Lately I have been seeing — I guess you’d call them “trend pieces,” though even that seems generous — about abrosexuality, which basically means “fluid sexual attraction.” An abrosexual might have exclusively homo attractions one day, bisexual ones another day, and just hetero ones another day. You get the idea.
To me, personally, this all just feels like one more iteration of bisexuality. I don’t know many bisexuals for whom gendered attraction is persistent and consistent — most bisexuals I know feel more attracted to one gender at one point, or another gender at another; we go through phases because, you know, that’s just how life is.
But I also understand that many people find the term “bisexuality” to be unsatisfying, and feel that it suggests a kind of fixed, “50/50” split between being gay and being straight, that it does not make room for the possibility that sometimes a bisexual might feel super straight and sometimes they might feel totally gaybones and that’s just how it is. So I don’t feel any need to tear down someone for whom abrosexual sparks some sense of recognition, or tell them that they’re “really” bisexual, or act like there is some grand betrayal at work when someone won’t use my preferred label for their sexual experience. Abrosexual, to me, is no different from pansexual, from polysexual, from omnisexual, and so on and so forth. I might see it all as flavors of bisexuality, but other for other people the distinction is important enough to not identify as bi.
However.
This all kind of goes out the window for me when we’re talking about sexuality as a political consideration. Politically speaking, I feel very confident in saying that there are only four primary frameworks we need to think about when we’re talking about gendered attractions*:
- attracted to one gender (normative)
- attracted to one gender (non-normative)
- attracted to multiple genders
- attracted to no genders
Or, as the New York State Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act refers to these four categories: heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, and asexuality**.
From a legal perspective, it simply does not matter if the discrimination you experience due to being attracted to multiple genders was a product of you being consistently attracted to multiple genders or being attracted to multiple genders one day and only one gender the next. It does not matter if you are attracted to more than one gender, or attracted to people in spite of gender. The discrimination is functionally the same: it is all based on a rejection of the idea that attraction to more than one gender is a fiction. That affects anyone who has been attracted to more than one gender at any point in their life — regardless of how they have arrived there (and yes, even if they have only been attracted to any one gender at any given time, and have experienced their attraction to more than one gender sequentially rather than simultaneously).
From a political perspective, it is hard not to feel like this fixation on subdividing bisexuality, or multigender attraction, or whatever we want to use as the umbrella term for an attraction to more than one gender, is nothing more than a distraction that obscures the actual, important point here.
Because, yes: we are all special snowflakes deserving of our own bespoke labels that make us feel truly seen.
But also?
We are all people who experience systemic discrimination due to our attraction to more than one gender. And that matters more than anything else.
* Though notably these are not the only sexual groups to consider within the law. Legally, people with multiple partners or non-normative sexual habits can be discriminated against even if they are otherwise straight. But that’s a topic for another newsletter.
** Yes, aces can be straight or gay or bi too but that, too, is a topic for another newsletter.
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