Earlier today, I stumbled across a person asking if they were allowed to call themselves bisexual if they were also attracted to trans people — you know, a variation on the same boring query we see again and again and again. I responded with my standard boilerplate: there are plenty of trans and non-binary bisexuals, the “bi” in bisexual doesn’t have to literally refer to two of anything, no one expects all lesbians to be from Lesbos. You know, the spiel I have given here time and time again.
But after I said that, I found myself thinking a little more deeply about why there is such fixation on this word, on this question. Why are bisexuals uniquely policed when it comes to what words we use to talk about our sexual attractions; and why do bisexuals ourselves feel so much insecurity about the words we use? Why did The Cutdo a whole ass podcast episode about whether “bisexual” is a word that’s still cool to use?
My general and immediate answer is, you know, biphobia. But I think that another, more specific, way to think through it is this: there is a displaced anxiety at work here, a gnawing discomfort with no place to go that surfaces in the question of what, exactly, we are to call ourselves.
In the broader culture that discomfort can broadly be understood as biphobia. There is no place for bisexuality in a binary, heteronormative society; the idea of people who can have both straight and gay attractions fundamentally mucks up the works. The insistence that we choose a consistent and correct name for ourselves is an insistence that we make our sexuality legible to others — while it’s not quite the same as the “pick a side” ask, it’s not actually that different. If we can’t conform to the hetero/homo binary, we should at least have the decency to explain ourselves in simple, immediately understandable terms, to present ourselves in the most dumbed down, absolutely literal version of what we are. The mere concept of bisexuality is so uncomfortable to many monosexuals that inserting any vagueness into our label — calling ourselves “bi” when we don’t mean a literal two! — is treated as an unforgivable insult and offense. How dare we be confusing. How dare we refuse to explain.
For bisexuals ourselves — like the person asking if being trans-attracted negated their ability to use such a reductive, binary implying label — I think there is a separate, yet related, issue, one that I have dealt with myself. To wit: I felt the most anxiety about calling myself bisexual when I felt the most anxiety about being bisexual. I don’t mean that in the internalized homophobia way, not exactly; for me it was more the fear that I wasn’t doing my same gender attractions correctly, that there was something off in how I experienced my love of women. “Bisexual,” with all its clunkiness, with all its baggage, seemed like it exacerbated the problem. Words like queer felt sleeker, smoother, better able to help me navigate the world.
Except. Even as I was calling myself queer, I still felt like a fraud. Indeed, it was only as I truly began to accept my attraction to women in all its robust, overwhelming intensity that I actually felt at peace with myself — and once I felt at peace with myself, the word bisexual felt just fine. Do I love it? Not really, not least because of all the puns. But it does not matter: it’s just a word. It’s just a label on a bottle of wine. I’m confident that the wine itself tastes good; the label is thus just a formality to help people know how to find it.
We’re going about it backwards, is my point. Words matter, of course words matter — I’m a writer, I of all people know this — and yet the obsessive fixation with words here is not really about the words at all. Yes, it will always be useful to have a way to indicate who is attracted to what kinds of people. But once we finally accept that the genders we are attracted to are much more a neat little quirk than an entire personality, well.
If we ever get to that point I think we will find that the words themselves don’t matter that much either.
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