My Late Two Cents for Bisexuality Visibility

I always seem to be late to these things.

Anyway, I'm bisexual, which most of you reading this probably know.  Bisexual people are in a very strange place, liable to suffer both homophobia, and also biphobia.  Both homophobia and biphobia are of course prevalent in the straight community, but biphobia is also very prevalent within the queer community.  It takes many forms, from the fears many lesbians have that bisexual women spread STDs, to the idea that all bisexual people are promiscuous, or that we need "one of each" (before I go on to other topics, I would like to note that this stereotype can fall especially heavy on people who are both bisexual and polyamorous, where the two become conflated, and the person who is both is shame for them.  There are plenty of monosexual that is gay or straight, polyamorous people, and plenty of bisexual monogamous people and plenty of people of all stripes who like one night stands), or that we are either gay and halfway in the closet, or secretly straight and doing it for the attention, or what have you.  But one of the most insidious is how the queer community pits two of its most marginalized communities against each other.

I mean of course, genderqueer people, who are themselves often treated horrifically within the queer community.  There is this idea that bisexuality as a sexual identity reenforces the gender binary.  This feeds off the idea that bisexuality is a somehow less valid sexual identity, and also serves to hold us up in opposition to genderqueer people, who do not fit in a gender binary world.  This puts enormous pressure on bisexual genderqueer people, obviously, as well as helps keep gays and lesbians at the center of the queer rights movement.  After all, if we're busy fighting each other, we can't demand equal shares in the movement that claims to represent us.

Worst of all, this supposed reinforcement of the binary that we bisexual people supposedly engage in by existing while bi is built on a single false assumption, that bisexual means attracted to both men and women.  This is absolutely not what it means, just as homosexual doesn't mean "attracted to men" or heterosexual doesn't mean "attracted to women."  Homosexual means "attracted to the same gender as one's self" and heterosexual means "attracted to a gender or genders different from one's own", and so bisexual means "attracted to the same gender as one's self and also a gender or gender different from one's own."  Bisexual as the attraction to both men and women is a definition forced onto bisexual people by non bisexual people, first by doctors, who themselves believed in the gender binary, who used the label bisexual for people they considered sexually deviant, and somewhere between homosexual and heterosexual.  They also considered us psychologically intersex, just as they thought gay men were psychologically women, so taking their word on our sexuality is more than a little ridiculous.  This definition is also used by people who buy into the gender binary and don't acknowledge the existence of other genders, and now sadly, within the queer community as a weapon against bisexual people.

The people who assert that bisexuality as a sexual identity is somehow automatically oppressive against non gender binary people frequently hold up the identity "pansexual", meaning "attracted to people of all genders and gender presentations independent of gender and gender presentation"  to us as a substitute term.  For many people, pansexual is the right term for them, and they wear it proudly.  For me, and many other bisexuals however, this is extremely unsatisfying.  Firstly, since it is much less well known, I would have to define the term for almost anyone I happened to use it with, which is exhausting, more exhausting than most people realize or understand.  However, I would be willing to do it if not for the fact that the term doesn't fit.  Like many other people who identify as bisexual, I am not "attracted to people of all genders and gender presentations independent of gender and gender presentation".  Gender and gender presentation is very much a part of the attraction process for me.  I am, for example, more attracted to women then to men, and more attracted to people who present masculinity and femininity simultaneously than I am to people who eschew gender signifiers altogether.  There is no room in pansexuality for this difference of attraction.

The people who assert that bisexuality as a sexual identity is somehow automatically oppressive against non gender binary people also ignore the fact that the terms gay, lesbian and straight do in fact rely on the gender binary to derive their meaning.  A genderqueer person who identifies as neither male or female attracted to people of the same gender as their own would be homosexual, but not either gay or lesbian, for example.  A genderqueer person who identifies as neither male nor female attracted to another gender, man, woman, different nonbinary gender from their own, would be heterosexual, but not straight.  Also, I as a bisexual woman, when I am not attracted to a specific gender, am seen as devaluing the gender identity of the people of that gender, when monosexed people, especially gays, lesbians, and straights, aren't usually seen to be doing the same.  For example, a gay man is probably never going to be accused of devaluing the gender identity of a woman by not being attracted to her.  This insistance that I should be pansexual, should be attracted to all genders equally, because I am attracted to many genders posits implicitly that my sexuality is somehow a choice, one of the very ideas the queer community has been against, at least when it comes to monosexuality.

There is of course bigotry against genderqueer people within the bisexual community, just as there is within the straight community, and within the gay and lesbian community.  And when a bisexual person says that they aren't attracted to "fake genders", this is a devaluing of the gender identity of non gender binary people just as it is a devaluation of the gender identities of trans* people when a lesbian woman says that she is not attracted to trans* women because they aren't "real women".  We within the bisexual community need to stand against this.  But bisexuality as a sexual identity is not somehow inherently binariest, and oppressive.  It simply is.

I leave you with the definition of bisexuality given to us by bisexual activist Robyn Ochs:

"I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge that I have in myself the potential to be attracted - romantically and/or sexually - to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree."