Years ago, when I was planning on writing a book about biphobia, I took some time to interview some elder bisexual activists — many of them leaders of the bi rights movement that began cropping up in the United States in the early 1980s. I learned a lot from those conversations — and they definitely shaped my understanding of bi history! — but the most memorable moment came in a conversation with Loraine Hutchins, who shared an anecdote about a time when cis gays lesbians very literally created a schism between their bi and trans colleagues.
The general arc of the story went thusly: in the early 1990s, bi and trans activists were relatively united. There were several reasons behind this union. For starters, both groups were seen as a bit fringe by cis gays and lesbians; there was also the simple fact that a lot of bi people are trans and a lot of trans people are bi. If you read bi writing from this era (like Bi Any Other Name, the anthology that Hutchins co-edited, or the zine Anything That Moves) you’ll see evidence of this overlap: trans people are made visible in these publications, their voices included as part of the bi experience.
But.
I’m a little fuzzy on the specifics here — this conversation was a while ago and I’m a little too lazy to look up my notes — some time in the early or mid 1990s, there was advocacy within the queer community to change the “Gay and Lesbian” branding (which itself had once been simply “Gay”) to something more inclusive of the full spectrum of queers. I think, specifically, there was a desire to have the name of a queer rights march — and a cursory google suggests it was likely the March on Washington — reflect that the group was made up of not merely gays and lesbians, but also bisexuals and trans people as well. And what happened, in Hutchins’s telling of the story, is that cis bisexuals and trans people were literally pulled into separate rooms, where their cis gay and lesbian peers worked to peel them off from one another, to encourage cis bisexuals to side with cis gays and lesbians at the expense of their trans siblings.
The March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation took place in Washington, D.C., on April 25, 1993. I don’t know if the bi/trans alliance has ever quite recovered from the schism that bisexuals but not trans people being brought into the march’s name represented. Even once LGB became LGBT and then LGBTQ and then LGBTQIA++, the damage had been done.
I think about that moment — the literal, physical separation of cis bisexuals and our trans siblings as well as the more symbolic rift — a lot. I think about it, especially, when I see trans and bi people pitted against one another in online rhetoric. Things have changed a bit in the past thirty years: trans people have gained more visibility and mainstream acceptance while also spurring a vicious political backlash in the process, while bisexuality has… kind of remained in the same permanent limbo as always, perceived as an in-between space betwixt straight and gay (with, of course, tons of potential to betray the gays).
But one thing that hasn’t changed is this sense that cis bisexuals and trans people are somehow at odds — that to talk about the realities of biphobia is necessarily to steal oxygen from discussions of transphobia, that we are fighting for scraps in an under resourced world and can’t both win. It’s weird, honestly, given that trans people and bisexuals generally want the same thing — to be left alone, to have freedom of self determination, to live in a world where fluidity of identity is no big deal — and because, as I mentioned above, a lot of bi people are trans and a lot of trans people are bi.
And it’s hard not to feel like that artificial rivalry — because let’s be clear here, there is no actual conflict between what cis bisexuals want and what trans people want — is fueled by other people, like it exists primarily to distract us from achieving true liberation.
I mean pitting cis bi people and trans people against one another, leading us to feel like there’s only room for one of us in the march name and we’d better duke it out, was literally a strategy employed to weaken our alliance in the past. The more we buy into the idea that our struggles aren’t linked, the more we ignore that our end goals are one in the same, the more we help out people who simply do not have our best interests at heart.