This is going to sound harsher than I intend it to, but: I don’t actually care about your hurt bisexual feelings.
Do you cry yourself to sleep because you don’t feel queer enough? Do you worry that everyone thinks you’re a cheating faking? Do you fret that everyone is right and you are, in fact, lying about your sexuality for attention? On a micro level, I absolutely feel for you. Hell, I even identify with you. I know exactly what it’s like to feel those feelings, I know how distressing they can be. I understand why so much bisexual discourse, why so many of our conversations, center these hurt feelings — it’s the most accessible evidence of our collective struggle.
But on a macro level, on a political organizing level, using hurt feelings as an entry point is… not great. For starters, we live in a culture that privileges the hurt feelings of some members over others; a culture that only allows some people to publicly have hurt feelings in the first place. When bisexual discourse is hurt feelings discourse, we wind up with “bisexual visibility” that basically looks like this.
Which is, of course, the very basis that people use to dismiss biphobia as a genuine concern. How can biphobia matter, how can it be real, if the only bisexuals I’ve heard of are all wealthy white ladies married to men? How can biphobia be a pressing concern if my only conscious interaction with it is bisexuals whining about hurt feelings? Even bisexuals themselves often buy into this logic: if all I know about my bi pain is that I feel bad, then bi pain must not be anything more concrete than individuals feeling bad, and how can that possibly compare to the structural oppression experienced by the truly oppressed?
Except as I’ve noted before, research routinely shows that it’s not merely hurt feelings that bisexuals are struggling with. Bisexuals have elevated rates of poverty, elevated rates of both physical and mental illness, elevated rates of suicidality. We experience abuse and sexual assault at higher levels than other groups — and even within groups that are already vulnerable to abuse and assault, like women of color and trans people, being bisexual still manages to up your risk even further. If you saw the stats for bisexuals on paper, without knowing it was describing bisexuals, you wouldn’t assume that this is a group whose primary problem is having a big sad. You’d — correctly! — assess that this is a group of people who are suffering under a structural form of oppression. And you wouldn’t assume that the fact that some members of the group who are well off and reasonably doing okay means that the group as a whole is doing fine. Even if those relatively cosseted group members happen to be the most visible ones of all.
So the challenges I’ve been dealing with lately — the bisexual consciousness raising that I reference in the subject of this newsletter — is kind of two-fold:
How do we get bisexuals to think beyond the framework of hurt feelings and big sads to recognize that these things are just a symptom of the true problems of biphobia, the structural, systemic oppression that invalidates bisexuals not just in our personal relationships but within society? How do we get bisexuals to understand that conversations about bi women bringing their boyfriends to Pride is merely the smallest part of a larger structure that shuts bi people as a whole out of access to crucial resources and support structures?
How do we identify and map out the mechanisms of biphobia in order to dismantle them and achieve true justice? Because, honestly, it’s gotta be something bigger than just going to colleges and doing lectures about how Not All Bisexuals Are Sluts™️, cause we’ve been trying that bit for decades and it hasn’t done much.
I think I have a handle on the first one. This newsletter is definitely part of it. I know the talking points, I know the stats, I know how to explain to people that there is a big problem here that no one is talking about.
It’s the latter point that I’m stuck on, though. Because the way so many of us are taught to think about oppression is through the frame of what is legal or illegal. Queer people are historically oppressed because of things like sodomy laws and bans on same-gender marriage; trans people are currently under assault across the country because of a swell of anti-trans laws. But this is kind of a bizarre way to think about things given that most of us recognize that gays and lesbians still face oppression even as the legal barriers to being queer have fallen away; and anyone who’d argue that trans people faced zero oppression before the (relatively recent!) push for explicitly anti-trans legislation would be… kind of an idiot.
One analogue that I have been thinking about is the Black maternal mortality rate in the US. There are no laws preventing pregnant Black people from seeking out quality obstetric care; no regulations on the books that explicitly call for the neglect of Black people during labor and delivery. And yet Black people are still more likely to die in childbirth and suffer adverse pregnancy-related outcomes, even when controlling for income. There is clearly some structural bias, some misogynoir baked into the system, that elevating the risk of dying in childbirth while Black. Maybe it is that sort of subtle, unspoken bias that is damaging the health and well-being of bi people as well.
As a jumping off point: this study looking at the interrelation between bisexuality, poverty, and mental health finds that bisexuality increases the likelihood of poverty through a number of mechanisms, including loss of familial support and difficulty obtaining a job in a supportive workplace/keeping a job in an unsupportive workplace; poverty then has a fairly understandable negative impact on mental health. It’s just one study, and just one starting point, but it’s a dramatically different mode of talking about — of even thinking about — biphobia, and it’s one that I cannot help but find compelling.
So, yeah. Bisexual consciousness raising! Let’s keep doing it!
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But I also promised you some funny (funny haha!) bisexual history, and I am a woman of my word. For my Patreon (have you joined my Patreon?) I’ve been reading the second issue of the amazing turn of the century bi zine Anything That Moves (and yesterday I shared an essay reflecting on some of the issue’s articles about the topic of “bi community,” more essays to come soon!). I’m trying to keep most of my reflections on the zine reserved for my patrons, but I still wanted to share this photo of a bit of political street theater that some bisexuals engaged in 30 years ago after a dustup over an SF Bay Times column.
What’s happening here, in case it is not immediately obvious, is that a group of people in white and lavender robes have declared themselves to be a group known as Homosexual Unity And Conformity, or HUAC (which, if you are young and/or ignorant of American history, is very clearly a reference to McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee), and charged themselves with the task of sniffing out “half-hets” using the Acme Bi Detector. Onlookers were apparently encouraged to recite an oath eerily similar to the Levering Oath that was once used to get people to “prove” their loyalty to the US by disavowing communism. Those who successfully managed to get through the oath were given purple star emblazoned with the number 6; those deemed bisexual were adorned with a two way yellow arrow and kicked out of the group. The stunt ultimately ended with a purge that revealed that — save for one lone gay man charged with upholding homosexual purity — none of the HUAC members could actually be deemed free from the taint of bisexuality; everyone was tainted and everyone turned on each other.
Anyway. It’s fucking hilarious, right? I wish we’d retained this sense of humor; I wish more bi commentary and activism were funny instead of drearily self-serious. I’m not saying we have to bring back the HUAC stunt specifically (not least because McCarthy is even less relevant than he was back in the 1990s), but I do wish we could do more tongue-in-cheek stunts, inject more humor into our work, instead of being, you know, sad. Let HUAC be your inspiration.
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Systemic bias is... systemic. The doctors delivering unequal care were trained by that system how to distinguish patients and how to deliver unequal care - and that’s not even the root of the problem
I am curious about the overlap of Bi folks and Neurodiverse folks - seems like both groups have very similar issues in the world