“Beyond Binaries: Identity and Sexuality,” headed by author Robyn Ochs on Feb. 26, led Oswego State students and other attendees through interactive presentations and activities to explore traditional and nontraditional expressions of gender, sexuality and sexual orientation.

Ochs said she has used her experience as a bisexual woman in her 60s to educate students and others around the world and to increase awareness and understanding across identities and social movements. Her presentation focused on the evolution of gender identity and sexual orientation labels with the aim of showing how labels are as complex as the individuals who choose to use them. 

“Identity is complicated,” Ochs said. “It’s hard sometimes to know what to call yourself or how to label yourself or which of many options to use. I personally believe that people are too complicated to fit neatly into simple classification systems, except for maybe ‘human’ and ‘not human.’”

Through her work, Ochs has helped to reform the traditional Kinsey Scale, the sexual-orientation categorizing system developed by Alfred Kinsey in 1948, to include numerous and fluctuating gender identities and orientations. 

“If you don’t fit neatly into someone else’s frame, the limitation lies with the frame, not with you,” Ochs said.

To demonstrate how complex even new labels can be for people and how simple numbers of classification do not tell the whole story, Ochs had students fill out an anonymous survey and participate in an interactive activity.

Students were given a different survey from their own and asked to move around the front of the auditorium according to their person’s answer to each question about sexual experience, romantic attraction, gender identity and other areas exploring gender and sexual orientation. The results showed that nobody had the exact same meaning for any label or identity. 

Ochs said her presentation shows how labels do not tell the whole story. 

“I like to think of labels not as the information but rather the doorway to the information,” Ochs said. “It’s almost like a sign on a door, and if you really want to understand someone, you can’t just stand outside and look at the door. You have to knock on the door politely and ask for permission to come inside and learn more.”

A notable change Ochs made to the Kinsey Scale is the addition of off-scale answers, like “?” for not sure and “N/A” for not applicable, which she said validates people’s right to an ever-evolving sense of identity that does not have to have clear labels. 

“Identity is a journey,” Ochs said. “There may be many points in your life where you don’t have all the answers, and that’s fine, and you’re certainly not the only one.”

That sentiment was appreciated by many of the students who attended, including junior human development major Bailey Perry.

“I really liked what [she] said about having the right to be confused,” Perry said.

Other students expressed similar appreciation for Ochs’s unique take on gender and sexuality, such as junior business marketing major Antonio Pallotta, who said the presentation helped him think about identity in new ways.

“It’s very complex, and I [have] got to admit, my brain hurts a little bit because … there’s way more to it than what you think,” Pallotta said.

Matthew Waack, a sophomore adolescent education major, said Ochs’s activity was unlike anything he had experienced before. 

“I thought it was pretty eye-opening how many people change from what they identify as versus maybe how their friends perceive them or how their family perceives them, and that’s something just along with how confusing and complicated sexuality can be sometimes,” Waack said.

Ochs said she has done similar activities at many other universities and never received the same results, demonstrating the complex nature of attraction.

“Attraction is so irrational. It’s so strange. It’s so fickle,” Ochs said. “Because sexual orientation is based on attraction, and attraction is not simple, that sexual orientation becomes even more complex.”

That message resonated with junior music major Nicholas Radford, who said he appreciated Ochs’s approach.

“Even when someone may say something is like one thing, it might mean something else,” Radford said. “It may come off as being binary or simple, but it can be a lot more complex.” 

Robyn was recently named by Teen Vogue as one of “9 Bisexual Women Who are Making History.” She has written three books about bisexuality, including “Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World.” 

Jessica Wickham | The Oswegonian