A note on language

In case you were about to ask me about pansexuality.

If you find yourself attracted to multiple genders, there will inevitably come a time when you are forced to defend your sexual label of choice. If you opt for bisexual, someone will insist that you’ve announced you are attracted to exclusively two genders and thus hate nonbinary people; if you opt for pansexual, you’ll get an eye roll and some jokes about kitchenware. You might be able to avoid people’s judgment if you simply call yourself queer, but probably not: odds are good that someone, at some point, will accuse you of being evasive and refusing to commit to saying what you “actually” are. If you go with polysexual or omnisexual or multisexual you’re just begging for people to see you as precious, and heaven help you if you decide to opt for no label at all. (Trust me, people hate those folks most of all.)

I call myself bisexual, and broadly refer to people who are attracted to multiple genders as “bisexuals” for a couple of basic reasons. In terms of the former: I came out in the 1990s, when bisexual was the common word for what I was, I also happen to prefer the bi flag over, say, the pan flag (sorry, I hate yellow). More than that though: for many years I didn’t call myself bisexual because it felt so corny, so cringe, so uncool, and that, more than anything else is why I call myself bisexual now. The older I get, the more important it feels to lean into the things that cause me discomfort; if “bi” feels awkward, shameful, embarrassing as a label, that’s probably a good reason to reclaim it.

With regards to the latter: the shortest version is simply that bisexual is the most commonly used umbrella term for people who are attracted to multiple genders and thus it is the easiest one to use*. The only other option I’ve seen is “mspec” which stands for “multisexual spectrum,” yet is nowhere near as widely known as bisexual — if I announced I was doing an mspec newsletter it wouldn’t mean as much to as many people as a bisexual newsletter. (Also, I’ll be honest, I dislike the term “mspec" even more than I dislike yellow.)

But there’s a larger question I grapple with when it comes to language and multigender attraction, which is this: I don’t actually know how much any of it truly means. If someone thinks that bisexuals are fake or greedy or otherwise bad, are they going to look at a pansexual and think “ah, but you are okay!”? I have my doubts! If anything, the obsession over labels, the insistence that we must align ourselves with the perfect one, feels like so much more biphobia. What is it if not an insistence that we must make ourselves perfect, get all our ducks in a row, must choose the most perfect and correct name for ourselves, if we actually want anyone to care about our elevated rates of poverty and suicidality?

Which isn’t to say that I don’t think there’s a difference between these labels on a personal level, of course. I choose to call myself bisexual rather than pansexual (or omnisexual or polysexual or multisexual) for a specific reason; I also choose to call myself queer alongside bisexual for a specific reason as well. For me, the very thing that taints “bisexual” for folks — the whiff of heterosexuality that indelibly taints it — is exactly why I call myself bisexual. I cannot escape my history of participating in heterosexuality, of dating straight men, of attempting to contort myself to heteronormative values as best as I possibly could (which was… not very well), so I might as well own it**.

But that is not everyone’s story. Plenty of people who are attracted to multiple genders — especially non-binary and trans ones — are permanently fixed in queerness regardless of the gender of their partners. For some, that’s a reason to eschew the term bisexual altogether; for others, bisexual still suits, but simply means something different than it does to me.

And again, I think that’s fine. I think it’s complicated and personal, and that the idea that we will all somehow agree on a term is foolish to say the least. But I hope that we can recognize that there are things bigger than words, and that the oppression and suffering of people who are attracted to multiple genders is, in fact, one of them. I hope that you can forgive my clumsy defaulting to “bisexual” as an umbrella term for those of us who are effected by this oppression, who are suffering this suffering, as an acceptable sacrifice in the pursuit of greater visibility for our hurt.

* For the record, I called this newsletter “The B+ Squad” as a nod to “bi+” as an umbrella term. Also because I fucking hate “bi” puns and wanted to avoid using one at all costs.

** I once said that if I had to take the “bi” in “bisexual” to be a literal two then it was straightness and queerness; recognizing that my own bisexual journey has led me in and out of both of these spaces at various points in my life.

PS Will this always be a daily newsletter? No. But it is one for now because I have a bunch of baseline ideas that I’m trying to establish and also because I’m trying to get some steam behind this newsletter.