As you may be (or, more likely are not at all) aware, I’ve been a volunteer advocate for rape and domestic violence survivors for the past four and a half years. What this means, in practical terms, is that a couple of times a month (less now that I’m also a mentor to new advocates), I go on shift, spending twelve hours waiting to see if I get a call telling me that a survivor has arrived at the hospital emergency department. Most of the time, I don’t get called in; but when I do, I head to the hospital and provide emotional support for the duration of the survivor’s stay in the emergency department.
It’s fulfilling work, and I truly enjoy it, which is why when the organization I volunteer with announced that they were doing a training for a new type of advocacy program, I immediately signed up. And that’s how I found myself on a three and a half hour Zoom call a week and a half ago, learning the basics of being a legal advocate — or, to put it more plainly, a person who provides emotional support to survivors during a trip to a police precinct to make a report.
Early on in the training, the organization’s legal team explained what happens when a survivor goes to the police — the difference between, say, making a report to the Special Victims Division vs the general police staff; the processes that unfold when a survivor shows up to make a report. And then there was a slide about some of the biases that might make it harder for a survivor to report. At the top of the list was this line:
Perceived promiscuity of bisexual individuals
It was such a small line, so easy to miss, and yet. I don’t even know how to describe the feeling it sparked in me — validation, I guess? Someone was just plainly putting out there that, yes, my sexual orientation is often used to justify abuse against me, to minimize my experiences of violation, to blame me for every bad thing that has happened to me. And seeing it there, in plain text, on a Powerpoint slide — it was like coming up for air when you don’t even know that you’ve been drowning.
I think a lot these days about how young me might have reacted to more straightforward conversations about bisexuality; if she’d understood her identity as more than just “lesbian adjacent,” as its own thing with its own challenges, challenges she, herself, would one day face. Would I have been better able to identify the abuse I experienced in my late teens and early twenties if I had understood the specific dynamics of abuse against bisexuals? Possibly not — though I think that knowledge would, at the very least, have helped me with my healing process, have helped me forgive myself.
I mean, I can certainly see the healing that’s been sparked over the past few years as I’ve actively begun processing my experiences with biphobia, as I’ve begun to understand that even my relationships with men weren’t really protective harbors of heterosexuality because I often experienced biphobia within them. Thinking through the contours of how bisexuals experience abuse differently from monosexuals — how our bisexuality is used to demand things from us, to police us, to blame us for our abuse — has helped me let go of so much of my shame and anger and regret.
It’s been an incredibly powerful transformation. And for me, all it took to spark it was a simple awareness that, yes, my bisexuality does provide me with a unique experience of the world. A simple awareness not unlike that one little line about how stereotypes about bisexuals can make reporting sexual violence more difficult. These things, they’re so small. And yet for many of us, they mean the world.
There's something about the earnestness or joyfulness in this piece that we don't always see from you that made for quite lovely writing.
Being *seen* in a way that prompts you to be a more effective advocate. Gentlest possible "high five".