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How rigid/fluid is your LGBT identity?
Is it static, or does it change?
How does that feel to you?
How does it play out in your day-to-day life?
What thoughts do you have about rigidity/fluidity in general?
(As always, I'm using LGBT as an umbrella term here, so this question applies to anyone with minority gender, sexual, or romantic identities)
I feel pretty confident in my cis gay male identity.
I've had moments where I considered "what if I'm bi and just repressing the straight side" and I think I could spend the night with a lady and have a fun time, but there's no active desire there. I want to date and love and enjoy my life alongside a male partner.
Regarding gender expression, I do lightly dabble in femininity as an extension of my masculinity, not as a replacement. For the vast majority of time I do and actively want to present masculine, though.
I follow some non-binary creators and I love how some of them play with gender and seem to flow between both presentations so effortlessly, it's fun to watch their expertise play out.
I feel a bit like your cis straight counterpart.
A few of the men in my life have my heart in ways that I would appreciate a happily ever after, and I've also wondered if I've repressed that side due to norms and habituations, but I can't help but shake the scents and hairstyles and sensitivities of women and how they light my fire.
I also like to paint my nails, have picked up sewing, and consciously avoid masculine centered interests like sports or cars.
But I also think I'm in the eternal dance of trying to intellectualize what a feeling is rather than just experiencing it fully.
Sudden tangent that I decided to keep in this comment rather than move to my journal:
I think ultimately I just love how thoughtful and curious I am in my 30s because this life has shown me enough to warrant a desire to retreat, but still I persist.
Yeah, at some point the self-analysis stops being helpful. I had a brief moment of wondering how much of what I was questioning about myself were genuine questions my soul was asking, or just the heteronormative upbringing I had. Now it's clear it was the latter, but it did have me wondering for a bit.
I put myself vaguely on the ace spectrum, and a lot of ace discourse is (or was, I guess, I'm not particularly dialed in any more) open to the possibility that orientation can vary or drift over time. (Or that it might not! Obviously lots of people e.g. realize they're suuuuuper gay at 15 and absolutely never waver in that conviction, and that's totally fine.) Some of this might just be that various ace identities overlap in ways that are difficult to explore intentionally (e.g. if you're demi, you're likely to consider yourself fully ace until you meet The One™), but I think some of it is probably a reaction to a common reaction to people who enter a sexual relationship after having identified as ace: "oh, that's normal/just for attention/you just haven't met the right person yet". This is obvious BS, and the most comprehensive way to head it off is to say "they can have been ace before and now they're not and that's valid".
Anyway, regardless of the reason, I never felt super tied to the way I identified, and my self-identity drifted from fully ace to demi as I had the opportunity to act on crushes in my late teenage years. These days I'm happily married to one of those crushes, and so I really don't think about it much. It's not clear to me if that was my identity changing or my romantic circumstances, and… I don't really care much? Thinking it can be fluid, for me, means I don't feel the need to worry about my identity. If I bumped into some rando on the street tomorrow and thought they were super fuckin' hot, that would be very surprising, and socially awkward, but not a crisis of identity.
Being a cis person married to another cis person of the opposite gender is obviously an extremely passing situation, so I don't think my identity has ever come up outside conversations with partners. It's discernible (for example, a surprising number of my straight male coworkers have been willing to openly express attraction to random women; unprofessionalism aside, that experience is just totally alien to me), but not overt.
In general? I think a lot of straight people (and probably at least a few gay people) would benefit from allowing for a bit more fluidity. You don't control who you're attracted to, and so if you find yourself attracted to someone unexpected, that ideally shouldn't trigger a crisis of identity. I realize that straight folk denying same-sex attraction is heavily tied up in internalized homophobia, so it's not as simple as I'm presenting it here, but I guess I just wish that brushing up against queer experiences would make people more inclined to broaden their horizons rather than doubling down.
I wouldn't say my queerness is fluid, but it is definitely part of my identity. I think identity in general is fairly fluid, at least for me, because I have ADHD and a dynamic disability. Day to day, who I am changes based on how I feel in my body, but not because of my gender or whether my interests have changed.
I sit squarely in cis, bi territory.
As for others, I think it all depends on how they feel in their body, and I am not one to judge how someone else feels, whether they feel static or fluid.
Genderfluid here, and I've landed on the term because I doubt I'm ever going to find a fixed identity particularly happy. There's a lot of comfort in embracing the flux. I'm pretty male-presenting IRL, but online or offline if this ever comes up I just tell people to address me however the hell they want. I don't correct anyone.
I was still a little off about the masculine parts of my identity until I became a parent - the 'dad' label fits me well, I think. Aside from fixing cars with swear words and listening to Steely Dan, it feels like something I enjoy compartmentalizing as a social place for me which I chose. Otherwise I would have little attachment to being male.
It's so fluid that in all manners it has become less like an ocean of physical force to flail against and more like a dense fog that moves and swirls at even the slightest thought of a breeze.