ABSTRACT
As there is no widely used language for sexuality that takes trans identities into account, trans identities are often made invisible through the currently-available labels for sexuality. Based on ethnographic research, this chapter presents some of the problems with sexual identity categories for cisgender women with trans partners, while also highlighting the importance of these categories for many individuals, both personally and politically. Terms such as “lesbian,” “bisexual,” and “straight” – even “queer” and “pansexual” – might help to define individual sexual identity, but they fail to account for the ways that gender and sexuality are also relational identities that indicate our connections with intimate others. This chapter argues that gender binaries in language are related to issues of (in)visibility around sexuality and that gender binaries impose limits around sexual identity that erase the trans specificities in a relationship.
