Trans and poly: literally strange bedfellows

So I am not subscribed to Eliza Mondegreen’s Substack, but someone shared this article in my newsfeed on Facebook a few days ago, and I thought I would chime in with a “me too.” You won’t be able to read it either unless you are subscribed, but you can see a bit.

One thing about me is you will see me use the word cult here. I probably should explain, again, that I am agnostic. It is not a case of me thinking some religions are (or one religion is) REAL and the others are CULTS. I’ve seen no good evidence that any of them are real, and they all have varying degrees of cult-ness. My theory is that the newer the religion, or the more that the religion relies on converts to keep its numbers up, the more cultish it will be. I am probably using a fuzzy definition for the word, but I don’t have the patience to go in-depth about this because most people reading probably won’t get it anyway. I hate busting my ass only to not accomplish what I was trying to do. So, “cult” it is. If I can find a better word in the future, maybe we’ll try that one.

In that vein, I consider both gender identity and polyamory to be cults, and they absolutely are interconnected. I cannot see enough of Eliza’s article to know how longstanding she thinks this interconnection is. I will say it is not new. I was seeing it as far back as 2002. In fact, when I discussed this on my own Facebook and in addressing the fuckery that is the connection between these two cults, first I compared it to a freight train and then I backtracked, likening it instead to a dangerous fungus. “You’re just finally seeing the fruiting bodies,” I said. I am one of those people who throws away the whole piece of cheese if it’s got mold on it, because the bit you can see isn’t the largest part of the organism. It spreads all throughout the cheese first, and then it becomes visible to us. Likewise these movements. They spread throughout a few subcultures first and then BAM, here they are in the mainstream. Poly a little less than trans even now, I think; but if we don’t get a fucking grip and nope it the fuck down, give it time. It’ll get here.

I was once a member of a Neopagan church founded by the guy who, along with his primary partner, coined the word polyamory. I personally got into poly back in the early aughts because I thought I was fundamentally broken and couldn’t do monogamy, a stance I later refined into “I am just oriented to be poly.” I gave it my best shot, but one thing I learned early that really bothered me was that it doesn’t matter if you have more liberal rules, people will decide that rules don’t matter and just do whatever the fuck they want. I ended it with one guy because I caught him baldfaced lying to his wife when we were together, and then had not just a monkeywrench but the whole damn toolbox thrown into the gears of what I had with my daughter’s father because he was yet another cheating liar. Another thing that bothered me was the cavalier way so many polyfolk treated their relationships, like, “Oh well… that’s over. Guess the universe meant me to learn a specific lesson from it. Moving on now.” Partners were seen more as roles in a person’s life and had little inherent value. And do not even get me started on the primary-secondary model, which is just spouse and side fucks with extra steps. If you’re going to say you’re capable of multiple loves, why are you gonna shove three of those loves into the closet when the in-laws come to visit? When have you ever put a group of people into the position of having to vie for hierarchal status and actually had that turn out well? Much less when you do it within the context of a so-called “love” situation?

I used to see poly people compare having more than one romantic partner to having more than one child: “you love them all the same.” Asshole, no you don’t. It isn’t fucking possible. Love between two people grows with time and mutual experience, and I am not talking about sex, so naturally your feelings for all your significant others are going to be at varying strengths depending on how much time you’ve spent with them in how many different situations. So there is a built-in imbalance. And let me see you forcing your kids to vie against one another for your time and affections. Any person with half a brain would call you an abusive narcissist. They would be right. Guess who gets attracted to this stupid relationship cult DEPRESSINGLY often.

I don’t know how actually “human nature” it is to be monogamous. I definitely do not know how “human nature” it is to get married the way we do now. In fact I strongly suspect that serial monogamy, or only being with one romantic and sexual partner at a time but not being with the same one your whole life, is the actually natural state of human affairs. If for no other reason than the cold, hard fact that a pair of romantic partners rarely ever both die at the same time. But certainly, as Eliza points out in passing in the bit of her essay I can see, deliberately taking on more than one romantic partner at a time is unnatural, in the same way that the patriarchal standard for feminine behavior is unnatural. If it came naturally to us, it wouldn’t need so fucking many rules in order to keep the peace, and we wouldn’t have to keep reminding one another of and enforcing those rules. Duh.

There is a stereotype that most polyfolk are people that normal people wouldn’t want to fuck anyway. They say there is a nugget of truth in every stereotype. This one’s more like a whole-ass goldmine. I mean, we’ve all seen that my face would sink a thousand ships, and there were people in that movement way worse-looking than me. And if looks don’t matter, behavior definitely does; I probably could have counted the number of people in my social circle without a mental health diagnosis on one hand. Certainly no more than a couple extra fingers. In other words, not exactly relationship-longevity material. If they could have even found a normal person who’d take them on. And they’d have had something to say about that, too. They took great pride in rejecting the normal.

There were nicer-looking people — I mostly saw those in poly dating ads, this in the days before microstock and AI — but that didn’t mean they were nice. Most people are never going to not code polyamory as “cheating with permission,” so right there they weren’t going to take you seriously as a partner. And then there were the straight couples who wanted to add a filly to the man’s herd, wanted to play at bisexuals (for the woman, obviously), or — ye gods and small fishes — find a fertile woman who could have a kid for them. It was a fucking circus. Literally.

Anyway. And there is a lot of overlap between the poly and LGBwtf “communities,” because if you’re bi and poly then you don’t have to choose which sex class you’ll try to date. And of course the LGBwtf “community” has trans as hangers-on, so if you were already rubbing elbows with bi people, you were sure to run into someone pretending to be the opposite sex sooner or later. My first (I thought) Serious In A Poly Situation boyfriend was married to a woman who had a trans-identifying sister, and she brought over a male friend who was pretending to be a woman. (I did not mess with either of these people; it was just a [gasp] normal visit.) Later, when I moved to Ohio, my daughter’s father’s wife had a friend who was in a lesbian couple, and the friend’s partner decided she was a man and went on testosterone. My daughter’s father’s then-wife has since divorced him and has now decided she’s “non-binary” and is married to yet another man pretending to be a woman. (Interestingly, the first thing Now-Ex-Wife told my daughter’s father when she met him was “I’m a lesbian.” My prejudice against bisexual women who claim to be lesbians has basis in the real world.)

All these people were some degree of nerd and were immersed in the fantasy and sci-fi (f/sci-fi) fandoms, and so I ran into neopronouns early as well; there were people in my broader social circle who thought “they/them” was not progressive enough and so would opt for “zir/zim” when speaking of people of unknown sex. We can thank f/sci-fi for even dreaming that up. You would think people who claimed to be so enamored of science would understand the difference between fiction and the real world. You would be wrong: they think because some character in some book, show, or movie changed sex or had ten husbands, that means they can too. F/sci-fi used to be my favorite genre. I can’t read any of the new stuff because every time I turn around some idiot is nattering on about gender identity. If you know your shit about sex and gender, it yanks you right out of the story.

(And don’t even get me started about what’s going on with the TV and film side of things, and ALL THOSE STUPID CELEBRITIES.)

Eliza refers to both trans and poly as “maladaptive coping mechanisms.” She’s absolutely right. And if you already have shit going on with your mental health, both these cults make that worse. I should have counted myself among the number of polyfolk I mentioned who have mental-health issues; contending with people playing stupid bullshit games with their relationships, in what was supposed to be a relationship-bullshit-free zone, sent me into a tailspin and it took me years to recover. (Cannot say I’m fully there yet. In fact, I’m finding I still have certain triggers in place — but I’ve come a long way, because those triggers haven’t destroyed my current situation yet and it’s been almost a year.) I would suggest to anyone currently dipping a toe into one cult or the other that you need to stop, back away slowly, and give it a real good think. You will get a lot more mileage out of working on yourself and trying to achieve things with your life which have nothing to do with sex, gender, or relationships. As the kids say, or did in the aughts: Learn from my fail.