Distinctions between gender, sexuality and kink

Biyuti, posting @ Womanist Musings, has a piece titled The distinction between gender and sexuality about how the traditional Trans* 101 argument that "gender and sexuality are separate and not the same thing ... at all" is constructed by society, and in particular, Western society, such that, "if this statement has any truth, it might only true in the Western discourse on gender and sexuality."

Biyuti states that:

Different societies will have different constructions. This seems like a basic understanding, but since the West likes to think itself the centre of the universe, this is rarely emphasized as strongly as it should be. Even more rare are those who recognize the basic normative and imperialistic notion of asserting that all gender is distinct from all sexuality.

This is not my truth. Just as I do not experience my race as distinct from my sexuality/gender, my sexuality and gender intersect and overlap. Perhaps, they are even the same thing. I'm not quite sure and I'm not really concerned with working out the exact boundaries between the two (if they are even exist).

Two things struck me as potent about my relationship to this point, and they were these:

1. I haven't really stopped to think about how I conceive the relationship between my sexuality and my gender identity, even though I have thought a great deal about both
2. The dilemma struck me as being similar in kind to another one relating to my sexuality, which is "is BDSM just kinky sex?"

The first point struck me particularly when I read the commenters who described buying into the Western division-classification system and I realised that I didn't even know if I had or had not bought into that mode of thinking! I think I have done, inasmuch as I have tended to think about them separately, but I think I have not inasmuch as I have been aware that expressions of one have shifted the other (I have just not focussed any thought on what's going on in that respect).

Which leads me to my first conclusion - just scratching the surface of gender and sexuality pretty much reveals that there's more to it than meets the eye. In 2008, I wrote a series about "geometry of gender", in which I talked about an "orthogonal model" in which maleness and femaleness are independent variables, and talked about different "axioms" by which people are gendered - including sexual orientation and, distinct (though not necessarily separate) from that, partner choice. (I'm not at all sure I still believe what I said back then, although I still think those thoughts are useful in helping to investigate these relationships.)

With feeling almost but not quite a man, and the variable gender identity/expression that goes with being Lady Rosenthyme et al, and with being "bi-curious" or "heteroflexible", there certainly seems like a whole load of stuff about gender and sexuality to be explored. When we look at the fact that BDSM orientation trumps gender in my choice of partners (though people I find sexy tend to be more likely to be female), it gets more complicated still (and also points to why I thought of the BDSM dilemma in relation to Biyuti's post).

I can't really untangle this knot very easily. I still conceive of sexuality and gender as being distinct from each other, but they are also clearly interwoven and intermingled such that tugging on one inevitably leads to questions about the other, when I start trying to think it through.

Because I experience my sexuality and gender(s) as being embodied, and all of them are in the same body (mine) how can they help but intermingle and impact upon each other? The desire I have to feel a thick, hard cock in my cunt (it's such a shame I don't have one for it to be in!) is an embodied wish despite that non-existence issue - I can feel exactly where I perceive my non-existent cunt to be, right at the base of my prick, and I try to imagine the sensations that such penetration would cause. But I also imagine fucking a girlfriend with a strap-on (sometimes I wonder if I could use a strap-on even given that I already have a natural dong of my own). Inevitably, those are different types of fantasy or experience from those of having sex as a man. Somehow, I feel as though I would be more evenly split in my sex-partner choice (i.e. more evenly bisexual) if I were female-bodied, though how much of that is Patriarchy-induced sex-class attitudes steering my thoughts (I know that I was the only guy who said I would be straight if I was a woman, all my guy friends said they'd be lesbian).

On the BDSM front, this is similar to how I feel about the relationship between sex and BDSM. They are deeply intertwined, and in many ways similar (for instance, in being embodied experiences) but still seem to me to be distinct. However, they cannot and perhaps should not be separated. It is possible to analyse one in isolation of the other, but to do so some reference must still be made to the other in order to make sense of anything. My experience of (shifting) gender keys directly into my understanding of both in ways that cannot be simply extracted one from the other - Lady Rosenthyme, Sucha and SnowdropExplodes are three different gender expressions (it's worth noting that I am much more fluid and less discrete in my conceptions of them nowadays) and also three different ways of approaching BDSM and sex, and that's intertwined in curious and hard-to-fathom ways.

Certainly, as embodied experiences, BDSM