QYou may not be the right person to answer this, but your commenters might be able to help. I love and support my friends who are transgender, but I don’t understand all the 18- to 21-year-olds among my friends who are declaring themselves “gender neutral.” I am a bit older, and have always been interested in queer culture and history. But it feels like they’ve forgotten, or never knew, that butch lesbians who wear strap-ons are still women, or that it’s very common for straight men to wear lacy underwear. They don’t seem to know that they can be gender nonconforming without having to discard gender. Because they’re so young and all of them have decided this at the same time, it seems to be some kind of trend. Some may be on their way to coming out as trans, which is fair enough, but I strongly suspect some of them will be completely conventional in a couple of years. It would be rude and dismissive of me to tell them that it’s just a phase, so I would never do that, but I don’t really understand the point of being gender neutral. What has changed in the last few years that this is suddenly a thing? —Longtime Reader
But since it’s (almost always) impossible to tell the attention-seeking poseurs from the actual items, LR, your best course of action when someone declares themselves to be gender neutral—or bigender or pangender or etceteragender—is to smile, nod, inquire about pronoun preferences, make a mental note not to use pronouns around that person (easier than committing multiple sets to memory), and then change the genderfucking subject.
(3) There’s being sensitive to gender issues, and then there’s being so sensitive to gender issues that you’re practically allergic. But rest assured: you are not a jerk, OOPS, as there are so many freshly minted gender identities and pronouns sloshing around out there that no one can keep up.
APerhaps I should’ve said that threesomes rarely happen naturally, GGT, while emphasizing that individual results may vary. But a relationship is far likelier to survive an “unnatural” threesome—one that has been planned in advance—than it is to survive a spontaneous threesome. Unsexy negotiations about limits and boundaries, hashing out what is and is not OK, and discussions about STIs and birth control are nearly impossible to have as your clothes are coming off. So threesomes that people drink, massage, or strip-poker their way into are likelier to result in the kind of hurt feelings that lead to breakups and make all threesomes, spontaneous or planned, look dangerous and risky.
