I think one of the reasons why being “bi enough” is such a concern for many bi people is because the majority of us can only conceive of bi oppression as being adjacent to the policing of same gender sexual contact and relationships. Can a bi person in a hetero appearing relationship truly consider themselves oppressed if the legality of their marriage will be globally recognized without question? Can a bi person experience oppression if they’ve never, you know, done gay sex?
It’s such a weird question to me, and one that really shows how centering the LGBTQ rights discussion around marriage equality really eroded a lot of people’s imaginations. Sexuality-based oppression is certainly at its most visible and concrete when it is policing what legal rights a same gender couple has versus a mixed gender couple. But to say it ends there is… what.
The thing about, for instance, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (and complete and total bans on queer participation in the military before then) is that they weren’t really about, I dunno, a fear that there was going to be an epidemic of gay sex in military bunkers if openly queer people were allowed to be in the military. They were much more about this idea of the queer person as a threat to unit cohesion — about the potential threat to moral if, say, one soldier was worried about being objectified or hit on by another soldier. The mere existence of attraction, or even potential for attraction, was the threat — I think that and also this idea that queer people could be more readily blackmailed and compromised by the enemy.
And I bring this up not simply because Don’t Ask Don’t Tell explicitly called out bisexuality alongside homosexuality in its list of things one should neither inquire about nor speak allowed (though it did!), but because this whole framing — I think it’s been lost for a lot of us. It’s a framing in which a queer person is a threat not because of what they are actively doing — queer sex, queer relationships, queer marriage — but because of their mere existence, because of the theoretical challenge they pose by simply being different. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell didn’t care if you were a queer who’d never been in a relationship; the mere fact that you were queer was in and of itself explosive. You, as a person, were a contagion, independent of your behavior or relationship status.
I wonder what it would feel like to consider biphobia in that frame: to think of it as an oppression that renders bisexuality unspeakable, that treats bisexuals as an unacceptable kind of person, full stop. Would we continue to worry that we didn’t “count” as “bi enough” to be subjected to that oppression? Or would we begin to understand that the very insistence that we are not “bi enough” to be oppressed is a form of this kind of oppression — that rendering bisexuality unspeakable even to ourselves is, in a way, doing the work of those who wish to eliminate bisexuals, full stop.
Brilliant, thanks