The kids are alright

I wish I could say the same for me.

This past weekend I had the pleasure of hanging out with two delightful teens, both of whom were far more educated about queer identities and lingo than I had been when I was their age. They effortlessly wielded words like ace and aro and non-binary, and talked about friends who’d transitioned, or had complex gender identities, or were going through journeys to figure out their own sexuality. These teens, I should note, both had a list of modifiers to describe their own complex identities — identities which would have been utterly foreign to me back when I was their age.

I feel like it is teens like these who lead people to tell me things like, “Oh, well biphobia isn’t a thing anymore,” or insist that the kids are going to magically make it all go away. Teens like these who lead people to insist that the future is bright for all queers, bisexuals included. These teens are growing up with The Owl House, a Disney+ show where a bi teen comes out to her mom in a very adorable montage that includes a lot of bi pride flags. Surely, they’re a sign that everything is fixed, right? Right?

My thoughts about this are two-fold. Firstly, I think it’s… very optimistic to assume that young people are just totally okay with bisexuality now, that everything is fine and dandy and good because of some stuff they saw on TV. I think it is better, certainly, but I also have been dog piled by enough teen lesbians on Twitter, seen enough queer teen TikToks, and just been around the block enough times to be leery about anyone who insists biphobia can just be magically waved away with a few good bi characters on TV. This conviction that it’s all been fixed seems like an extension of the belief that biphobia is nothing more than an extension of homophobia, that if you fix one (and we legalized same sex marriage, right?), the other will naturally resolve without much effort. I… feel like you probably know my answer to that (and if you don’t, well, the archives of this newsletter are free for you to peruse).

But there’s something else that comes to mind for me, something that extends beyond the question of whether or not Gen Z has fixed biphobia. And it’s, well… I mean, not to be selfish, but even if they did… what about me?

There’s this assumption, I feel like, that it kind of doesn’t matter that many of us are fucked up by biphobia, have had our lives derailed by biphobia, so long as the next generation grows up comfortable with and cool about the bis. It seems, at times, like the many generations of bisexuals who aren’t okay, who are still conflicted and confused and ashamed, just kind of… don’t matter anymore, like it’s expected we’ll just disappear into the ether, or just magically be fixed by the teens being chill about bisexuality — even as our parents, our peers, the people around us, many of whom have tons of institutional power, remain less than enthusiastic about our existence.

You would think that the long tail of racism, of sexism, of homophobia — all things that still exist in our society despite being “fixed” by the youth of previous years — would help us understand that none of these structural prejudices just vanish over night, that it takes time, and effort — lots of effort — to actually effect meaningful change. You would think that we’d understand that even as future generations may be better off, past generations still deserve care and consideration, that a better future doesn’t erase a brutal past.

You would think. And yet!

Look, the kids are alright. Or, well, a lot of them are. (Those lesbian teens who dog piled me probably aren’t.) But the world, at large, is not. And the kids alone cannot undo that — no matter how cool, how queer, how right thinking they are.