What's in a name?

About "bisexual," again.

It is a little depressing that — outside of people just saying straight up biphobic shit — one of the most common discussions about bisexuality seems to be an obsession over why people call themselves “bisexual,” why that word, rather than, say, pansexual or queer happens to appeal to certain folks.

For instance: A few days ago I saw someone posit on Bluesky that people who ID as “bisexual” are more likely to be attracted to masculine men and feminine women — that bisexuality is the domain of people with attractions to more traditional presentations of gender (sigh). And certainly, there are some bisexuals — maybe you yourself! — who that describes, but there are also plenty of us whose attractions don’t fall into that neat category. Bisexuals who are only into masc folks, bisexuals who are only into femme folks, bisexuals who are all over the map. (Plenty of people pointed this out to the Bluesky poster, for what it’s worth.)

It feels, always, like there’s this investment in painting “bisexual” as somehow regressive, somehow loyal to heteronormativity. That’s what “bisexuals like masculine men and feminine women” suggests, right? That to be bisexual is to hew to gender norms that are in line with straight culture, that to be bisexual is to not really be committed to breaking gender binaries. (Though one has to wonder what to make of, for instance, a masc bi woman who’s into masculine men and feminine women — is she upholding hetero norms with her attractions, or queering them by being masc herself? The mind boggles!) So, too, the insistence that to be bisexual is to reject trans people or non-binary people as potential sexual partners; an argument that, sigh, positions pansexuals as the more “progressive” multi-gender attracted queers.

I think on some level that this obsession with “bisexual” as regressive is an unconscious attempt to justify biphobia through proving that bisexuals are bad actually. If people hate bisexuals, it must be because there’s something wrong with the word bisexual, right? It must carry with it some inherent anti-queerness, it must carry with it some fundamental flaw.

No one ever seems to wonder if the obsession with nitpicking the word bisexual might, itself, be a manifestation of biphobia.

Anyway.

I’m not super interested in the deep etymology of “bisexual.” The word is only interesting to me as a broad umbrella term that encompasses anyone who falls outside of the bounds of monosexuality. For me it’s less an identity and more a description of behavior — and to the extent it is an identity, it’s mostly because it seems to irritate people so much. You think there is something wrong with the word bisexual? Well, fuck it, then that makes me want to reclaim it. The endless fixation will not make me shy away from it (sadly, no one actually escapes biphobia by identifying as pan or queer). It just makes me double down.