#stop me if you heard this before
British transphobes have graduated to claiming that bisexual women are tainted by our association with men and thus change the “vibe” of women-only spaces. It’s true, every time I walk into the room, I’m also bringing the spirit of every man who’s been inside my vagina. They live up there like lil ghosts.
This people are genuinely the goofiest dumbest bigots.
[Image id: screenshot of a tweet from Femme Loves green heart emoji white heart emoji purple heart emoji @femmeloves. The tweet reads: “Lesbians know that even having a bisexual woman in the room changes the vibe. Not to say that it’s *worse*, just that it’s *different*. Lesbian only spaces are the only places in the world boundaried about with a hard and final "no” to men. Those spaces are everything.“ end id]
Link to the above tweet to prove it jas not been taken out of context and is indeed as rancid a take as claimed: https://mobile.twitter.com/FemmeLoves/status/1532714085195866112?cxt=HHwWgICz5d_VpcUqAAAA
Highlights from the thread include referring to a hypothetical trans woman as a "male body”, and whining about not being welcome in inclusive queer spaces because of her anti-trans bigotry, and about having lost a friend because he refuses to speak to her sweet bigoted self. She also mentions 2003 as perhaps the best time to be gay. Put a pin in that.
I think saying they “graduated” to anything ignores the fact that this is straight up the standard old school biphobia common in exclusionary, supposedly feminist, circles, such as terfdom for decades, and when I came of age online, in the 2000s, and early 2010s, this was EVERYWHERE. You might notice that 2003 was before same sex marriage was legalized nationwide in the US, before a kid could even contemplate taking a same sex partner to a school dance in most parts of the country, and when “that’s so gay” was the favorite schoolyard taunt. That was the best time to be gay, according to FemmeLove, better than now. Really. I know that FemmeLove is British, but somehow I doubt the UK in 2003 was a paradise for the gays compared to today. Forgive me for being just a little bit cynical, but I suspect that FemmeLove looks back so fondly on 2003, because back then, not only transphobia, but biphobia was not only rampant, but accepted in large parts of the mainstream gay and lesbian communities.
My favorite variant of the idea expressed in the above tweet, popular in the early 2000s, is that bisexual women are “sexually available to men”. This makes bi women gross and dirty, because somehow in these “feminists’” minds, a woman’s moral compass lies between her legs, and contact with, or lack of aversion to, the almightly penis (and I say penis, because the venn diagram between people who think of themselves as feminists and hold these beliefs, and people that think trans women are men, is not quite a circle, but it’s damn close), causes a woman to be forever changed and made “bad”. If that sounds like old school patriarchy to you, and the sort of thing that actual feminists are fighting against, good for you for being observant.
But anyway, this “sexually available to men” thing makes bi women not only gross and bad, but also a danger to lesbian women, because our very existence makes men think that women who are attracted to other women are also attracted to men, and this will mean that men will think that lesbians are sexually availible to them! So men who persue or even sexually assault lesbians are somehow bi women’s fault for existing.
And let’s get into just what “sexually availible” means, because it is in fact a way to disregard the concept of consent, and replace it with attraction to a whole gender. This whole “sexually available to men” thing cropped up every time anyone brought up the statistic that bisexual women face higher rates of abuse and sexual assault than either lesbian or straight women, and it was invariably brought up to say bisexual women deserved it. What did they expect, making themselves sexually availible to men? Somehow the idea that some of the abuse and sexual assault suffered by bisexual women, or indeed lesbian women, might have occured at the hands of other women, never entered the conversation, and when it did, because somebody like me brought it up, let’s just say that when some women brought up being abused and assaulted by other women, they were laughed at. Don’t be silly. Women are never rapists and abusers. This is why I was so turned off by the “love between women is so pure” positivity posts: [Link].
I’ve even seen some biphobic lesbians make The irrelevancy of consent in this framework explicit, and, as they say these days, “say the quiet part out loud,” by which I mean, I have heard biphobic lesbians wandering if bisexual women can really be raped, since they are sexually available to men. If you’ve noticed that this is just a biphobic variant of the whole, “it’s not rape if she’s a slut” thing, congratulations, you’re two for two on sniffing out misogynistic, victim-blaming, patriarchal bullshit, masquerading as feminism and lesbian liberation.
Much like terfs who go on and on about men, but only ever seem to care about trans women, lesbian biphobes might claim their loathing and scorn for bi women is because they’re sexually availible to men, they never seem to have the same bile for straight women. I’ve got many theories as to why, But one of them, and I think the one responsible for most of this, is that a lot of people might resent their place in a hierarchy, might resent the way they are marginalized, but they don’t resent the hierarchy, they just want to change their place within it. And ultimately a lot of people like this are willing to resign themselves to their place in the hierarchy, if they can bully, torment, and subjugate someone else. They aren’t interested in liberation from the oppressive system that marginalizes them, they just want a chance to do the marginalizing. This is a huge part of why bigotries tend to run together, and why you rarely find somebody who is just prejudiced against one group. And it’s why there is a well-trodden path from terfdom to the alt-right and white supremacy.
Terfs, biphobic lesbians, and their ilk like to call any (cis) woman who calls them out on their bullshit, a pick-me, which they define as a woman who allies with men and the Patriarchy, selling out her sisters in exchange for the benefits that compliance brings. This is ironic, because by that definition, terfs and biphobic lesbians, and other pseudo-feminists like them, are the biggest pick-mes of them all. They sell out their sisters to the Patriarchy and rape culture, in exchange for self-satisfaction, the illusion of being better and purer than those dirty, tainted women, and the dubious pleasure of getting to personally shit on those other women.
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