analog

I actually managed to read the whole damn thing since my last post, before martinguerre and Gilda got involved and the whole thing blew up (in a good way, it's been a great discussion), and I just had two issues I wanted to see about:

If everyone was consenting, then I'd readily accept this definition for sex acts they mutually entered into. However, since the nature of this case is specifically the problem of the two men reacting to what they perceived as a homosexual experience, I don't think it would be fair to call this a strictly heterosexual experience. Clearly, under consent from deception, these events took place under false pretenses- if you are having sex with two straight males, I would think that, if nothing else, it would simply be rude to "leave out" the part that your sex is male, even though your gender is female. If I put my penis through a hole in a wall and got a blowjob, being told a woman was on the other side, it does not make it a heterosexual experience just because I was tricked into thinking so. When all is said and done, regardless of the other person's gender, the sex is male, and that makes it a homosexual experience. That is what they reacted to. If everyone knew what was going on, and the gender and sex differences were mutually known and accepted, then I'd very easily accept this as heterosexual.

Seeing as the sex was not consentual (the sex happened as a result of deception), I would simply call it "non-consentual sex", and ignore any notions of gender/sex implications of "hetero-" or "homosexual sex" on the events, since there's simply no reason to assign those labels.

The lines of thinking that go, "if you have a penis, you're male, no matter what you say you are" and "if you have a vagina, you're female, no matter what you say you are" only work if you live on a planet inhabited only by straight people, whose sex and gender are always the same thing.

Since we live on a planet with both straight and gay/bi people, whose sex and genders don't always match, this line of thinking is incorrect.

You are not your arm, or your foot, any more than you are your penis or your vagina. We don't walk around projecting, "I am a penis" or "I am a vagina" (though I have seen some guys whose behavior has caused me to refer to them as a walking penis, but that's different). We convey ourselves in terms of our gender, our sexual identity.

The bottom line is, people can be attracted to sexes or genders, in any combination. If I like the female gender specifically, I may be perfectly fine with a female whose sex is male, if sex doesn't matter to me, just the gender. Most "straight men", for example, are attracted to the female sex and gender. You can like one and ignore the other, you can like one and be specific about the other. You could be a woman who doesn't care what gender the person is, as long as the sex is male- and I know one such woman, personally.