If you have been in a queer space — and especially if you have been in a queer space as a bisexual — you have undoubtedly been witness to (or maybe even participated in) a conversation that attempts to rank the respective suffering of the various members of the LGBTQ community. The most basic version of this is the one that says bisexuals simply cannot be that oppressed because we can (theoretically) happily partner with straight people, but that’s hardly where it ends. There’s also “bi girls should shut up because trans girls have it worse” — an argument that bizarrely ignores that many bi girls are themselves trans — as well as the eternal “who has it worse, bi men or bi women” discussion.
I’m not saying I’ve never engaged in any of these discussions — I am, let’s face it, just a human lady — but when I think about them now, I just… you know, what’s the point, right? What are we getting at when we rank the suffering of various members of an oppressed community, and why are so many of us so addicted to it?
It’s not that I don’t think it’s worth highlighting the disparate ways that various people of various gender identities and sexual orientations experience harm. I mean obviously it is. If men who have sex with men are at an elevated risk of contracting HIV (or monkeypox, remember monkeypox summer), then it’s important to highlight that so these communities can access targeted public health initiatives. It’s similarly important to talk about, for instance, elevated rates of poverty among trans and bi people, or trans and bi people’s elevated risk of intimate partner violence, because these community level phenomena point to a larger, community level problem that is broadly having an effect on a group of people.
But that’s not really the way these “who has it worse” conversations usually go down. They’re not usually focused on solutions or resource allocation; nor do they really recognize that these statistics we’re talking about are aggregates and not portraits of an individual’s life. More often people get into these discussions because they’re trying to assign moral worth to an individual queer: to say that, for instance, a bi cis man has more right to queer spaces than a bi cis woman because there’s more social stigma against male bisexuality than female, to figure out who belongs by virtue of who suffers more.
Except — and hopefully you already realize this — not only are most of our assessments of “who suffers more” based more on gut feelings than actual statistics and data; there’s also the simple matter that the aggregate is not the individual. Bi women are at an elevated risk of poverty; but I, a bi woman, have never lived in poverty. Caitlyn Jenner is hardly representative of the trans experience at large. A gay virgin isn’t at an elevated risk of getting monkeypox. Identity and labels might be able to give us a rough picture of the general neighborhood that someone resides in (and, sometimes, help us correctly assess their struggle) but they’re not, like, someone’s literal biography.
And again I just — I just think more of us should be solution-oriented, and we often are not. For bi people in particular, the “who has it worse” convo is often self-defeating, not least because it tends to reinforce myths and stereotypes (the idea that all bi people are cis, the idea that hetero relationships are an automatic safe haven for bisexuals), but because it further ossifies the boundaries between identities, further sets up walls between this identity and that one.
Which, I’m pretty sure, is the exact opposite of the progress that most bi people are looking for.