Thread by @_chelleshock

happy #BiVisibilityDay! 💙💖💜 remember to support and show up for all types of bi experiences today & everyday, even if they don't center (or even include) cute femme cis white women 🌈

I understand why it happens, but wow I have a lot of complicated and messy feelings around how bi discourse usually goes. Biphobia and the pain of being excluded from a community is VERY real, and there are absolutely experiences that are uniquely bisexual...

...BUT a lot of the time, conversations about bisexuality, by/for/centering bi people, tend towards a few trends that I (a fellow bi person) am not super fond of:

1. They center cute/femme cis white women, often those dating cis men. Of course they're bisexual, but that's not the be-all/end-all of the bi experience. (this fits with the queer community's general tendency to view white experiences as the default)

Where's the space given to trans & nonbinary bi people, femme bi men, butch bi women, bi people of color? What about the people who exist at any or all of these intersections?

2. They often involve claims that are kinda overblown, usually in an attempt to qualify their bi experience as "just like yours" to the rest of the queer community. And like. I get it, I do, but...

...a couple that looks like two gender-conforming cishet people is not going to get hate-crimed for being queer while walking down the street. They're VERY unlikely to experience rental discrimination on the basis of their sexuality. And so on.

3. They often gloss over the things that are actually specific bi experiences. We have a lot of stats about that, but instead of talking about isolation, the combined forces of biphobia & homophobia and how they manifest, increased stats of partner violence & rape, and so on...

...people will argue that what bisexual people experience, across the board, is just like the experiences of a lesbian or gay person's and thus, we belong in the queer community.

We belong in the queer community *because we are queer!* But that doesn't mean that our experiences are exactly the same as the rest of the community's (or that all bi people have exactly the same experiences, either!). And tbh, pretending they are doesn't help anyone.

here's some stat sources if you want to look more into those, TWs for violence, sexual assault, etc. apply

thetaskforce.org/bisexual-women…

bi-privilege.tumblr.com/bistatistics

of course, there's also a distressing amount of bullshit coming from non-bi people that happens around bi discourse, including everyone's fave:

1. "straight passing privilege!" which like...I'll just link to this bi-privilege.tumblr.com/post/959204953… & save y'all the tweets

I do wanna add as well that this very much depends on how you look and where you're at - when I lived in Virginia, there were people who definitely assumed I was queer based on how I looked, even though I was dating a man at the time

this is not to say that there aren't benefits that come with being perceived as straight, as I mentioned earlier. but those benefits depend HEAVILY on context and details that aren't usually mentioned, and are always tenuous + often revoked.

but typically none of that nuance gets discussed, and we just see "straight passing privilege" thrown at bi people for existing, which I'm not super chill with actually

2. Assumption that The Bis™, or whoever they're snarking at in the moment, is cis and/or read as such in every single interaction in their daily life. (this kinda ties back into #1 and another issue I have with convos around "cis passing privilege" ...

- who gets read as cis, when, depends on where you're at and who you're talking to. there are places where someone might not necessarily read you as trans bc they don't have that vocab, but they can look at you and know you're doing something fucky with gender and not like it.)

3. I don't even know what to put this one under but I've had this experience that's like...sort of handwaving my sexuality away? I feel like this maybe goes with assuming that there is one all-consuming bisexual identity and experience?

like, hey, I am actually still bisexual, even if I'm butch and have some messy opinions on dating men and v specific stipulations under which I'll even consider doing that! cool that you don't "see me as bi" or think I'm not like other bis but actually no it's not cool at all thx

love to be included in queer in-jokes! but not at the exclusion or erasure of my sexuality, because bi erasure and biphobia is a huge part of why I didn't come out until I was 27, to the great detriment of my mental health and dating life. #BiVisibilityDay

so that's my thread of Bi Opinions that has something for everyone to dislike. leaving it with this post about butch/femme & why it's chill for bi people to use them: bisexual-books.tumblr.com/post/920496950…