While our culture caters to customization and rewards a sense of being unique and special, as well as different and oppressed, much of this comes down to little more than narcissism.
In June of this year, the Supreme Court decided in a 6-3 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, that sexual orientation and gender identity were both understood to be protected under the term "sex" in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 regarding employment protections. While for many on the left and the LGBT community this was viewed as a victory for gay and transgender people, the ruling, however, is broad enough to cater to the most absurd impulses of the LGBT community.
Facebook's famous 2014 expansion of of gender options from the traditional two to 58 introduced much of the country to the concept new genders like "cisgender" and "genderqueer." But the explosion of possible identities has only grown since then.
While there are no official lists of options out there, the LGBTQIA Resource Center offers a fairly comprehensive glossary, many of the most popular identities have adopted their own unique color-bar flag, mimicking the original Gay Pride rainbow flag. How each flag was designed and agreed upon is astonishing on its own.
Alongside the traditional six-color rainbow flag is the woke flag adding a black and brown bar, which is commonly used by LGBT organizations today. Bisexuals got their own flag first, with a dark pink and dark purple bar blending into the middle and more recently a separate lesbian and gay cisgender male flag has been introduced, naturally assigning pink for girls and blue for boys.
My list of genders with flags:
An update of those Constitutionally protected sexuality and gender identities.
But with an important warning: pic.twitter.com/gX60RwOl8Z
— Chad Felix Greene (@chadfelixg)
But before jumping into the many options one can choose from, or from the LGBT perspective, discover in oneself, we have to understand how modern LGBT understands sexuality and gender identity. As the glossary helpfully illustrates, there are many intersections a person can find themselves at when exploring what these terms and concepts mean.
But essentially it is broken down into sexual attraction, romantic attraction and gender identity. A person can be sexually attracted to one, two or all, not attracted to any or sometimes attracted given specific circumstances. Each slight variation splinters off into a new identity.
To understand the formula, a person may be sexually or romantically attracted to men, (androsexual), but only experience sexual interest when in a relationship, (demisexual) and may identify as a man themselves sometimes or in limited situations, (demiboy). A person begins with their own gender identity, which can range from highly specific, (transwoman) to extraordinarily vague, (alexigender, where a person has more than one gender but cannot tell which genders they are).
One can have no gender as well being agender. They then determine their romantic interest, either towards one gender, two genders, specific subsets of gender, all genders or if they have no romantic interest at all (aromantic). The Huffington Post explored what being aromantic means in a piece about a 46 year old woman who discovered she was one.
Sexuality follows the same formula, with each subset branching off into more narrow and specific criteria. For example, asexuals do not experience sexual desire, but cupiosexuals are asexuals who want to have a sexual relationship regardless, even if they don't enjoy it or feel anything themselves. Or perhaps they are fraysexuals which are asexuals who only experience sexual desire towards people they do not know and lose sexual interest once a relationship begins.
Most interesting is that the wide spectrum of genders and sexual or romantic orientations betrays the standard LGBT argument of permanent and inborn characteristics, which is the basis for legal rights. An abrosexual has fluid sexual orientation that changes to other sexual orientations over time. A novosexual is a person who simply cannot say what their sexuality or gender is because it is not permanent and changes frequently. Naturally, each individual subgroup has a "fluid" option for those who can't pin down exactly what it is they are feeling at any given time as well.
Other interesting choices? You can be bi or trigender. A trigender person experiences exactly three gender identities simultaneously. The three can be any of one's choosing. If you are nonbinary, meaning you do not identify as either male or female, you get an entirely separate list of options including being trixic (attracted to women) or toric (attracted to men). Skoliosexuals are people exclusively attracted to transgender people and lithosexuals enjoy sexual attraction to others but do not want others to be sexually attracted to them.
My favorite of all of them, however, is pomosexual which is a sexual orientation for people who do not wish to have their orientation categorized. While all of this sounds like nonsense, and it is, there is an important legal issue at hand here since the Supreme Court did not limit which sexual orientations or gender identities enjoy these new protections.
It is assumed that any sexual or gender identity is to be protected under "sex" in employment discrimination. Under the list of possibilities nearly every person falls under at least one of them, if not multiples. A biromantic demisexual, for example, is someone who needs to feel a strong connection to a person to feel sexually attracted to them, regardless of their gender. How many people fall under that criteria and didn't even know it?
While our culture caters to customization and rewards a sense of being unique and special, as well as different and oppressed, much of this comes down to little more than narcissism. But it also illustrates how gender identity has derailed the gay rights movement. Being a gay person is a powerful emotional journey that redefines how a person sees themselves in the world.
To be lumped together with people who sometimes want to have sex but not really and only with people who have pink hair and sometimes use male pronouns is a deeply offensive insult to what gay people have fought for. Legally, it can only cause more confusion and unnecessary regulations, policies and lawsuits and in the end does little more than make the LGBT movement look foolish and silly.
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