Over the weekend, Jordan Peterson — he of “clean your room” and lobster men fame — shared a tweet that I have to imagine he thought was a gonna be a real hard truth for queers to take.
In my head, I can see Peterson smugly sitting back in his chair after pressing the tweet button for that one, smiling as he envisioned the meltdowns that little missive would undoubtedly provoke. I suspect that someone like me — not just a bisexual, but a Professional Bisexual™️, a person interested enough in her own bisexuality to write a whole newsletter about the sexuality — is especially the kind of person Peterson predicted he’d trigger a temper tantrum in, as though just reading those words, having to contend with the revelation that my core self is not defined by who I want to fuck, would send a flood of hot tears streaming down my face.
Which is what makes it so funny that, uh, I actually agree with Peterson here.
While there is certainly an argument to be made that queer broadly, or bisexual specifically, are identity groups — that there are affiliations here, a culture and community and shared interests — I don’t think any of that is rooted in the question of who any of us want to have sex with. I don’t get on my computer every morning and fire up the Substack newsletter because I think it is just so deeply interesting that in the course of my life I have touched penises and vaginas; and I certainly don’t think the various folks who set my loins aflame constitute my identity.
But what is an identity — the thing that fosters that culture, those communities, those affiliations — is being a person who is thrust into a little box on the basis of their sexual attractions. What does forge an identity is experiencing oppression based on those sexual attractions, of being forced to define yourself against a limited, stereotypical vision of what those sexual attractions say about you.
[NB: This is also more or less how I personally feel about my gender (just my gender, you can feel different about yours). I don’t know if there is anything “essentially woman” about me, because I don’t know what a woman’s, uh, essence would even be. I know that someone looked at my genitals when I was a baby, tossed me into a box, and that that’s defined my life experience ever since. And I know that the boundaries of the box don’t chafe badly enough for me to need to break out, but I think the identity part is more about how I have grown as a person in response to being in that box more than who I was at that first moment of birth, before I got tossed in there.]
And I mean — I think all of us understand that people who, for instance, use their heterosexual attractions as the basis of an identity are, you know, weirdos, right? If you’re walking around very interested in the fact that you are STRAIGHT, if you talk about your affinity for straight culture, if you, god forbid, attend a Straight Pride Parade (lol) — I mean most people would look at you askance. Because without the oppression, without chafing of the stereotyping, without having to exist with your sexual attractions against a backdrop of constant oppression, forming an identity that’s in any way connected to those sexual attractions just seems… silly. Most straight people are not Straight People™️, it’s only the annoying ones who feel the need to embed their straightness into every aspect of themselves. The primary thing that makes queer and bi people into Queer People™️ and Bi People™️ is the pressure society puts on us to reject these elements of who we are.
Anyway. I, for one, would love for my bisexuality to be no more relevant to the core of who I am than, say, the fact that I have brown eyes and and am 5’4.5”. And I think that Peterson’s tweet is truly on to something. Which is what makes it all the more ironic that it’s people like Jordan Peterson — the warriors of “The West,” the scholars so committed to the gender binary and hetero supremacy that they trip all over themselves to defend it — are the ones who are forcing LGBTQ identities to be identities in the first place.
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