There’s this weird phenomenon — you may be aware of it — where men routinely overestimate how much women are talking. Multiple studies have documented this effect: when a conversation is split 50/50 on gender lines, the perception is often that women are dominating the conversation. Indeed it is only when women are speaking far less than men are that many people will perceive the conversation as “balanced;” by virtue of their marginalized status, women are perceived as taking up more space than we actually do.
It’s not just women who are subjected to this magnification due to marginalization. You may be familiar with the old saw that if a TV show has more than one Black character it is suddenly a “Black show” (a belief that blessedly seems to have fallen by the wayside over the years); when trans people enter a space, they’re often accused of somehow “taking over” simply by existing. Indeed, there is often more discourse about trans people than actual statements by trans people, their presence inflated by the paranoia of transphobes.
I think, sometimes, that this effect is also at play with the bisexuals.
I do not mean to turn this newsletter into a daily recap of what happened on Twitter dot com, but: there was some bi discourse on Twitter dot com. The whole thing began with a tweet (one I didn’t actually see in its original incarnation, only as a screenshot) about someone being misgendered at a queer event by a bi girl’s boyfriend, which then got criticized by a bi activist as being bimisogynist and treating bi women as extensions of their male partners and… well. It just kinda got uglier from there, spinning out into a lot of nasty comments about bisexuals that largely felt disconnected from the original issue (someone got misgendered at a queer event and that felt shitty).
I don’t feel like recapping what was said on Twitter any further, nor do I really want to discuss this question of who is or isn’t bringing transphobia into the queer community, or why bi women can’t just pick better boyfriends. But I do want to say this: this is the second time this year that there’s been a flurry of social media talk about bi women as vectors through which bad straight men enter queer spaces. And I have to wonder: are bi women actually disproportionately bad actors, or are our bad actions simply hypervisible by virtue of our marginalized status?
I mean, I dunno. I am not going to sit here and tell you that bi women have never dated anyone bad — I myself have dated some real pieces of shit — but this conviction that queer spaces are just teeming with badly behaved bi women, it just does not sit right with me. The majority of the bi women I know are far too anxious about their own queer cred to even spend much time in queer spaces, let alone bring straight men into them; and yet I feel like I am constantly hearing discussions about bi women tanking the vibe for everyone else. One has to wonder if, perhaps, it’s less that bi women are doing the most harm, and more that people feel the most comfortable calling out the harm done by bi women — that because they do not see bi women as “belonging” in queer spaces, they are more primed to police our actions, to see us as taking up space we don’t deserve.
Personally, this is all kind of theoretical for me: with the exception of friends’ parties where the majority of folks are queer and, ugh, the bane of my existence that is Lex, I would not really say that I spend a lot of time in “queer spaces” (however we are defining that). I’ve never been a huge bar person, and even less so in the pandemic era; nor am I really one for dance parties. And now that I don’t really date men, the chances of me bringing one into a “queer space” (which again, what space would that be) are slim to none (I mean even when I had a live in boyfriend I wasn’t really bringing him around places like that because queer spaces were a space for me.).
But even so: when I see this discourse, when I see this commentary about bi people as a plague, my thought is not that I am “one of the good ones” who isn’t being talked about. No, my thought — partially but not exclusively fueled by my obsessive-compulsive disorder — is mostly that, by virtue of being a bi cis woman, and one who has primarily dated men, I am a toxic asset, a bad person, a vector of contamination. My thought is that I should quiet myself, make myself smaller, and above all, stay out of queer spaces. My thought is to police myself. Which is, I guess, the whole entire point.
Like this newsletter? You can get bonus essays and a chance to chat with me over at Patreon.