So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”
Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”
So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it.
That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender.
When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.
And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.
But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.
But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I wasalso saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”
And that? That gives me hope for the future.
Similarily: “Dyke/butch/femme are lesbian words, bisexual/pansexual women shouldn’t use them.”
When I speak to them, lesbians who say this seem to be under the impression that bisexuals must have our own history and culture and words that are all perfectly nice, so why can’t we just use those without poaching someone else’s?
And often, they’re really shocked when I tell them: We don’t. We can’t. I’d love to; it’s not possible.
“Lesbian” used to be a word that simply meant a woman who loved other women. And until feminism, very, very few women had the economic freedom to choose to live entirely away from men. Lesbian bars that began in the 1930s didn’t interrogate you about your history at the door; many of the women who went there seeking romantic or sexual relationships with other women were married to men at the time. When The Daughters of Bilitis formed in 1955 to work for the civil and political wellbeing of lesbians, the majority of its members were closeted, married women, and for those women, leaving their husbands and committing to lesbian partners was a risky and arduous process the organization helped them with. Women were admitted whether or not they’d at one point truly loved or desired their husbands or other men–the important thing was that they loved women and wanted to explore that desire.
Lesbian groups turned against bisexual and pansexual women as a class in the 1970s and 80s, when radical feminists began to teach that to escape the Patriarchy’s evil influence, women needed to cut themselves off from men entirely. Having relationships with men was “sleeping with the enemy” and colluding with oppression. Many lesbian radical feminists viewed, and still view, bisexuality as a fundamentally disordered condition that makes bisexuals unstable, abusive, anti-feminist, and untrustworthy.
That process of expelling bi women from lesbian groups with immense prejudice continues to this day and leaves scars on a lot of bi/pan people. A lot of bisexuals, myself included, have an experience of “double discrimination”; we are made to feel unwelcome or invisible both in straight society, and in LGBT spaces. And part of this is because attempts to build a bisexual/pansexual community identity have met with strong resistance from gays and lesbians, so we have far fewer books, resources, histories, icons, organizations, events, and resources than gays and lesbians do, despite numerically outnumbering them..
So every time I hear that phrase, it’s another painful reminder for me of all the experiences I’ve had being rejected by the lesbian community. But bisexual experiences don’t get talked about or signalboosted much,so a lot of young/new lesbians literally haven’t learned this aspect of LGBT+ history.
And once I’ve explained it, I’ve had a heartening number of lesbians go, “That’s not what I wanted to happen, so I’m going to stop saying that.”
a lot of shit i hear in the discourse reminds me of actual things homophobes say irl and it’s… really troubling?
“preteens identifying as ace is sexualizing!” whenever i headcanon a character as gay or bi/pan, my mom tells me, not everything has to be sexual. lgbt identities are viewed as inherently sexual and inappropriate for children.
“why do you feel the need to talk about being ace? it’s tmi, no one needs or wants to know about your sex life except your partner.” i’m not against your lifestyle, just keep it in the bedroom, okay?
“telling kids they can experience sexual attraction is grooming.” please stop conflating minority orientations to pedophilia, this has been used against gay people forever.
“asexuality is a disease and doesn’t naturally occur.” do i even have to explain this one?
what i’m trying to say is that it’s really hurtful for me, an ace lesbian, to hear this rhetoric used against me by straight people because i’m gay, then go into lgbt spaces–which are supposed to be safe for me–and hear other gay people saying almost word-for-word the exact same things, this time directed against my asexuality.
please stop using these arguments. don’t repackage homophobic rhetoric and use it against a different minority orientation.
(Image description: six square images with purple backgrounds and white borders, every image has bold white text in the center. All together this text reads: “I don’t care if testosterone therapy makes me sterile. I am allowed to live a life that does not revolve around childbearing or parenthood. I do not have to prioritize childbearing or parenthood in my life. My bodily autonomy and freedom of choice are worth more than potential fertility. I don’t give a fuck what you believe my "biological purpose” is. This body is mine to do with as I will.“)
Possibly controversial, but I don’t care if testosterone therapy makes me sterile.
I’m allowed to live a life that does not revolve around possible future childbearing or parenthood. My own bodily autonomy and freedom of choice are worth more than potential fertility.
I don’t care what anyone believes my "biological purpose” is. My body is not your “earthen vessel”. I am not here to “be fruitful and multiply”. I don’t want to join your womban only arts and crafts circle and finger-paint with period blood. I don’t have to find any kind of special meaning or spiritual significance in the reproductive organs that I was born with.
The only reason I am here right now with this body that is mine is to do whatever I want with it.
I’m allowed to not want pregnancy and childbirth, or the possibility of them. I’m allowed to not want parenthood in any form. I don’t have to prioritize those things in my life.
The potential loss of my fertility on testosterone is not a loss for me, it is a benefit. For more than half of my life now I’ve known that I never want to experience pregnancy or childbirth, and yet I am clearly expected to value my potential ability to do those things above my own actual wants and needs? No chance.
No trans person should be required to delay medically transitioning because of concerns about future fertility, if the trans person themselves isn’t concerned with the ability to have biological children.
I resent the notion that medically transitioning is harmful because we’re–allegedly–choosing to sterilize ourselves*. Choosing sterilization is not harmful. The ability to choose sterilization should be the right of every person, regardless of gender, who is of an age capable of reproducing.
(*Contrary to popular belief, testosterone therapy is not a contraceptive and does not always result in a person being sterile; it is entirely possible for a person to become pregnant while using testosterone therapy or after stopping it.)
aggressive reminder that while y’all don’t have to headcanon any unlabeled multisexual characters as pan, y’all need to start acknowledging that there are more than three sexualities and that bi isn’t the default for “not straight or gay”, therefor they could very well be pan. stop erasing us.
There’s this idea in femslash that “exotic” features are the domain of “interesting” white women who are supposed to stand out of a group of “traditionally white” characters. At the most everyone is a “tan”, but she’s going to have almond eyes, or a certain build, or a darker skin tone that makes her different (but not enough for them to admit she’s probably not white).
They use terms that they know exclude many WoC (they usually assume we can’t be blond, brunette, or redhead…and the “black” hair they think we have doesn’t get the poetic treatment that the “jet black hair” characters they decide are white get). So they can have their “blond + brunette, light vs. “dark”, feminine vs. masculine” without having to deal with any real nuance.
I’m tired of fiction that treats WoC poorly, especially when its femslash. We’re women too, but you wouldn’t know it from how overwhelming white femslash circles can be. Like, why is it that people who can find any justification to pair two white women (who often hate each other) suddenly can’t figure out what to do if one of those women becomes black? Suddenly writing her features out leaves a bad taste in their mouth and the relationship just isn’t viable anymore. But they don’t want to admit this is because they’re writing for a certain gaze. They’re too invested in seeing themselves as morally superior to sexists who only write for the male gaze that they fail to address how their writing reflects the white gaze in very problematic ways that wind up erasing (and/or fetishizing) a lot of women. I HATE that.
I swear, if I find another femslash story where the brunette has my skin tone and my features but is written as white I’m going to flip. Don’t erase me but then use my features so that a white character can “contrast” with their significant other in a way that allows you to still feel comfortable. I’ve had enough of that crap used against me offline in LGBTQ circles, I don’t want to deal with it in my fantasy or my sci-fi or any of the fanworks that derive from it.
Queer women DO exist, and no we aren’t all a part of cisgender, pale skinned, “traditionally white blond” and “exotically white” brunette combinations. Write what you want, and yeah, part of this can be blamed on the lack of WoC in these shows and movies (especially in regards to Black, Indigenous, and Asian women, though this can be applied to WoC as a whole). But fanfic (or even original fiction) doesn’t require you to accept the same limitations that the source material has, you CHOOSE to write things this way, and its your responsibility to unpack that if you want to fix it.
I really hate on this website that we erased the term monosexism as it was a very useful term m-spec people have being using for years but terfs decided it was bad becuse it group them with straight people and all of you believed it.
Monosexism is the belief that people who are only attracted to one gender is somehow better or more superior to those who are not monosexual.
Monosexism seeing everything as only gay or straight and if your not you either lying or making things up.
Monosexism is erasing multisexual people are seeing them as less memebers in tge community.
Monosexism is seeing multisexual people are dangerous and dirty
Monosexism is seeing m-spec men as gay men who havent fully accepted themselves as gay.
Monosexism is seeing m-spec women as either lesbians or straight women depending on who your talking to
Monosexism is not seeing multisexual as a full identity and only half of something or on the way of realizing our ‘true’ sexuality.
But you guys all decided it was bad becuase terfs said it ‘group gays with the straights and that it was inherently evil for that.’ And you believed it.
Bisexual positivity blogs have big problems about throwing polyamorous people under the bus. We are both blamed for creating stereotypes about bisexual people being nonmonogamous and for oppressing them by wanting to have threesomes with them. To set things straight: we did not produce the stereotypes, monogamous heterosexuals who could not fathom bisexuality did and polyamorous people are not the cause of fetishizing bisexuality, it is monogamous heterosexuals treating bisexual and pansexual people like human sex toys who did. We are not the enemies of the bisexual community and they need to stop throwing us under the bus.
This is so important, folks. We need to always make sure the blame is placed squarely at the feet of heteronormative society, rather than throwing others under the bus.
We can be upset about the stereotypes without implying that it’s dirty or wrong to fulfill stereotypes. The problem is always with people who assume things about you due to stereotypes and ignore you as an individual, not with the stereotyped thing itself.
So do polyamory, have threesomes, be promiscuous if that floats your boat. Because really, no amount of “respectability” will make straight people stop hating us. WE don’t have to prove that we’re good bis and we’re just like them - THEY have to learn to respect our differences and treat us like human beings even if we’re not like them. Liberation, not assimilation, and no leaving anyone behind.
