There is a sentiment I hear from time to time that never fails to irk me; it’s currently top of mind because I recently saw someone say it on Twitter (it doesn’t matter who, this is a common enough sentiment that it’s basically just in the ether). It more or less boils down to this: women who date men would be happier, with healthier relationships, if they exclusively dated bi cis and bi/straight trans men.
It sounds so nice! I get the appeal of it! I get why people keep saying it, over and over: we want to believe that the toxicity of masculinity is exclusively the purview of cisgender heterosexual men; that men who are either queer or trans or both are necessarily less toxic by virtue of their own complicated gender journeys, and as a result they are better partners to women. There’s a nice little logic to it, especially if all the queers you know are the ones who’ve been forced to become self-actualized and thoughtful and present by virtue of accepting their queerness.
It is, nevertheless, an absolutely appalling sentiment that we should all just dispense with.
I have a couple of objections that I’m going to outline, but I’m going to start with the most novel one first: can you imagine how absolutely fucked up it would be if someone said that bi cis and bi/straight trans women made better partners for men who date women? How unbelievably gross that sentiment would sound to most people? And, look, yes: “If you swap the genders it sounds bad now!” is a very hacky argument to make, because generally if you swap the genders you are constructing a wildly different situation with a wildly different power balance. That’s certainly the case here: the threats to women who date men are different than the threats to men who date women.
But if we are making the argument that queer and trans people are necessarily more self-actualized and well adjusted, and thus better partners, then there’s no reason why that shouldn’t be the case for bi and trans women as well as bi and trans men. But when you gender swap this argument, it inherently sounds fetishizing and distressing. It inherently offers up bi and trans women as being in service to straight male needs and desires. And granted, part of this is because the gender dynamics in male/female relationships are such that it’s usually the men who need to do more of the self actualization and work in order to be healthy partners. But I also think the valorization of queer and trans men here is necessarily fetishizing. Which, yeah, it feels kind of gross.
(Brief break here to note that, now that I think of it, there absolutely are people who make the whole “straight men should date bi women” argument, albeit in a slightly backwards way. I mean isn’t that the whole basis of the “bi wife energy” shtick? Granted that’s more about a woman’s queerness somehow rubbing off on her cishet partner and making him better, but, like… ugh it still sucks and I hate all of this.
Moving on.)
The second thing I need to say is the most personal one for me. I fucking hate this argument, this valorization of queer/trans male partners for women who date men, because I was abused in extensive and horrific ways by a bi man. I’ve written about this before (I don’t have the energy to link back but you can find it in the archives, I’m sure), and it will always color my view. And sure, maybe you can say that he wasn’t the kind of bi man that people actually mean when they say women should date more bi men, that he hadn’t done the work, that he wasn’t in community with enough queer people, that he was a bad, abusive boyfriend because he was a bad bi man. But then the argument necessarily becomes that there are good bi men and bad bi men, and if we’re going that route, well, there are good straight men and bad straight men, so why tell people to avoid the good straight men just because they’re straight, you know? If I’d used used the bi good, straight bad rubric to pick and sort my partners, I’d still have dated my abuser, and I’d have avoided one of the kindest, most emotionally open men I’ve been involved with. It just doesn’t make sense to me.
(I also feel like I should note here that “queer and trans people make better partners” is gross erasure of the existence of the abuse that exists within queer relationships, abuse we do not discuss nearly enough. It’s almost as if being marginalized isn’t an expressway to being a well-adjusted partner and can, in fact, fuck you up in a way that makes you a much worse person? Big if true, people. Big if true.)
There’s one more problem I want to raise with this argument, which happens to be both the most damning and the most straightforward. Somewhere on the order of 98% of women date men. Maybe 3% of men are bi or trans. How exactly are you going to make those numbers work?
But the big picture here, ultimately, is that as tempting as it is to use LGBTQ identity as a sign post for quality, it’s just not going to work. Marginalized people are, at the end of the day, people. We’re just as likely to be piles of shit as we are to be solid gold. As I often like to remind people, the leftist catchphrase “be gay, do crimes,” is as easily applied to the Stonewall rioters as it is to, say, Donald Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn or Japanese fascist* Yukio Mishima. Hell, even Pete Buttigieg could be considered to be a gay who did crimes, if we’re counting that whole bread price fixing scandal.
It would be nice if queerness was some automatic quality filter for screening partners. Unfortunately, it’s just not that easy.
* Literal fascist, committed seppuku after a failed attempt at a coup. Great writer though!
The idea that bi men are more self-actualized/sensitive and feminine is actually not particularly true imo, for reasons that have a lot to do biphobia. The fact that a supermajority of bi men are not out to important people in their life suggests they are not in fact super self actualized or comfortable in with their gender and sexuality. And I think many struggle with internalized homophobia & biphobia (as of course do bi people of other genders). The idea that they are more sensitive etc feels derived from the biphobic stereotype that bi men are actually just gay.
And similarly for trans men it feels like it's coming from this transphobic idea that trans men are more soft and feminine, aren't really men in the same way cishet men are.
Very much relate as someone who also had an abusive bi boyfriend. I had a friend suggest that because he had issues with women, he was lying about being queer, which is itself biphobic and ignores the many ways that queer men (including cis gay men) can be misogynistic, messy, and not great people!
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the ideas described in this post insofar as they're an attempt to counteract the biphobia and transphobia bi and trans men face. 63% of women (presumably straight) say they wouldn't date a bi man. Not sure of the stats for trans men but I imagine the reason why straight trans men tend to date within lesbian spaces is similar. We should be pushing back against the prejudices that code bi and trans men as undesirable partners.
But I don't like this implication that it's bi women's duty to date/fuck/love these men who are rejected by the straight world. It feels like just a slightly dressed up version of the idea, which you've written about before, that bi femmes owe every single forlorn man sex and affection.