Somewhen last week I figured that my relationship to kink is different than from my relationship to gender or sexuality. I would consider myself as trans and very demisexual, if I had to put it into words I would say “I am trans” and “I am demisexual”. With kink it is different… Instead of „being kinky“, I am more leaning towards “doing kink”. It is more of a hobby that I really enjoy then an actual identity.
The strange thing is, I shouldn’t have a problem with that, should I? How I live my life, is my private business and as long as the basic rules apply like: be discreet, don’t kink shame and support the community everything should be fine, but somehow it isn’t.
Something bothers me. My voice in my head tells me it should be different. The majority of people I have met in the community are kinky and queer. Why am I not, and why am I once again haunted by my own Impostor Syndrome, which not only questions my new hobby, but also my entire identity?
Is there a rough tendency why people see BDSM either as an identity or as a hobby? From the perspective of sexuality, I only know the argumentation from people for whom their sexuality is not the centre of their life. Yes, they sleep with other genders than heterosexuality provides, but they are definitely not queer! Why not? The community and therefore the community engagement doesn’t exist…. there is not even an agenda to sign up to.
Most of the time I got the impression during such conversations that these people wanted to separate themselves in order to keep the illusion of being „completely normal“. Hetero-, cis- or endo- normativity are easy to live with… the rest means so much more resilience.
None of this applies to my relationship with kink. I am lucky to live in a very liberal (even) kinky environment. So there is no social or political pressure. Maybe I am just wired differently in that sense, that I am not fully wired differently just a bit. Or it’s actually just that my own curiosity pushed me over the edge, and I simply found that kink is far more exciting than many other hobbies? That would re-establish the first self-description I came up with: vanilla with sprinkles.
But when does doing kink change into being kinky? Is it just the neurons, the hormones, the job, the environment, the luck of having already found one’s own BDSM identity? A little bit of everything? The more I think about it, the more I know that my pivot is identity. While I have been living with active gender-confusion for half a decade and my sexuality has meandered between all of them for just as long, kink is still a very new aspect of my life.
I know now that if I were already denied the opportunity for medical transition forever, I would suffer negative consequences from it. Even if I transition, there will be this awkward time in which I will have to manually change my name at every company that wants to address me personally like banks, insurances, fitness studios, telephone contracts etc. My favorite will always be the difficult question, if I should out myself already during the job interview or stay in the closet to make thigs easier.
Same goes with demisexuality, while considering myself asexual I wasn’t seen as a full adult neither by society nor by people that were slightly older than me. As a demisexual you just don’t get taken seriously in the dating world and during conversations. Instead of accepting that it takes some folks longer than other to find out how compatible they are with a partner, they call you in the best case “sensitive”. It would be interesting, if I could get a glimpse into the future just enough to figure out how my relationship to kink evolved if I ever figured out my place and comfort zone within the BDSM world.