The majority of my chronic conditions can be traced back to my nervous system being hyperactive and oversensitive. Fibro is just one example.

God I just realized Freud may have been a little bit right, but only a little bit.

I'm not saying that an Adult who thinks they're 100% gay or straight is not (though I have my doubts) but rather maybe you conditioned yourselves from childhood to fear or feel shame or discomfort about the other option and so NOW genuinely no longer feel that attraction. That's socialization!

Not to mention people who think they're straight all their lives and then meet the one person they fall absolutely in love with, fundamentally changing their whole view of their sexuality??

Look, everyone is bi, we just shove ourselves into boxes because we seem to like doing that for some reason

And EXTRA evident now that we're talking about attraction to trans people as throwing sexuality potentially into question as a whole (because how are you defining sexual attraction, really, now that the binary model is flawed?)

And those of us like myself who managed to maintain both/all sets of desires? Well, we won the game of socialization.

And I think this becomes really evident NOW w/ more and more people identifying as bi or pan, or acknowledging fluidity. Because we're hammering home the binary shame protocol less

Whereas if you have an innate inclination to men, and society tells you that's incorrect, suddenly there is shame and a desire to suppress it, which may lead in adulthood to a singular fixation on the thing desired but suppressed, or a need to identify the self with the thing suppressed as a freedom

But like taste in color or food, sexual desire is unique to any person. One boy might have an innate inclination to women, another to men. With an innate inclination to women & society telling you from a young age that that's correct, a child could form this positive identification with straightness

But I genuinely feel like, innately, all people have the ability to desire anyone, irrelevant of gender or sexuality. What determines what social behavior we accept in ourselves as children is our nurture. This can nurture that tells you HETEROSEXUALITY is normal too.

Follow me on this, right? So the nature argument is about the innate impulse and sexual drive. And the nurture argument is that social influences can determine sexuality. And everyone keeps focusing on this being a binary fucking issue, right?

But let me just say. Bc he didn't have spots and I forgot about the trill parasite thing, watching Alien Matthew Mercer have a chest burster inside of him was AWFUL.

Though I will say. The fact that Bev was more willing to concede to fucking the body of someone she considered a brother, than some random hot lady....Beverly pls, I beg.

Anyway I liked it! I think with 21st century glasses on its a bad episode, but with 1991 glasses on its much more sympathetic. Even though I fully forgot that's how the trill work and parasites under the skin are a huge no for me. I definitely had to look away during the surgery!!

Which 0speaks very much to that final scene almost being TOO allegorical (but it's trek, they can get away with it). To me, Beverley's speech felt like a commentary on the 1980s/1990s, unable to take that step towards the utopian future Odan represented, where gender and sexuality are not rigid.

And Odan accepted the boundary with love, respect, and also left her with a very erotic wrist kiss and a hope for a better future. I thought it was sad and sweet and still full of love, stuck at a crossroads of emotional desire and the boundaries of sexual attraction.

They could have made femme Odan aggressively chase Bev after the rejection (like they did whe in Riker's body), or make Odan out to be a freak. But Bev's issue wasn't the Trill parasite, just her own sexuality as a boundary.

It's all very interesting when I put my queer theory glasses on. I read the brief summary of the criticisms on the wiki for the episode, and they're all objectively correct. But also I was surprised that I didn't read it as the Show being homophobic so much as Beverly being a little homophobic.

I return to this now to say this: even though Beverly needs to work out her internalized homophobia, I still like that Odan kissed Beverley's hand and they said they still love each other in 1991. I look forward to reading the fix it fic where Bev let's herself get scissored by her trill girlfriend.

I forgot I had a whole ass TNG watch commentary thread, so I didn't comment for most of the EXCELLENT season 4. Which is a shame bc S4 has been banger episode after banger episode.