hi! I’m new to your blog as you can probably tell, since I’ve been reblogging a lot of your posts bc I think they’re great! but there’s one idea here that I’m not so sure about. you seem to support the idea that nb people can’t identify as straight or be in a straight relationship and I don’t really understand that. imo, being straight is being attracted to 1 gender that is different from your own, so an nb person who only likes men could be straight. could you explain your thoughts on this?
‘Straight’ is, in the vast, vast majority of circumstances, synonymous with ‘a centered (non-marginalised) experience of sexuality’. Nonbinary people do not fit into that model on any level. (Even binary transness makes it complicated!)
The redefinition of ‘straight’ as ‘a single gender other than your own’ was dreamed up with basically zero regard for the orientations of NB people, or the circumstances facing NBs when other people are attracted to them. I remember the push to use ‘other genders’ rather than ‘opposite genders’ in defining straightness, and it was never done because ‘NB people are included in straightness’, it was done because ‘opposite genders is a bad way to phrase it’. And then we ended up with this half-baked attempt at NB inclusion that basically just amounts to painting over the experiences of NB people with regards to orientation.
People do not, in general, mean ‘man + NB’ or ‘woman + NB’ or ‘genderfluid + androgyne’ or whatever the hell you want to pick when they say ‘straight’. They mean ‘man + woman’. People will misgender and paint over NB experiences to shove them into that model. When Straight people do it, it’s Straight people being their usual obnoxious selves. When other non-Straight people do it, it’s everything from unaddressed transantagonism to actively trying to paint NB people as having a privilege they do not in order to justify exclusion from non-Straight communities. (Which, if you’ve been a long way into the backlog, you might have seen me yell about before.)
TL;DR: We can sit here and make up our own definitions for ‘straight’ if for some damn reason we think that’s a good use of our time, but that is not how the rest of the world is using the word and I do not see how saying ‘this orientation that is generally understood to be privileged applies to NBs’ when NBs are in no way included in orientation-based privilege is in any way useful or helpful.
