Let’s begin with a clarification:
To be perfectly transparent, this newsletter is a project I launched on a whim just a week ago. I was frustrated with the shockingly muted Bi Awareness Week that had just passed, and I was frustrated with repeatedly hitting a wall every time I tried to pitch a project about bi identity and issues — being told that my ideas were too niche, or not marketable enough, or what have you when I know that there is hunger for these conversations, that there is an incredible need for them. So, yeah, I launched a newsletter to prove a point.
But because this newsletter is an attempt to prove a point that was created on a whim, it’s also a project I am doing alone, without an editor, just me and my laptop and the Substack interface. What you’re getting here are unfiltered, unedited brain dumps, just the raw feed from my grey matter to your device, and that means two things:
There are going to be typos. Even if I proofread. Sorry!
There’s no editor to engage me in conversation, to push back on my thoughts, to ask me to clarify the various statements that I throw out into the ether and assume will be understood. As a result, I sometimes forget that not everyone else is trapped in my brain 24/7; not everyone else is starting from the same perspective that I am; that I need, at times, to slow down, begin at the beginning, and clarify what, exactly, I mean.
I was given a reminder of point 2 yesterday when I received a reader response to my explanation for why I default to using “bisexual” as an umbrella term:
Hi Lux! I had a little panic flurry about this terminology a while back, and what some folks in the replies said (which I didn't see you explicitly call out here) is that many non-TERF-y modern bi folks have kind of retconned the "two" aspect of "bi" to mean "both my own gender, and other gender(s)". Which feels less squicky than declaring pan, or any of the other terms that weren't really around when I came out/came aware of my own bisexuality either. I hope this is helpful! Loving the newsletter and all your nuanced thoughts within. <3
I wrote this person back, and I liked my response enough — and realized that it was probably broadly helpful enough — that I decided to share it here as well (apologies if you already read it when I posted it on Twitter, feel free to skip past it to the new stuff that follows right after):
Hi! Thank you for reading and reaching out.
I am aware of the “bi means my gender and other genders” definition, but I don’t really take comfort in it; the fact that you thought I would makes me worry that I wasn’t actually clear in my original newsletter (entirely possible, since reading over it I realize I was making a lot of assumptions about readers’ familiarity with my opinions and stances and past proclamations on Twitter).
So, just to offer a little more clarity on my feelings about the word bisexual:
To begin with, the idea that bisexual was originally intended to declare sexual attraction to two genders (or sexes) only is already a bit of apocrypha. The original use of bisexual — which I believe dates back to Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis — has nothing to do with sexual desire at all. To the contrary, at that time bisexual meant what we now call intersex. In other words, the original bisexual was a kind of third gender/sex (since the concepts were not considered separate at the time). When Freud declared all human beings to be inherently bisexual, he didn’t mean we’re all attracted to multiple genders, he meant that we are all part male, part female (which does actually imply that he thought we all had the capacity to be attracted to multiple genders, but I’ll get to that in a second).
How did an old fashioned word for intersex become the bisexual we know and have mixed feelings about today? I’m less clear on this transition, but I would have to guess that it had something to do with the era’s conviction that sexual orientation and gender identity were fused at the hip. As you’re likely aware, an old term for gay/lesbian was “invert” — the idea here was that gays/lesbians had “inappropriate” sexual desires because their gender had been “inverted.” Gay men might be male on the outside, but sought other men’s sexual affection because they were female — and thus had female sexual desires — on the inside; to be a gay man was conflated with feminine gender presentation (there was actually an era in history in which it was *only* the effeminate gay men and butch lesbians who were considered queer — if your gender presentation aligned with your sex assigned at birth you were simply a normal person lured in by an invert, not an invert yourself. Like I said, different times!).
So anyway: if we recognize that there was a time where sexual orientation and gender identity were assumed to be in lock step, and that “bisexual” meant “intersex” back in this era, you can kinda see how the word goes from one meaning to another. Bisexuals are attracted to multiple genders not because it is our lot in life to be attracted to two genders, but because we are, ourselves, two genders — or rather bisexuals have the capacity to be attracted to multiple genders because bisexuals are a third gender, one that is not bound to the hard and fast rule of “men like women, women like men.”
All of that said: it is strange to me to be told that a word that originated as a third gender is someone negating or exclusive of third genders, not least because I know plenty of bisexual-identified non-binary folks. I should also note that “bi means you’re not into non-binary people” is just a modern take on “bi means you’re not into trans people,” the line I used to hear back in the 1990s, which made no sense then, either, given that the bi community had always been the most supportive of trans people, not the least (also more trans people than cis people identify as bi so that’s a thing, too).
But all of this is kind of dancing around my real point, which is this: honestly, I find the tendency to fixate on “what does bi mean” to be biphobic in and of itself. No one is demanding that lesbians actually hail from the island of Lesbos — nor do they seem particularly concerned with the fact that Alpha Lesbian Sappho might very well have been bi — and no one is demanding that gay men be perpetually happy. Additionally, no one seems particularly concerned as to whether gays or lesbians or straight people are attracted to non-binary people — it is, somehow, only the bisexuals who have to account for this desire lest we be declared TERFs.
Why must bis, and bis alone, be held accountable for the literal definition of our label? Why must we assert some literal two that our name represents? It just feels like a waste of time and energy, this demand for a perfect word, or a perfect meaning for the word that’s been in use for decades. I have other, better shit to worry about personally (like the fact that bi women are sexually assaulted at a rate far higher than our straight and lesbian peers!).
So. Now that I have that out of the way: since writing that email, I have been thinking a lot about this idea of bisexuality as, itself, a kind of third gender. I don’t mean that in the sense that cis bisexuals experience gender dysphoria or automatically understand that experience of being trans (and I certainly don’t mean it in the sense of cis bisexuals being the targets of transphobia). But what I do mean is that bisexuality — as a concept, and independent of the gender identity of individual bisexuals themselves — is, fundamentally, a form of gender trouble.
It is common wisdom these days that one’s sexual orientation is totally separate from one’s gender, and in the sense that what you are does not determine who you like, then sure. But also? I have to say I think it’s a little bit bullshit. One’s experience of their sexuality is inseparable from their gender — no one thinks lesbians and gay men have identical lives just because they’re both same-gender attracted — and one’s gender cannot be understood independent of their sexuality, either. Queer womanhood is not the same as straight womanhood, nor is queer manhood akin to its straight counterpart — and to be non-binary is to permanently divorce oneself from the possibility of partaking in heterosexuality (to say nothing of the way that even heterosexual trans people are often assumed to be inherently queer by virtue of their gender journey).
So what does any of this have to do with bisexuality?
As far as we are from the days of talking about gays and lesbians as “inverts,” I don’t think we’re fully divorced from the idea of queerness as a kind of inversion of gendered expectations. There’s a reason, after all, that male femininity is still considered a sign of gayness; there’s a reason why feminine lesbians feel a need to aggressively, overtly assert that yes, indeed, they are actually queer. Even as one abandons heterosexuality, there’s still an expectation that the rules will apply: that you will consistently be attracted to one gender and one gender only, that there will be a kind of “balance” within your relationship (see: butch/femme), that you will operate in a way that conforms to general expectations even if it happens to subvert them.
And then you have bisexuality.
Look I know I’m supposed to tell you that I’m not “half gay half straight,” but rather “all bisexual,” that no matter the gender of the person I partner with, I’m still the same person. But to be honest, insisting on my own internal consistency has always felt a little forced to me — indeed, insisting to myself that there was some consistency in who I was sexually regardless of the gender of my partner mostly served to render me incapable of understanding what I actually wanted out of sex. There’s an inherent slippage built into my bisexuality, a shifting that occurs depending on the gender of my object of affection, the gender of the person I am trying to attract. I am, to quote Judy Greer on Hulu’s Reboot*, a “sexual fluid,” and what I mean is that my shape changes depending on the container that I am currently residing within.
Obviously not every bisexual feels that way exactly (and I would never be so bold as to attempt to encapsulate the broad and diverse range of bisexual experiences just through my own narrow lens!), but I think that we are all united in this commitment to upending expectation, to being unpredictable, to breaking the rules. Bisexuality necessarily disrupts the gender binary by abandoning one of the central precepts of cisheteronormativity: this idea that we are born one way and remain fixed through the span of our lifetime, that what we want, who we are attracted to, will always remain unchanged, that one can look at us and know our whole entire deal from our current gender presentation and relationship. Bisexuality injects uncertainty into the conversation — which is, of course, why it is so policed.
There’s a phrase you’ll hear from time to time, one that I’ve coopted for the title of this newsletter: “no B without the T.” It’s a line echoes one of the intraqueer battles of the 1990s, when cis LGs made a concerted effort to break up the BT alliance by luring cis bisexuals into an LGB coalition and abandoning the Ts (a move which, sadly, succeeded). The line is a reminder of the powerful history of a BT alliance, generally used by cis bisexuals who want to flag their loyalty to their trans peers. But I think there is another way to understand it. There is no B without the T because these camps are, ultimately, inseparable from one another; there is no B without the T because on a macro level, we are fighting the same fight.
* Sidenote, Reboot is a really good show, I know the marketing made it look terrible but somehow it inexplicably just works
I think there are also a lot of similarities between bi and transwomen's experiences on the more micro level. While I don't want to speak for transwomen and I think transphobia is more violent, structural, and politically salient than biphobia, there are a lot of obvious sources for solidarity.
Both are over represented in porn and sex work and suffer high levels of sexual violence, which is related to a common stereotype of bi and trans women as hypersexual, lacking sexual boundaries, and perpetually sexually available. Both are also commonly viewed as lying about their identity for attention and as sinister infiltrators bringing maleness into lesbian spaces.
I wasn’t aware of that “no B without the T” went back to the 90s. They’re fighting that battle all over again in the UK now.