Tumblr is a wonderful place for marginalized people, including queer people, to find community and uplift each other. However, it has also become the breeding ground of queerphobic movements, among them trans exclusionism, aphobia, and battleaxe bis. While sometimes people in these movements are open about their bigotry, they can also post veiled messages, or “dogwhistles” containing subtly queerphobic sentiments and ideas. Unfortunately, I’ve seen a lot of well meaning people, including pan people, reblogging these posts. Today I’d like to take a moment to go over common panphobic dogwhistles, and hopefully reduce the reach of these campaigns.
Veiled panphobia usually contains two major components:
1. Vague reference to a misinformed or hated group
To ensure allies and people in the targeted group reblog the message, it is intentionally vague about who it is talking about.
2. “Calling out” a straw man of a biphobic or otherwise bigoted person
A straw man is a logical fallacy where an incorrect caricature of the opponent’s argument is set up that can then be easily debunked.
Examples include:
Posts vaguing about people “erasing bi history”
Posts stressing that bi people can be attracted to all genders
Posts quoting an incomplete version of the bi manifesto (You can find the full version here)
Posts railing on the hearts not parts slogan
Posts talking about how all sexualities can include trans people or “calling out” transphobes who “reduce trans people to their genitals”
Posts talking about Freud’s idea of pansexualism (which is an outdated psychological theory not related to modern understanding of human sexuality)
Posts claiming pansexuality is a new identity. (It’s not)
If you see a post resembling any of these, think twice about reblogging it. Make sure to check the person’s profile. Look for phrases like “battleaxe bi” in their bio, and search their blog for posts tagged pansexual to see if they have posted panphobic stuff in the past. Even if their blog is clean, it’s best to play it safe. Don’t reblog a post that rubs you the wrong way or seems to include subtly panphobic messaging. Be safe out there everyone!
I know it’s been years since it was at its height but I started thinking about it earlier and can we talk about how biphobic a big chunk of the SU fandom was. Like how so many people frothed at the mouth at the very suggestion of a character being bisexual/pansexual, or were only okay with it as long as they were only shipped with the same gender. Or how many people were saying that headcanoning a character as bi was “just an excuse to ship them with icky men”. Or made memes about Rose being a token straight. Or called people who made harmless bi/pan headcanons homophobic, even if the character didn’t have a confirmed sexual orientation to begin with. Or how some people genuinely believed all of Gemkind must have the exact same sexuality (except Rose of course). Or accused Rebecca Sugar of pretending to be bi for clout. Or how a lot of gem/men shippers were actually LGBTQ but were assumed straight by anti-shippers because people in m/f relationships can’t possibly be bisexual. Or that time I saw a lesbian fan get accused of hating lesbians because they said gems can be bi. Or how if you spoke out against these things I just mentioned you would be mocked?
Can we talk about that? Because in retrospect that was pretty messed up wasn’t it. And I didn’t forget about it. I saw you people acting like bisexuality was some sort of downgrade.
not gonna lie, seeing exclusionists throwing a pity party because they have to be reminded that people outside of their approved 3-4 letters exist will never not be funny to me
I’m gonna be sharing some of these with canon pan characters but also if you’d like me to do some about a specific canon/non canon pan character I’ll be reading your suggestions
I’m talking about all the queer people who keep forcing us to be hostile towards others mspec. I don’t really like that, so pls if that’s not your case then this meme ain’t talking about u ☘️☘️☘️☘️
All of you anti-pan bi’s and anti-bi pan’s are literally so infuriating. Stop with the revisionist bullshit. Literally just think critically for ONCE people.
Stop using the bisexual manifesto agaisnt non bi mspecs. Stop saying bisexuality is transphobic or pansexuality is transphobic. Stop saying pansexuality doesn’t exist and is just bisexuality. And for fuck’s sake recognize polysexual people?
Neither bisexuality or pansexuality are transphobic or problematic. Some of the people who use the terms may be, but the terms themselves are NEUTRAL.
There is nothing wrong with coining a more specific term to describe being attracted to all genders. Would you tell lesbians to not call themselves lesbians and that they’re just gay/homosexual? No! You wouldn’t. Just like lesbian, pansexual is a term to simply specify attraction further. So is polysexual.
Bisexuality includes trans people always has. Bisexuality isnt just about being attracted to men and women and includes nonbinary people.
Pansexual and polysexual may be used by some transphobes to describe being attracted to trans people but that is an issue with transphobes not pansexuality or polysexuality.
Bisexual is functionally an umbrella term but that doesn’t mean you can shove individual people who specifically do not identify as bisexual under it and call them bisexual.
Literally. I promise you this shit about bi pan hostility is so FAKE stop buying into it. PLEASE.
I am BEGGING you, as someone who has been involved in the lgbtq+ community for nearly half their life, STOP IT.
Fam, I don’t think you understand what “transphobia” is.
Imagine thinking gender is a social construct.
That’s just a couple steps away from being a damn TERF.
“Thinking that gender isn’t a social construct is transphobic”
N-no
In fact, thinking gender is a social construct is transphobic.
Die mad about it.
If gender were nothing but a social construct you could simply unteach it to yourself and be 100% unbothered. Yet instead of doing so, trans people spend tens of thousands of dollars on name and gender marker changes, HRT, surgery…. I wonder why /s
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.”
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.
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.
idk how to say it but 25 semi structured interviews of folks who got internet brainrot is not research. you’re just picking data you want to correlate your conclusion.
I know it’s only April, but I just saw such a rancid take on Tiktok (and the person blocked me, woo!) That I need to vent somewhere.
The argument went “bi/pan/queer people with cishet partners shouldn’t bring those partners into queer spaces/Pride because it makes those spaces unsafe for lgbt folks.”
Which is a frankly awful take for many reasons.
First of all “makes a space unsafe” is not an identity. It is a behavior. And ANYONE who is making those spaces unsafe, regardless of their identity, *shouldn’t be there.* Whether they are a cishet man or a lesbian, if you are making people unsafe, you shouldn’t be there.
Secondly, it’s blatantly unenforceable. You can’t clock someone’s identity at the door. You don’t know if they are bi or trans or nonbinary. And no one should have to out themselves to a bouncer.
As a caveat to this, you also don’t ever know *why* someone might bring their cishet partner to pride. Whether that’s because this is an important part of their life they want to share with their partner, or they are disabled and need help managing their meds or mobility aides, or the partner is a designated driver. You just don’t know. So even if you did know they were cishet, maybe they have a “good reason” for being there.
So between it not solving an actual problem to not being enforceable, all this discourse does is create an EXTREMELY hostile environment for, well, bi/pan/queer folks especially. Always. We always get targeted for this kind of stuff.
But also anyone who might worry that *they* aren’t queer enough or not look queer enough. Trans folks who haven’t socially transitioned, non-binary folks who aren’t androgynous enough, ace and aro folks, people who are newly out- they see this rhetoric and think “Oh no. What is someone sees me and thinks I’m cishet? What if someone tells me I can’t be there? What if I don’t really belong?”
So we aren’t doing it. It’s shitty snd hostile and biphobic and exclusionary.
Can bisexuals please stop acting like bisexuality has always meant attraction to all genders.
Because when I joined the community that was not nor ever was a common definition of bisexual.
If you find that definition of bisexual works, then that’s fine.
But please stop acting like the term bisexual has always meant that.
As a bisexual I define my attraction as being attracted to two or more genders. That is still how I view my bisexuality. It is not wrong for me to view my bisexuality this way.
I also feel like this is an excuse for panphobes to justify their harassment of other pansexuals over the label they choose since pansexual can also mean attraction to all genders. And this in turn allows panphobic bisexuals to justify their idea of pansexuality not being a valid label.
BAB’s (battle axe bisexuals) always claim that pansexuals have hurt bisexuals. Or that pansexuals have held back bisexual rights.
The problem is they can’t actually explain to me how pansexuals have ever hurt the bisexual community in any meaningful way. They assume that pansexuals are trying to somehow invalidate the identity of bisexuals.
This is just straight up wrong. As someone who identifies as bisexual I refuse to remain silent on pansexual erasure within the lgbt community. The amount of panphobia I see on tumblr needs to stop. This discourse gets us no where and we are literally just punching ourselves. Pansexuals are friends to bisexuals not enemies.
Name one definition of pansexual that isn’t transphobic (saying trans men and women aren’t real men and women), ahistoric/rewriting bisexuality (bisexuality has always included trans/nb people and we have been using “attraction regardless of gender” since the seventies), or just the same as bisexuality (hence erasing bisexuality and making it okay to just dismiss bisexuality in favor of whatever new word you want to make up). All the pansexual label has done is hurt the lgbt community.
How is “attraction to all genders” as a definition biphobic. Or “attraction regardless of gender” nice try making shut up. It doesn’t work.
BAB’s (battle axe bisexuals) always claim that pansexuals have hurt bisexuals. Or that pansexuals have held back bisexual rights.
The problem is they can’t actually explain to me how pansexuals have ever hurt the bisexual community in any meaningful way. They assume that pansexuals are trying to somehow invalidate the identity of bisexuals.
This is just straight up wrong. As someone who identifies as bisexual I refuse to remain silent on pansexual erasure within the lgbt community. The amount of panphobia I see on tumblr needs to stop. This discourse gets us no where and we are literally just punching ourselves. Pansexuals are friends to bisexuals not enemies.
I’ll tell you the biggest way pansexuality has hurt the bisexual community: perpetuating the idea that bisexuality is limited, regressive, and exclusionary.
You’ll see TONS of pieces of media that actively shame bisexuality and praise pansexuality for being better or more progressive.
I personally know bisexuals (as well has myself) who have experienced biphobia at the hands of pansexuals.
We’re told we’re not actually bi, we have our identity redefined, we’re told we’re transphobic, we have our identity questioned and invalidated constantly.
Also, pansexuality has done a NUMBER on bisexual history. Pansexuality has been the lead (and let’s be honest, one of if not the ONLY) contributor to the redefining of bisexuality, the rewriting of bi history, and the defamation of the bisexual identity.
“We bisexuals tend to define bisexuality in ways that are unique to our own individuality. There are as many definitions of bisexuality as there are bisexuals. Many of us choose not to label ourselves anything at all, and find the word ‘bisexual’ to be inadequate and too limiting.” -The Bisexual Manifesto
The idea that pansexuality erases bisexuality is not only biphobic but wrong. Fuck off panphobe
BAB’s (battle axe bisexuals) always claim that pansexuals have hurt bisexuals. Or that pansexuals have held back bisexual rights.
The problem is they can’t actually explain to me how pansexuals have ever hurt the bisexual community in any meaningful way. They assume that pansexuals are trying to somehow invalidate the identity of bisexuals.
This is just straight up wrong. As someone who identifies as bisexual I refuse to remain silent on pansexual erasure within the lgbt community. The amount of panphobia I see on tumblr needs to stop. This discourse gets us no where and we are literally just punching ourselves. Pansexuals are friends to bisexuals not enemies.
