Thread by @AlexandraErin

You know, as much as the stereotypes about "SJWs" and "cancel culture" is that it's all thought police and you put one foot wrong and you're the enemy, I have rarely seen friendships fall apart over things like "bi" vs. "pan"... and it's sad, because it's unnecessary.

You can make logical arguments for why bi is the "correct" label and you can make logical arguments for why pan is, but... A of all, language doesn't work that way, and second, no oppressive structure in the history of the world has preferred one of those to the other.

They might play bisexuality against pansexuality, or pansexuality against bisexuality, just as they'll play gays against trans, or binary trans against non-binary, or stealth passing trans against trans and proud...

But in their minds, we're all just gay and wrong and should die

And if they can get us to push each other off the cliff by pretending to tolerate us and making common cause against someone else closer to the cliff's edge in the moment than us, they will...

But then we're the ones on the edge. We're the ones teetering on the precipice.

I am way more a utilitarian than I am "a good person", whatever that means. What did the Doctor say about good men and rules? Good men don't need rules. I like rules. I remind myself, often, that trust and altruism are optimal behaviors for a society, and society is optimal.

I identify with different aspects of bisexual and pansexual and I understand the arguments that people have put forth for why one is Good and perforce the other less so.

But identities aren't quantitative, they're qualitative. They're not objective, like Pokemon categories.

Nazis... in the broadest sense of the term... bigots, status quo-ists, allocishetero supremacists, conservatives, people who want everything to be a pastiche of the 30s to 50s white Americana forever...

They hate bi people. They hate pan people. And they don't believe in either.

They either think everyone is straight and some of us are willful, or they think most of us are straight and some of us are degenerate, and either way they think the labels we give ourselves are just play acting, just ways to legitimize our wrongness.

There has not been an oppressive structure in the history of the world that reified bisexuality or pansexuality. "Bisexual just reinforces the gender binary," you say, but people who care abuot the gender binary are terrified and repulsed by bisexuality, which cuts across it.

People who care about the gender binary are the ones quickest to say that bisexual men are just gays fooling themselves and bisexual women are just straights fooling around, because binarism is gender essentialism plus patriarchy, which means cock = male = rules over all.

The gender binary has no more use for bisexuality than it does pansexuality, or even homosexuality, because at its core the gender binary is biological essentialism is patriarchy is compulsive heterosexuality.

Binarists think gay people defy the binary, too.

When I was a child with no concept of transness, I thought I was a gay boy. I knew I was a girl, but in binary society, being assigned male but identifying with female is what gayness IS, and vice versa.

When gay people identify with the status quo against trans people or vice versa (the latter is hardly in vogue right now in the west, but it happens) it's just getting in line for the bus wheels while shoving our neighbors underneath it.

Because as far as the Status Quo Warriors are concerned, it's ALL the same thing. We're on a flexible continuum of freakiness, but once they deal with the freakiest freaks, whoever's left on the margin after is the new freakiest freaks, even if they helped with the last batch.

I have made this whole exact rant on here before in defense of pan people against what I saw as misguided bi people. This time it was inspired the opposite. But. It really doesn't matter.

We are ALL on the edge of the cliff. We are all facing the sword.

And we either uphold each other, or we don't.