Difficult survey questions

I’ve spent a lot of time making surveys that ask people about their orientation, so I’m familiar with the messy relationship between orientation and nonbinary genders. Gay and straight are labels that assume that a binary gender for both the subject and object of attraction–men who love men, men who love women, etc. If you’re a nonbinary person who loves women, or a woman who loves nonbinary people, “gay” and “straight” don’t really succeed in conveying that information.

Some nonbinary people, I’m aware, will identify as gay or straight anyway. For example, if you’re commonly perceived as a man, and your dating pool primarily consists of men who love men, you might feel that “gay” fits–or is at least useful–even if you don’t identify as a man. On the other hand, some nonbinary people would be uncomfortable with a label that frames them within a binary gender identity.

In any case, if someone fills out our survey, and they say they’re nonbinary and gay, I’ll say sure, that’s what they are. The survey isn’t there to judge, only to measure. But… I have no idea what genders they’re attracted to. If I want to know that information, I have to ask directly. Are you attracted to men? Are you attracted to women?

But isn’t it strange? In order to understand the orientations of nonbinary people, we’re asking about attraction to men and women. Didn’t we leave some other genders out? What about attraction to nonbinary people?

Attraction to nonbinary

Now it’s easy enough to throw in a question about attraction to nonbinary people. But it raises so many more questions.

When I first encountered the idea, my first thought was, isn’t that going to confuse most folks with binary gender? As it is, I’m gray-ace, so I’m already confused how to answer the questions about attraction to men and women. But now we’re also going to ask about attraction to a group that I rarely encounter? I don’t have the sample size!

In truth, I had likely encountered a lot more nonbinary people than I realized. By this point, I’ve met enough nonbinary people to understand that they don’t necessarily look any different from men or women.

That’s a slightly contentious thing to say, since many nonbinary people would like to look different from either men or women. It’s just that it’s nearly impossible. Present one way, and people assume you’re a woman; tip the scales just a tiny bit and people assume you’re a man. There’s only a tiny sliver of space, a coin standing on edge, where people will categorize you as nonbinary. And even then, most people will simply go back and forth on whether you’re a man or a woman.

But what I mean is, I think there’s a common sort of nonbinary person who doesn’t put much effort into presenting as nonbinary. Perhaps the futility of it all gets them down? Or perhaps they just don’t care about gender, and that includes not caring enough to figure out what the heck it means to present as nonbinary. Nonbinary as a category also blends into this large liminal space of people who are gender detached (or “cis by default” or “cis-genderless”). For many (not all) nonbinary people, it’s not that they want to situate themselves within a new gender, it’s more that they feel little attachment to their assigned gender.

So, having learned a bit more about nonbinary people, does “attraction to nonbinary people” make sense? Can we really speak of attraction to a class of people with no commonality in appearance? Can we be attracted to a class of people when we don’t even know a lot of the time whether somebody is part of that class or not?

Maybe it refers only to attraction to nonbinary people whom you detect as nonbinary? But it feels kind of weird to pretend that it’s attraction to nonbinary people, when you really just mean attraction to the “obvious” ones. You know, the black lipstick, the purple tie, the “nonbinary” haircut. It’s okay to be attracted to androgyny, it just feels kind of reductive to call it attraction to nonbinary people, who are not in fact all androgynous.

Realistically speaking, anyone who is attracted to any gender, is also attracted to nonbinary people. I just don’t think all those people are going to say “yes” to a survey asking if they’re attracted to nonbinary people. So that survey question is really bad at collecting accurate responses.

Skoliosexuality and Ceterosexuality

So there’s actually a sexual orientation term that refers to attraction to nonbinary people. That term is “skoliosexual”. I strongly recommend against ever using this term.

So, I don’t know exactly where “skoliosexual” came from, but I have spent a lot of time in communities that loved coining new and obscure sexuality terms, so I can make some educated guesses. I believe that wherever it came from, there was probably a legitimate purpose for it. People say that “skoliosexual” was meant to be used only by nonbinary people. And that makes sense, if you’re a nonbinary person hanging out in nonbinary groups. Maybe you don’t like dating cis people because they’re inexplicably obsessed with gender, so you stick to dating other nonbinary people. It’s fine to have a word for that.

But then the word escapes its original context, and now there’s a WebMD article titled “Skoliosexual: What does it mean?” and a Cosmopolitan article titled “Skoliosexual definition explained”. Then it escapes back into the nonbinary context, and everyone is disgusted by idea of cis people identifying as nonbinary chasers. And nobody even uses the word anymore because they all decided that “skoliosexual” was problematic, actually, and now they’re using “ceterosexual” instead, except they’re not, because that’s problematic too. And sometimes one or both of those terms also means attraction to trans people, which is another can of worms that we’re just going to gently lay down in the corner and try not to touch.

Having seen a lot of these obscure sexuality terms develop, it’s typical, really. I’m being non-judgmental about it, nothing against people using the words. But I must strongly recommend against identifying with a sexuality term just because you saw it on Cosmopolitan, or on the LGBT Wiki for that matter. There’s no way you’re getting sufficient context from those sources.

Once they’ve escaped their original context, skoliosexual/ceterosexual ultimately have the same problems as “attraction to non-binary people”. What does that even mean?

Non-binary affirmation

Now I’m just a cis person, so you might be skeptical. But I learned some of this from Verity Ritchie, who argues basically same points in their video, “Everyone is Attracted to Nonbinary People“. As they tell it, this whole conversation is built around trying to affirm nonbinary people, and so people try to fit them within the patterns that we apply to the more socially accepted genders. So if we talk about attraction to men and to women, then we also ought to talk about attraction to nonbinary people. But then we’re just trying to fit nonbinary people into standard gender structures, which kind of defeats the point.

Verity admits the possibility that terms for attraction to nonbinary people might be useful in a dating context, but cautions against reifying this as sexual orientation:

But hey when you’re on your dating apps looking for honeyz, you might find people aren’t very understanding when it comes to nonbinary genders. It’s not necessarily even a matter of them not finding you attractive, it may just be that they’re a douchebag about pronouns and aren’t familiar with trans issues. And it may well be easier in some ways for me to find ceterosexuals and plurisexuals who are into me.

But I think we ought to be careful here, because we may end up absolving people of the responsibility to be kind to trans people by suggesting that their assholery is just a different sexual orientation.

In some contexts, talking about attraction to nonbinary people may behave as a positive signal of affirmation of nonbinary people.  But ultimately, the concept is kind of weird, and not likely to survive a deeper familiarity and understanding.