing to you. However, let me attempt to show you.

Close your eyes. Stay perfectly still. What do you feel, innately, that tells you that you are the gender that you identify with? What “female” feeling or “male” feeling do you have, sitting there stoically? For most people, what gives us our gender is not what is within us, but what we have learned to associate with ourselves, such as dress, hobbies, sports, grooming, and mannerisms. Beyond a few biological, evolutionary tendencies conducive to mating, very little intrinsically tells us how to act in a way that tells others what is in our pants.

So with people like me, who have come to identify as genderqueer, we reject this idea of a gender binary—a system that identifies only two genders, male and female. If you want more information on cultures with multiple, or even no genders, Google it, there’s not enough room here to describe that.

Thus, fucking with genderqueer people can be different than fucking someone who falls neatly into the binary gender paradigm. With us, like I said, leave gender at the door. One moment, we’re fucking and in our minds it’s a girl with a girl. Another moment we’re a man, having sex with a woman. Perhaps we feel, what is most likely, completely genderless—we’re just having sex, even if it’s emotional, powerful sex, but we surely don’t feel that our erotic imaginations are bound by our genitals.

And you might think, if you’ve ever known me or someone else who identifies similarly, we seem “normal.” With me, for instance, I look like a girl, act like a girl sometimes, dress like a girl, etc. Hell, I even smell like a girl most days. And what’s hard for even “progressive types” to understand sometimes is that I certainly don’t want to physically change myself into a man. I like my vagina, really I do. I think it’s lovely. In fact, I think all genitals are lovely, if properly groomed and maintained.

My point in writing this is to point out, how do you know what you screw like? Do you sex (verb) like a man? Like a woman? Are you perpetuating some image of yourself, like an out of body experience, when you fuck? Are you…fucking a gender you see in your head, but do not feel…just a thought. I am sure most folks feel very connected in a one-to-one correspondence between their biological sex and their gender and the way they fuck. I’m just reminding you all that for some of us, it’s different. And that’s not a bad way to get down.