nonbinary and gay?

Sexual orientation, emphasis on “sex”. Your sex is male or female, while gender relies on societal constructs on how individuals from these sexes should behave. To be non-binary is to not conform to these constructs such as masculine or feminine. With this being said, I don’t think there’d be much of an issue with someone identifying with being lgbt and non-binary. But also, this is my understanding which could be wrong.

 

this is actually a bit of an oversimplification because for many people, sexual orientation has much more to do with gender than it does with one's physical body, ie i'm gay, but for me that definitely includes trans women and does not include trans men, regardless or what their bodies look like and if they're undergoing a medical transition or not.

the language used for sexual orientation pre-dates much language about gender, which means that sometimes the words are not necessarily suited in their literal meaning, and people adapt them as necessary to fit their situation. for a lot of non-binary people, terms like straight and gay can be used to express different meanings for the 'same sex' or 'opposite sex' definitions ('opposite sex' is problematic anyway because it implies only two genders that must also be opposites, which is just not the case and based on very outdated ideas of gender roles). some nb people use gay to mean they're only attracted to other non-binary individuals, while others use it to the refer to the binary gender they feel most closely connected to. ie a person who was assigned female at birth, identifies as nb, but still feels like they have more in common with women than men due to how they were raised and the struggles they face when being perceived as women, may use 'gay' to mean 'sexually attracted to women'. but, there are no rules about this, and other people may even use gay as more of an umbrella term, or they use gay because they identified as gay before identifying as non-binary, and the label just feels right to them. straight is generally not used that way because it seems to be a much more rigid label and people may not be as comfortable adapting it for their own needs.

really, language is so limited in its descriptions that it's very much a matter of adapting it in a way that works for you, in a way that best expresses the way you feel. and also what way you're most willing to defend. ie if you use 'gay' to refer to women, people may assume you're a woman at first - whether or not that's something you want to explain all the time (or if you're just willing to let it pass) really depends on yourself and your own experience. there aren't really any clear rules because it's all a bit of a grey area of language, where language is clearly too limited to properly express these things.

 

I look like an ordinary guy, I'm a girl inside and consider myself gay. I don't feel the need to question these things and I do my best to make them work for me in ways which are fulfilling.

 

Whatever you feel is appropriate. A lot of people go by the labels of gay or lesbian or straight when they have non-binary gender, because this is the clearest explanation and this is what they are with respect to their biology (on the outside).

If it bothers you, there are labels adrosexual and gynesexual, which mean atracted to men/women, without implying your gender. Many non-binary folk use those labels in the internet... I'm not sure about meat space. A lot of people say "I like men/women" too, simply.

 

There are the terms nblm, nblw, and nblnb, meaning nonbinary who loves men, nonbinary who loves women, and nonbinary who loves nonbinary respectively