The Journal of Bisexuality has just published a very interesting paper by Rosie Nelson that deconstructs the notion of “straight-passing privilege” using very academic language and heady theory. You can read it yourself — it goes over a number of concepts I’ve thought about in my essays for this project — but the reason I bring it up is because of one paragraph in particular:
Herein lies the issue for the way in which bi+people can develop their own identities, understand their social position, and be understood by others. Ultimately, bi+people are incomprehensible in the social world due to the predominance of a heterosexual/homosexual binary.
On one level, this is a very basic statement: bi people are not like straight and gay people. We say this all the time. And yet reading it over, I was struck by how few of us (and here I am including myself) fully absorb the depth of what that actually means.
We are constantly being asked to think of bi oppression through the lens of other people’s frameworks. Indeed, within the American legal system, this happens in a very literal way: sexuality-based oppressed is frequently framed as an extension of gender-based oppression, which is to say, if you’re discriminating against a man for banging it out with another man when you would be fine with a woman banging it out with a man, you are oppressing him on the basis of his gender (yes, this is a very roundabout way to get to “being gay is fine” but welcome to the American legal system).
Anti-bi oppression, then, gets shoehorned into this gender-based oppression framework as an extension of anti-gay oppression even though it doesn’t really work. I mean, yes, if you’re discriminating against a bi man because of his same-gender attractions exclusively, then the gender-based oppression analysis holds. But if you’re specifically grossed out by a man being into multiple genders that doesn’t imply that you’re fine with a woman doing the same. And if you’re discriminating against bisexuals while giving a pass to gays and straights, that isn’t oppression the basis of gender at all, but a wholly separate axis that is obscured by our insistence on understanding oppressions through previously existing models.
But even setting this convoluted model aside: most discussions of biphobia still begin with homophobia as a starting point. Indeed, we are expected to validate the existence of biphobia by comparing it to homophobia — to frame it as an extension of homophobia, to rank whether it is more or less bad than homophobia, to explain how bi people can experience oppression comparable to homophobia from within the safety of a heterosexual relationship*.
What seems impossible for people to grasp — and yet what is essential here — is that while bi people might experience homophobia, biphobia is not a variation on homophobia, but rather the secret third thing of sexuality-based oppression. Biphobia is not sparkling homophobia — it is the very experience of being “incomprehensible” within a hetero/homosexual binary.
And it is, I think, that very incomprehensibility that leads even bi people to misunderstand ourselves. We are not given the tools to understand our experiences, our conflicts, our struggles. I mean, hell, I didn’t even understand that I might have bi-specific manifestations of mental illness because the literature just did not exist.
I have been writing this whole newsletter in an attempt to help create more language for these unnameable experiences. I still don’t feel like I have the vocabulary I need. But I am — we are — still trying, because what else is there to do?
* In before someone tries to tell me bi people can’t be in heterosexual relationships, that’s a whole other conversation
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