There’s this thing that often happens whenever someone is doing a biphobia, a kind of championing of bi respectability, bi worth. A bi person will get up and start explaining why the biphobe is wrong, making a case for the fundamental goodness of bisexuality, of bi people.
Bi people, they might say, aren’t half gay and half straight; we are queer all the time. Even our mixed gender relationships are queer, because we just exude so much queerness. Possibly someone will talk about how bi people make their straight partners better, and even deploy the cursed term “bi wife energy.” You bet your ass there will be some Bisexual Mythbusting™️ in the mix.
Personally, I have no interest in this. It’s partly because, uh, I don’t think a lot of what people get up and say about the bisexuals and our value and validity is true, or at least not universally, anyway. I, for one, would absolutely never say that all my relationships have been queer: there have definitely been relationships I was in that felt hetero, even as I remained a bisexual while in them. And this idea that I’m some magic bi pixie spreading magic bi pixie dust on all the straight men who put their dicks in me? No thank you.
But it’s also because, quite frankly, I am very aware of all the ways I have been a total dirtbag, and I’m also aware of many other bisexuals who are, not to put too fine a point on it, terrible people. My abusive ex-boyfriend? Bisexual. The woman who bullied me so severely in college that I lost most of my friend group and became isolated and withdrawn? Also bisexual. I don’t think there’s any inherent goodness to these people, I don’t think there is some virtue bestowed upon them because of their bisexuality.
But also? I don’t think it matters. Individual morality is irrelevant to the question of systemic oppression — and indeed, systemic oppression often corrupts individual morality. The worse you get treated by society, the worse you are likely to behave; there’s no sanctification to be found in marginalization. That doesn’t mean you don’t deserve basic human rights.
Maybe some bi people are assholes. Maybe all bi people are assholes. Maybe every horrific stereotype they say about us is true: maybe we’re attention seeking sluts, maybe we can’t handle monogamy, maybe we’re confused and doomed to break our partners’ hearts as we leap from this gender to that gender in search of some incredible high.
Who cares?
What do my years as a twenty something dirt bag have to do with my doctors and therapists respecting my sexual identity? Why should me being a piece of shit mean I don’t get access to crucial anti-violence resources? Does me being an absolutely unrepentant asshole mean that people should judge me based on the gender of my partner?
I mean, I don’t think so.
Biphobia is toxic, not because bi people are inherently good, but because it is morally corrosive to police people’s sexual relationships, to demand some fealty to gender (or anything else) in people’s romantic exploits. Biphobia is wrong because it is simply none of your business how someone else conducts their consensual relationships, because assigning a worth to a person based on the gender of their partner is fucking dumb. It doesn’t matter whether I, a bisexual, am “good” or “bad,” it doesn’t matter whether you are, either. Adolf Hitler could have been a bisexual and it would not change the fundamental argument that biphobia is a rot on society.
Which is important to remember, because, quite frankly, arguing for the inherent goodness of bi people is a losing game. You will never convince people who hate you for your bisexuality that they are wrong and you are good, and even if you do, you’ll wind up in a game of Whack-a-Mole where there are always more biphobes to convince, always more people in need of being won over. It’s exhausting, and it’s pointless, so why even try?
We don’t have to be good. We don’t have to prove our worth. We are human beings. That, alone, is enough to ensure our right to have our identities respected, our sexualities unpoliced.
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