I cannot come up with a cutesy headline

I'm just annoyed

Bridget Ziegler is many things: co-founder of the far right group Moms for Liberty (ugh), a Sarasota School Board member, and generally an ultra-conservative terror wreaking havoc on the marginalized people of Florida. She is also — maybe! — bisexual.

That latter revelation comes to us courtesy of a weird and honestly pretty gross Miami Herald piece that surfaces details of a threeway relationship between Ziegler, her husband Christian, and an unnamed woman from… a rape claim filed by the unnamed woman against Christian Ziegler. Personally, I wouldn’t treat a rape investigation as a goldmine for salacious tidbits about people’s sex lives. But I don’t work for the Miami Herald.

Because for the Miami Herald — which in this piece at least barely seems concerned with the fact that Christian Ziegler has been accused of rape — the main thing that seems to matter is that Bridget Ziegler’s alleged threesomes with another woman mean that she might be a bi woman going after LGBTQ rights in Florida, which is, by their estimation, “hypocrisy on steroids.”

I don’t even know where to begin.

First, I guess, I just need to restate that I find it absolutely appalling that the Miami Herald is seemingly digging through a rape allegation in search of gossip items, like, what the fuck. I’m so disturbed by that that it’s hard for me to move past it, but move past it I must, because… oof, do we have an extra large suitcase to unpack.

The central question presented by the Miami Herald, in its sneering and grotesque tone, seems to be, “Is it hypocritical for a bisexual woman to be a raging homophobe and transphobe?” And like: I guess, sure, at the very least it’s self-hating. But I think what is missing from this framing is that there’s not actually any evidence that Ziegler sees herself as bi? Honestly, I don’t even know if there’s evidence that Ziegler is bi; any more than the news that Jerry Falwell Jr apparently had a cuck fetish meant that he’s bi.

Which is to say: guys, straight people have threesomes.

There is a version of this story that looks something like this. Bridget Ziegler, submissive Christian wife*, honors her husband by adhering to his wishes, including potentially his wishes for threesomes with another woman. In this framing of the narrative, Bridget is not actually attracted to the other woman, at least not sexually, but she likes pleasing her husband by participating in group sex. Or she gets off on watching him have sex with another woman. Or maybe she even enjoys having sex with another woman if her husband is also present; maybe she is attracted to other women within the context of threesomes with a man present but would never, ever pursue a woman on her own, let alone have sex with a woman without a man present.

Is that actually bisexuality? Does that make her bi?

Certainly there’s an argument for behavioral bisexuality in this situation, but if a woman is only attracted to other women in the context of group sex with a man present, it’s hard for me to really, you know, say that she’s bi (unless she wants to claim the identity in which case, great — she knows herself best). If a woman’s attraction to women is contingent on the presence of a man, then it’s sapphism as an accessory to heterosexuality more than sapphism for the sake of itself. We can say that that’s not straight, sure. But whether it is bi is harder to say.

And for someone like that, I mean — this is swinging in a way that is very compatible with the heteropatriarchy. This is sapphism that exists almost entirely for hetero male dominance and hetero male pleasure; and to say that it’s somehow in conflict with the “bring back the white cisheteropatriarchy!!!” ethos of Moms for Liberty is to simply misunderstand, well, everything about how white Christian right wingers actually work. The weird sex is never really the problem, only weird sex that deviates from a structure where (white) straight men are in charge and dictating what happens.

And there are a lot of threesomes that wholly adhere to that formula. There are a lot of threesomes that are very straight and not very queer.

Which is, of course, not to say that that’s the kind of threesome that Ziegler actually had. Maybe she’s a flaming bisexual who’s just self-hating enough to launch a crusade against her local queer community. Maybe.

Or maybe she’s a straight lady doing the kind of threesomes straight ladies do who hates queers because she’s straight. Many things are possible, friends.

* Submissive wife of Christian?