About five years ago, I underwent a five-month transition from conservative evangelical Christian to atheist. And what do most teens and young adults do after leaving a sexually repressive ideology? Why, go out and have lots of sex! Many of my friends expected I’d do this; some people probably assumed, as I used to assume about others, that I was leaving religion in order to get license to pursue sexual activities. But for me it was different. Sex had zero appeal to me, although I passionately wanted a relationship of love and pair-bonded intimacy. I’d never masturbated, and the last sexual fantasy I’d had was over ten years ago. As a young teen, I hadn’t found it difficult to repress the budding sexual desires that my religion told me were dangerous and destructive unless I was married; by 25 I had repressed them so successfully they were nowhere to be found.

I knew that I wasn’t “normal,” and began searching out information about what had gone wrong with me, that I rarely felt sexual attractions and didn’t desire sexual interactions. Fairly quickly, I stumbled on the concept of asexuality, and found www.asexuality.org. It was like a revelation: I might not be normal, but I wasn’t alone! On the message boards, I found a community of people who discussed love and attraction in terms I could relate to; I found a place where I could discuss my sparse sexual history without feeling like a freak; I found a language for my feelings of attraction and desire, words like “aesthetic attraction” and “heteroromantic.” It was liberating. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the people on those message boards, for giving me a safe, welcoming place to discuss sexuality and begin exploring my own sexual identity.

Obviously, at some point my identity began to shift. I slowly felt a resurgence of sexual interests and desires, and the label “asexual” or even “gray-a” (usually used to mean not quite asexual, but with a very low libido) no longer felt right to me. But becoming a sexual person was not an easy road — I should say is not, because in many ways I’m still working on it. At times of anxiety and depression, my libido disappears completely. I enjoy sex, sometimes quite a lot, but never as much as others seem to, and at times I feel inadequate, envious, or resentful about this. In short, my relationship with sexuality is still somewhat dysfunctional: sometimes we get along great, I’m happy to have it part of my life, and I’d hate to lose it; other times, I feel like it’s all struggle and confusion, and I wonder if it’s really worth it.

Going back to a self-identification of asexual (or, more likely, gray-a) sometimes seems like a tempting option (ignoring, for the moment, that I’m in not one but three sexual relationships, and how that would impact them). It would be easier, without a doubt. But it would be dishonest to say that it was my only option. My sexuality has grown and strengthened over time and with some deliberate effort, and I believe it can continue to do so. But it takes a lot of energy and courage to keep on that path. I see what sexuality can be for other people, and I want that for myself. But sometimes, when I look at the level of joy and satisfaction I get out of sex, and compare it with the level of joy and satisfaction others seem to, I’m afraid my potential is permanently limited, and I wonder if it would be wiser to just give it up and find satisfaction in other areas.

I know there are people within the asexual community who have approximately my level of libido and sexual connection, who have chosen to let sexuality fall by the wayside and to pursue other avenues of joy and pleasure. Sometimes I worry for these hypothetical people (who I am not at all supposing to be the majority of self-identified asexuals) that they’ve let an orientation label cut off their own assessment of what’s possible for them. Other times I envy them for evading many of the frustrations I feel.

I actually really like the word ‘cunt.’ Unlike most words for female genitalia, it sounds strong and earthy and unsentimental, which is how I like to think of my vagina. It’s long been my favorite genital slang word for either sex (I don’t really like any of the slang for “penis.”)

Beyond my personal preference, I’m generally all in favor of word reclamation: a word is only an insult if you let it be. So I’d like to see “cunt” brought to the same level of acceptability that “pussy” holds. Which means I had a weird cognitive clash the other night when I read about Penn Jillette calling a female humor writer a “fucking cunt” just for writing an article he found unfunny.

I’m really not interested in excoriating Jillette: this is not the first thing he’s done that made me think I wouldn’t like him as a person, and there are plenty of other people calling him out anyway. What I’m interested in is how strongly I reacted to seeing “cunt” used that way. It evoked a feeling of threat, of violent hostility, directed not toward a particular personality but toward womanhood — which meant that the threat was vaguely aimed at me as well.

This is pretty much how I always feel when seeing someone referred to as a “cunt” in a way that’s clearly hostile. I know it’s not always meant that way, and that in English-speaking countries other than the US the word is much more mild in connotation. But to me, unique among gender-based insults, “cunt” sounds to me like the speaker is about two steps from brandishing a knife, and lashing out not only at the person who evoked their wrath, but at anyone else who bears the same genitalia.

I freely use words like “dick” and “tool” to describe people who are displaying a stereotypically masculine unpleasantness, and “bitch” to describe people who are displaying a stereotypically feminine unpleasantness. I don’t have a problem with my own or other people’s uses of those words. But “cunt,” to me, is different, and I’m not sure why. Is it because “bitch” seems aimed at female behavior, and “cunt” seems aimed at femaleness itself? But then why am I okay with “dick” and “tool”?

My theory, and it’s pretty off-the-cuff, is that there is not nearly the level of culturally-engrained loathing of the penis as there is of the vagina. (In all the ensuing discussions of culture, I’m talking about the segment of modern US culture I inhabit.) Penis-having is seen as a pretty positive thing; we expect men with penises to be proud of them, and we treat penis-related indiscretions with the kind of indulgent scolding we’d give to a puppy who knocked over a cookie jar. Oblique references to the penis are constant and pervasive in our culture, and most of them are positive.

The cultural view of the vagina is much more ambivalent: there are a lot of people, both male and female, who see the vagina as dirty, disgusting, and treacherous. We talk less about vaginas, we joke less about them, we don’t pat ourselves or anybody else on the back just for having one. While phallic imagery is usually met with a giggle, vaginal imagery is often met with a vague feeling of discomfort. The mainstream cultural voices never seriously think someone’s worth is lowered just because they have a penis; sometimes they do think someone’s worth is lowered just because they have a vagina. “Cunt,” as an insult, draws on a whole deep well of hatred and revulsion that’s just not present, in our culture, for penis-based insults.

I find it interesting that “pussy” is only an insult when it’s directed at a man, which possibly sheds light on another subtext of “cunt.” Pussy is a soft word, in both sound and meaning: it’s gentle and cute and unthreatening. Cunt, as I said at the beginning, is powerful: it’s just as direct and plosive as cock. Women are never insulted by being called pussies: gentle, cute, and unthreatening is what women are supposed to be. Daring to be powerful while having a vagina is what gets women in trouble.

2011 for me was, if not quite as surprising as 2010, at least as momentous. I moved to the city which will likely become a long-term home for me. I was accepted into, and began, a master’s program and began shaping actual grownup-style career plans. I decided I wanted to marry that ridiculous, smart, caring, and passionate boy I live with, and happily for me he decided he wanted to marry me too. I rejoiced as several of my dear friends made similar decisions in their own relationships. I met two more amazing lovers, who nurture me, challenge me, and have shown me incredible forgiveness and acceptance when I needed it most. I began building family, traditions, and support networks of my own.

I have big plans for 2012, mostly building on what I’ve done in 2011. Get married; inch my way toward financial stability; continue building my relationships in our extended poly family; get close to completing my master’s, and decide whether to apply for a doctorate; begin teaching and speaking about different aspects of human sexuality.

Apart from these I have a few specific resolutions. One is to keep writing fiction regularly, if not prolifically. I find that I still have a mental and emotional need that is only satisfied by writing stories, and amid all the other work and play I have to do, I think I’ll be healthier and happier if I continue to make time for it, even if it’s only a few hours a week. Another is to begin engaging in debates with people who disagree with me, particularly about religion and sexuality: I still have a pretty deep discomfort with expressing my opinions if I know I’m in a hostile room, and I want to get better at that. A third is to continue the work, which I began several years ago but let fall off, of getting more in touch with my sensations and emotions, through awareness meditation, deliberate attention, and continually confronting the fears that motivate the disconnection.

I wish for all of you a year filled with growth, happiness, and love.

Myself, I try not to remember too hard. When my baby sister was a year old and I was nine, I had a recurring waking nightmare, a fearful fantasy that at times I could not help playing over in my mind: that our house would be on fire and that we’d be unable to rescue her from her room. I was haunted by the thought of little Beth, who trusted me with her whole heart, standing up and waiting for me to come rescue her as the smoke and flames filled her room, and I stood helplessly outside. It made me sick to my stomach and I had to sing loudly or throw myself into some mental task to chase the image from my mind. My point is, I have always had a deeply protective love for my next-to-youngest sibling… which has not changed much as my baby sister grew into my big, confused but loving teenage sister, and now into my brave, independent, pretty-much-grown-up brother.

I discovered I had this handicap when, a few months after Lane announced his intention to transition, there was a news story about the brutal beating of a transman in Baltimore. That’s when it clicked for me, that one of the people I love most in the world has joined a population that is the target, not only of bigotry and prejudice, but of violent hatred. Dwelling on it gives me basically the same feeling that I had as a nine-year-old imagining a house fire that cut off the baby’s room. So I don’t dwell on it.

I have always been horrified at the thought of violence against hate-targeted minorities: whether it’s sexuality, ethnicity, or religion, there’s something especially horrible about the fact that some people’s hatred can be aroused just because of someone else’s identity. But it’s real, and personal, for me now in a way that it wasn’t before last year.

I don’t really have a point or a theory. If someone you love ever comes out as gay, or trans, or moves to a place where their religion or ethnicity is viewed with hostility, you’ll know how I feel. Remembering the transgender victims of violence is important, because it should motivate us all to work to make this world a safe space for everybody who crosses gender barriers. It’s just, for me, I have to remember just a little bit, and then try hard to forget.

I wonder if a similar model would be useful for discussing religious belief. Is belief or unbelief in a deity (pick your favorite!) a choice? I would argue that at any given moment, a person does or does not believe in a particular deity. Analogous to the “orientation” piece of the OBI model, this is just a program that is running in your brain: you cannot choose to switch it on or off, although various paths you take in life may contribute to its running or shut it down. But it’s not subject to conscious, volitional will.

Then there is the “identity” component: whether you think of yourself as a theist, and usually a member of a particular religion, or not. This may or may not have anything to do with your belief orientation. There was a time in my life where I identified as a Christian although I no longer had the belief in God that I had in my earlier years. Similarly, anyone who identifies as an “atheist” because they are mad at God is not an atheist in the orientational sense: people who genuinely lack belief in a deity have nothing to be angry at.

Finally, there is the behavior component, which is independent of both orientation and identity. Attending church does not make you a Christian believer, nor do you have to call yourself a Christian to attend. And many people identify as members of a religion without engaging in any of the behaviors prescribed by that religion. Whether there are any behaviors that could be categorized as “atheistic” is an interesting question… I can’t think of any off the top of my head, although I can think of many that could be described as humanistic or skeptical.

What do you think? Useful categories for discussions of belief and unbelief?

I am not a particularly confrontational brand of atheist (although I am marrying one, in case you hadn’t noticed.) I pretty much never start discussions of theism, although I am happy to engage in them if somebody else does. With most people I encounter, I am more interested in maintaining harmonious connections than I am in expressing my thoughts and beliefs fully. Maybe that’s a weakness — I don’t know.

What I do know is that expressing my thoughts and beliefs openly, with many people, stands in direct opposition to maintaining harmonious connections. When I was a Christian theist, and engaged weekly in debates with two friends (one was an atheist, one a weirdly self-defined agnostic), I was explaining to them why I couldn’t date an atheist. I said, “Because he thinks I’m delusional.” I didn’t say this in a defensive or injured way; it was a simple statement of fact. I thought that I had a personal relationship with a being that he did not believe existed. That’s pretty delusional. To claim otherwise, for either of us, would be to deny the reality of my faith; to lessen the import of what I believed. Because my belief was in a real, absolutely existing God, not a God that could be “true for me” but not for someone else. For someone to say, “If that’s true for you, that’s great” was to mentally diminish my concept of God and then hand it back to me as a peace offering. To which I could only say, “No thanks.” I can coexist peacefully with people who I think are glaringly wrong on any number of important topics, but to diminish the importance of this topic was then, and is now, insulting to me. Anyone who didn’t believe that my God existed was in fundamental disagreement with me, and had to account in some way for the cognitive errors that gave rise to my belief. Anyone who pretended otherwise, I felt, did not fully respect my beliefs.

Now on the other side of the table, I can at least say that I give believers the same respect I wanted from atheists when I was a believer. I won’t mentally diminish their beliefs just to spare myself the discomfort of thinking, “but I think that’s wrong.” Depending on someone’s perception of God, of course, I may have very different assessments of the cognitive errors that lead them to believe something I think is untrue, but the socially uncomfortable fact is that I do think they’re wrong. I don’t go around telling them so: I realize most people don’t share my love of debate, and many of them, unlike Christian Ginny, might prefer a “If that’s true for you, great!” than an earnest confrontation. (If you recognize that I am a person who’s passionate about truth and loves philosophical argument, but has an almost pathological aversion to making people uncomfortable or unhappy, you will perhaps understand why most of my intimate relationships are with people who enjoy confrontation and debate.)

So what am I supposed to do? I hold an unpopular belief: a belief that some human beings, excellent and wise and moral and educated in many respects, are wrong about something important. I can’t talk about my perspective on religion without saying “That God/Goddess entity you believe in? The one that provides comfort and meaning and a sense of love and belonging to your life? I don’t think it exists.” That’s what it means to be an atheist, and I don’t know how I can talk for more than fifteen seconds about being an atheist without exposing that.

There are times and places where I feel doing that is worthwhile; specifically when I’m in a forum where intellectual debate is part of the goal, or where I am on the receiving end of a challenge. But in most social gatherings I prefer to hold my tongue, or to say quickly, “Well, I”m an atheist” and change the subject. And in this class, where we already had to cover too much information in too little time, I didn’t feel it was right to derail the conversation with a discussion of theism and atheism. (Also, of course, there’s the fact that the Christian minister was the person giving my grades. I really don’t think he would have been unfair or discriminatory, but people can surprise you in that way.)

So I kept silent, and I still didn’t know whether I did the right thing or the wrong thing.

This theory irks me for a number of reasons: the most rational being that it assumes that basically modern gendered family roles were present in the environment men and women evolved in. It assumes monogamous pair-bonding with the female dependent on the males’ support; if you’re having trouble imagining any other possibility, consider a small, close tribal community where resources are shared fairly equally among the whole tribe, as opposed to won and hoarded by a particular nuclear family unit. Consider an economy based largely on foraging, where women’s childbearing role would not hamper them from obtaining resources nearly as much as in a more labor-intensive agricultural economy. The “men evolved to be sexually jealous to ensure their hard-won resources nourished their own offspring” idea makes little sense if human brains evolved in such communities, as does “women evolved to be emotionally jealous to ensure their mates’ continued provision.”

An alternative theory is based on our culture’s intense conditioning of males and females around sexuality and emotion. Men are taught from an early age that being highly emotional is unacceptable. While women are allowed to cuddle and form intimate emotional bonds in many kinds of relationships (with family, with friends, with children), men’s sole source of both affectionate touch and emotional intimacy is in the sex act. For this reason, I think it’s often misleading to make a distinction between men’s sexual and emotional needs: very often the two are conflated, because our culture deems non-sexual emotional needs as “unmanly.”

From the women’s side, we are socialized to view male sexuality as rampant and uncontrollable: that a man will have sex every chance he gets, and with as many women as he can, is often viewed as natural and inevitable. And from that standpoint, it is likely to be much more forgivable. Men’s sexuality, in our culture, is cheap: easy to gain access to, and thus less valuable and less jealously guarded. Men’s emotional commitment and intimacy, on the other hand, is rare and difficult to obtain (see the above paragraph). Therefore for a woman’s male partner to give emotional intimacy to someone else is a much higher violation than for him to give sexual intimacy. (I use the word “give” as opposed to “share” deliberately: the idea that intimacy of either kind is a commodity is fundamental to the very idea of infidelity, so it seems logical to use that language even though it’s contrary to my own philosophy.)

In my view, our cultural constructions of gender, and particularly the severe suppression and distortion of male’s emotional selves, is entirely sufficient to explain the “women are more worried about emotional infidelity, men are more worried about sexual infidelity” statistic. Problematic and possibly counterfactual evo-psych theories are, in this case, superfluous.

Suppose, further, that you have a well-recommended therapist who tells you that they’ve had some success in helping gender non-conforming kids get more comfortable performing their socially-accepted gender. They assure you that they do this not by shaming or belittling the child’s preferences, but by encouraging them to find things that they do enjoy and value that fit within their prescribed gender role. (Note: I don’t know what the standard approach is for treating GIDC. This is my best guess.)

So you have lots of options. You can take your child out of school and either homeschool or find a school where his gender performance is accepted (the latter will be difficult, and might involve moving your entire family.) You can let him tough it out in his current environment and do your best to give him enough love and encouragement at home to balance it out. Or you can take him to therapy. What would you do? And why?

So right now I’m doing preliminary research for a paper which is going to have something to do with the relation between sexual orientation and gender nonconformity in childhood. I still have three days before I need to come up with a coherent thesis, so it’s all terrain-exploration right now. I’ve been reading a sequence of books and articles, from the mid 70s to 2008, discussing the correlation between gender nonconformity in children and homosexual orientation in adults. There’s a correlation, did you know? A pretty darn strong one, apparently.

What is amazing to me, having read mostly political and philosophical writings on gender and orientation, is how dispassionately these researchers present their theories, findings, and analyses. In fact the difference between an article written in 1974 and one in 2008 is much smaller than I would have expected, given the profound social changes we’ve seen since then. It makes me appreciate science, even a “soft” science, for its commitment to evidence and impartial analysis — which is not to say that researchers are unbiased, but there is a world of difference between the language of people who are trying to understand something, and people who are trying to advocate for a particular outcome.

So, quick self-poll for all of you: is sexual orientation primarily determined before or after birth? Is a newborn baby’s future orientation already fixed, or will it be formed later in response to life circumstances? Social liberals are more likely to say that it’s innate; social conservatives more likely to say that it’s caused by post-birth events. I suspect this is more because people perceive “born this way” as an argument for tolerance: we tend to think it’s less acceptable to discriminate against people for inborn traits than for features developed later in life (which, presumably, they had more control over.)

This creates a somewhat sticky situation, though, as we have an unanswered scientific question (how is sexual orientation determined) with a strong political charge. And bad things happen when politics meet science. On the one side, political influence can inhibit or skew scientific research, and on the other, political movements can appropriate scientific findings and use them to appalling ends.

But I think the political interest in this scientific question is kind of stupid anyway. At first, “I was born this way” seems like a strong defense, but it’s really not. A sociopathic killer might have been born that way, but we don’t urge tolerance and advocate their freedom to carry out their homicidal urges just because they were born that way. (Someone could quotemine the shit out of me there, I realize.) “They can’t help it” is really rather a poor and patronizing defense for somebody’s behavior. The appropriate defense for gay rights is “Being gay does not harm society, nor is it wrong by any other moral standard I recognize.” Period, end of story. How someone got to be gay is irrelevant: their right to be gay stands on the fact that there’s nothing wrong with being gay. Arguments with those who disagree need to be fought on that ground.

The second anxiety people like me have toward the possibility that sexual orientation might be formed later in life is vulnerability to “reparative” therapy. Reparative therapy as it is currently practiced is abusive and ineffective, and the argument “you can’t change them, they were born that way” should be an effective argument against practicing it. But again, while belief that sexual orientation is malleable is a necessary condition for reparative therapy to be practiced and recommended, I don’t think that strong scientific evidence for the innateness of sexual orientation would stop the practice of reparative therapy entirely. Religion overrides science for lots of people; need I say more?

Ultimately, if orientation is primarily genetic, it opens the same kinds of fears about people trying to control their child’s orientation: by selective abortion or genetic manipulation, for example. As before, the root problem is not where orientation comes from, it’s people’s attitude toward it. No matter where orientation comes from, the question is not so much “could you change it?” but “why would you want to?”

Then we get into questions of social stigma and ease of life and possible reasons why a parent who didn’t have a moral problem with homosexuality would still want a child not to be gay, a question which has its own complicated factors, many of which are addressed in disability activism as well. If one of my commenters wants to jump on that, feel free, otherwise I might get to it another time. For now, I have a paper to research.

Naturally, a lot of people have wanted to know if we’re still going to be polyamorous. Yes we are; this relationship has never been about “we’ll be non-monogamous until I decide if I really want to commit to you.” What really weirds me out, though, is the people who ask what the point of marriage is if it’s not going to be exclusive.

I’m not being flip here, I really am mystified. One person close to me said “What is a marriage without sexual faithfulness*?”– and then denied me the opportunity to respond, so I’m going to respond here. In marrying Shaun I am making him a partner in all my life decisions. I am committing to upholding the health of our relationship, and prioritizing it over everything except my own growth and wellbeing. I am declaring my intention to be with him through all the changes of adult life. I am trusting him to be the primary decision-maker on my behalf if I am ever incapacitated, and accepting the responsibility of doing the same for him. These things are the bedrock of my commitment to him, and though I’ve had very different ideas about the meaning of marriage throughout my life, these are always the things I have thought of as being the essence of marriage. Once upon a time I considered sexual exclusivity part of it as well, but only because I couldn’t imagine a kind of non-exclusivity other than cheating. Exclusivity was part of the marriage contract not in itself, but as a sub-category of the “upholding the health of our relationship” clause.

When I talk to someone who seems to have trouble imagining what a non-monogamous marriage could possibly mean, I begin to have rather unflattering thoughts about them. Such as (if they’re married) “has sexual exclusivity been such a monumental struggle or sacrifice for you that it’s come to define your marriage?” Or “is marriage, for you, more about ‘nobody else can have you’ than about the positive commitment you’re making to each other?” Apart from something like this, I really can’t conceive where such a question comes from.

But enough of that. My marriage is about the commitments and intentions I named above; I believe that Shaun and I both are better, stronger, and happier together than we would be apart, and in marrying him I am making public that belief and my intention to continue working to make it a reality.

*Faithfulness is the wrong word here; as I’ve said many times before, Shaun and I are faithful to each other. We each communicate our needs, emotional and physical, and faithfulness is a matter of us each considering the other’s needs before our own gratification. Exclusivity is only part of faithfulness if you make it so.