Being Non-Monosexual: Why the Middle Makes Everyone Else Uncomfortable

Loving more than one gender shouldn't be confusing. But to a lot of people, it is.

Queerness is already a minority position in a world built on binaries. Non-monosexuality (being attracted to more than one gender) is a minority inside that minority. And monosexual people, gay or straight, often can't sit with that. The binary is the only thing that makes them feel safe.

I get it, even when it costs me something. A binary gives you a map with only two roads on it. You know which road you're on and which road everyone else is on, and you never have to hold the discomfort of not knowing. Non-monosexuality doesn't offer that. It says the map has more roads than two, and some people move between them depending on the person in front of them rather than the gender category attached to that person.

That's a bigger map rather than confusion. But a bigger map is harder to hold, and a lot of people would rather shrink the territory than expand their grip.

Date a man, or someone masculine-presenting, and I'm "just another straight girl." Short hair, gender-nonconforming, doesn't matter: the label snaps into place anyway.

Date a woman, or someone feminine-presenting, and I'm "just another lesbian." Same erasure in a different costume.

I've never hidden who I am; my partners and the people around us knew. It didn't matter. What I noticed, over and over, is that the label was about whoever was doing the labeling, and what they needed to be true in order to stay comfortable in the conversation.

• "You're confused."
• "You're really a lesbian."
• "You just need to meet a nice man."
• "I don't date bisexuals. They're sluts."
• "I had that phase." (Usually a drunk, male-gaze-approved moment, think Katy Perry. Drunk or coerced isn't a real data point.)

• "You're confused."
• "You're really straight."
• "I remember that phase, before I accepted myself."
• "I don't date bisexuals. They can't be trusted."
• "They're sluts."

Same script in a different room.

Notice the mirror. Strip away which group is speaking and the sentences are nearly interchangeable: "confused," "really" something else, a phase, untrustworthy, promiscuous. Two communities that agree on almost nothing else somehow arrived at the same five accusations independently. That's what a binary does when something doesn't fit inside it: rather than expanding to make room, it reclassifies the thing until the binary is technically intact again.

That one deserves its own paragraph, because it's the sneakiest of the bunch. It usually shows up from a straight man a few drinks in, framed as a compliment, like he's letting me in on something. What you do drunk or coerced was never a reliable measure of who you are. A woman kissing another woman at a party because a man is watching and enjoying it is not the same event as a woman choosing a relationship, sober and unwatched, because she wants it. Collapsing those two things into "phase" does real damage: it turns an identity into a party trick, which is exactly the move that keeps non-monosexuality from being taken seriously as anything other than a performance for someone else's benefit.

I'm almost 39. That list isn't even complete, and none of it is new. The words have aged better than the people saying them. I've heard some version of every line above from a ten-year-old's understanding of the world all the way through adulthood, different vocabulary, same underlying refusal to update the map.

What's strange is how little the delivery changes with age or education. I've heard "you're really a lesbian" from people with graduate degrees in gender studies, delivered with the same flat certainty as the version I got in a middle school hallway. Sophistication doesn't inoculate anyone against needing the binary to hold.

Finding people beautiful without needing them to fit a category first isn't a popular stance. Other non-monosexual people live it. Everyone else admires it as a concept and stops there.

The one thing gay, lesbian, and straight people tend to agree on: non-monosexual people make them uneasy. That discomfort is theirs. It shouldn't get handed to us as a character flaw.

This part is worth sitting with, because it has little to do with who I'm dating. When someone insists I'm "really" a lesbian or "really" straight, they're managing something in their own life rather than making an observation about mine: usually a quiet, unexamined question about how fixed their own attraction really is, and what it would mean if it weren't.

It's a lot easier to pathologize someone else's fluidity than to sit with the possibility that your own certainty is a choice you keep making rather than a fact you were simply handed. I don't say that to be unkind. I say it because naming it accurately is the only thing that's ever changed the conversation: pointing at what the discomfort in the room is made of, rather than defending my own identity for the thousandth time.

For the record, since it comes up so often: non-monosexuality isn't indecision. It isn't a layover on the way to a "real" identity. It isn't promiscuity dressed up in a label, and it isn't obligated to prove itself through some quota of dating history before anyone's allowed to believe it. It's attraction that doesn't organize itself around a single gender category, no more mysterious than someone who loves both mountains and oceans and sees no reason to pick a favorite terrain to be loyal to.

I don't need anyone to fully understand it. I've made peace with that. What I need is for people to stop assuming their confusion is my problem to solve.

Life works better lived inside out rather than shaped around what keeps other people comfortable.

Have fun out there, and take people at their word. Nobody needs you to tell them who they are.

Happy loving. ❤️❤️🥰

Well wishes, 🙏 Love C. Dialogos, LMFT, Buddhist Chaplain

Further reading on this site:

• Gender-Affirming Care: Surgical Provider Directory: searchable directory of gender-affirming surgical providers across the U.S. and internationally, filterable by procedure and WPATH membership
• What Hormone Therapy Actually Does: GAHT effects and what WPATH SOC8 recommends
• The Vice Grip: Intersectionality and Compounding Suicide Risk: why LGBTQ+ risk compounds with other marginalized identities
• Neutrality Isn't Neutral: the politics of clinical "neutrality" in LGBTQ+ affirming practice