Am I Gynosexual?
Recently I was introduced to the term "gynosexual", meaning "attracted to women, regardless of gender". I am, of couse, something of a women liker myself. So since gynosexual is trying to be a hypernym of "lesbian", it's maybe odd that I had the snap intuition that I'm a lesbian but not a gynosexual, not just in terms of community but in terms of the actual mechanics of attraction.
Part of that is that identity is a shared negotiated fiction that means more than its definition. "American" means more than "legal U.S. citizen", "white" means more than "having certain skin tone or heritage", "woman" famously means more than "adult human female". So that's why I think the syllogism "A is lesbian; all lesbians are gynosexual ==> A is gynosexual" doesn't meaningfully hold. It's kind of the same as how there are a lot of self-identified trans girls who aren't women, or how historically a lot of Afro-diasporic immigrants didn't self-identify as Black immediately.
When people were hemming and hawing about "critical race theory" they were-- well, first of all, they were saying whatever the fuck they wanted, because I guess it's a valid political strategy to run around the house leaving a trail of shit your mom has to clean up instead of punishing you. But ostensibly they were reacting to Kimberle Crenshaw's legal application of "intersectionality". The naive point of view is that compound identities are like linear algebra: what is true about "Black woman" is inherited from either "Black" or "woman". But intersectionality states that adding together these identities is more like chemistry, where you can get table salt from explosive sodium and toxic chlorine. When you reify "gynosexual", lesbian becomes an intersectional identity: lesbian = gynosexual + woman. So that fundamental theorem applies: Just because something is water, doesn't mean it's like hydrogen. Just because "lesbian" is useful to me doesn't mean "gynosexual" is.
Identity is also a site of community, or aspirations thereto. We accept and reject identities to mediate what communities we think we (and others) should have access to or should want to have access to. I don't share anything meaningful in common with Ricky Gervais or whatever because we're both attracted to women, least of all political goals. Thus I'm rejecting the basket that implicitly claims we do. Or, rather, I'm rejecting the implicit claim that the identity basket of "xlw" is as meaningful or explanatory as "lesbian". Simple as.
But wait, you might ask. All this is about socially mediated imagined identity! But you said something about the "actual mechanics of attraction"! Are you also claiming that you have different brain hardware than the straights, and therefore that the "gynosexual choice" is also mostly about brain hardware?
And no, I'm not. Not to sound like your GWS101 teacher, but everything is political, and sex and romance are like, 99th-percentile political. For example, sex and sexuality orbit these concepts of family-rearing and child-bearing. Not that all mlw's want children, but there's social power in being able to the metaphorical wife, 2.2 bio-kids, and a picket fence. Not every straight man has access to this life, but I'm excluded from it for reasons contained within "lesbian". This power isn't just about status, either-- it's epistemic power, the power of knowledge. When straight people talk about "family", they're mutually intelligible. I mostly avoid talking about "family" because it confuses people, even other lesbians, and other people talking about "family" often confuse me back. We're all experiencing the injustice of not really having a word for the things we desire or aspire to– just a word for something we sort of kind of want to partially reject.
It's not just "family", either. Most people end up asking "What is love?" and "What's the difference between love and friendship?" at some point in their lives. Straight people have always been able to bracket this question, because marriage as a concept allows them to prescribe the answer for a few years while they gain the world-experience necessary to answer it more thoroughly. Ignoring fundamental questions isn't healthy, of course-- but it beats having to explain my own personal difference between partners and friends with benefits every time I want to negotiate that boundary, a difference I don't even know and have to basically come up with and figure out how to communicate from scratch. There's that epistemic power again! Even living in post-Obergefell America I feel like straights have a parbaked concept of "marriage" and "relationship" that I don't. They can go beyond that abstraction when they want, but they can always fall back on it and be basically content, not to mention legal rights and privileges. Meanwhile I feel like my communities are figuring things out from first principles, especially because Reagan killed off the living libraries on the subject.
None of these things are secondary to the actual event of attraction. "Everything is political" means that our separation of eros and identity is a pedagogical lie, a useful abstraction. Who we love is necessarily tied to our past and future– our personal histories, our aspirations, our dreams of possible futures, our imagined conversations, our ideas of what sex looks and feels like. In a word, our needs. "I want a big titty goth gf" or whatever is not an independent aesthetic preference. If it were, there would be no value added from constructing a characterological figure called "big titty goth gf". So having different epistemic constructs, having access to "uhaul lesbian" as a relevant characterological figure instead of "nuclear family", changes how we think about attraction, and how we communicate about it.
So yes, there are differences in the actual event of attraction that I think cleave "lesbian" from the broader "gynosexual". Simple as.
But wait, you might ask. Why stop there? Why should your analysis of intersectionality stop in a way that's convenient for you? Why not go one step further, and reject "lesbian" because "transbian" is not as simple as "trans + lesbian"? While you're at it, American institutional marriage has famously not worked seamlessly for straights who are (e.g.) Black, Indigenous, atheist, polyamorous, trans, or born out of wedlock. Don't you think you have something in common with those straight people?
And yeah, on some level I don't have a good answer to that. That's why the word I used originally was "intuition"; I'm still just confused. I really like the word "transbian" (it lexicalizes an intersectional axis of oppression in a way that excludes it from being the sum of its parts, in the same way "misogynoir" does). But it doesn't give me a detachment from "lesbian". The difference between the "transbian / lesbian gap" and the "lesbian / gynosexual gap" is unclear to me, really. If anything, I'm willing to bite the bullet at least a little.
Maybe it's just that the "lesbian"-"gynosexual" gap breaks a usefulness barrier. You know a "lesbian" and "lesbian" are probably compatible; a "gynosexual" and another "gynosexual" are... well, we need more information. Of course, this broad usefulness means more details get lost, but that's the price of using abstractions as machinery. Remember, straights have held power for centuries by muddying the distinction between love and their state-sanctioned loyalty kink. You can be real vague and still have epistemic power; if anything, it helps.
Also, "queer" is an important identity for me, so the first public indication that I'm some brand of faggot has huge value to me. That's why the jump from "gynosexual" to "lesbian" is so huge. Not that I don't also want to signal that I'm trans at every possible moment, but defining community isn't pinball, you don't get 50k bonus points for lighting up all the letters in LGBTQ+ at once. (Although to be clear, if you did, I probably would.)
As to the difference question... empathy is overrated, and using labels as a site of empathy-building is no exception. This is the caveat to all that stuff about community-building earlier. I don't need to linguistically signal I'm the same as someone else to form a coalition with them. Our suffering need not be homoousion for us to mutually understand one another-- and since everyone is made of different atoms, using identity terms to focus on similarities necessarily abstracts away details we might want to know about. The assumption of whiteness is famously a problem in queer spaces for exactly that reason, and would remain that way with or without microlabels or whatever.
All this, of course, is the equivalent of typesetting a recipe and saying the hard part of baking a cake is done. I haven't really argued that I shouldn't use gynosexual, and I certainly haven't made an argument that anyone else shouldn't use gynosexual, god forbid. I'm circling around technologies I can't use, because "there is a hazy tradeoff between the need to find community and the virtue of not grafting my own perceptions onto others" doesn't really explain why I think "lesbian" makes that tradeoff better than "gynosexual". For sure there's something uncomfortable about "gynosexual" insisting that the archetypal straight male comedian, joking that he's a lesbian in the sense of "attracted to women", is actually onto something. But I don't feel the same gap between "lesbian" and "transbian" despite separately affirming that a cis person experiencing a drop of t4t would be a peasant Dorito situation.
In a way it parallels the journey of self-identifying with labels. Carefully considering labels, crowdsourcing definitions, colorpicking flag colors, and in the end taking a leap of faith and coasting on vibes.