Thread by @LuxAlptraum

A lot of attempts to combat biphobia are doomed from the start because they are playing a rigged game on someone else's home field.

A lot of these convos about biphobia have some real "when did you stop beating your wife?" energy. You can't win with someone who says things like, "We don't hate *you*, we just hate your boyfriend" because they are already setting you up to fail.

Likewise all these attempts at "myth busting": bi people aren't necessarily slutty, bi people won't automatically cheat on you, bi people can be monogamous — you're starting from a defensive crouch, begging monosexuals to see that you are human.

Even the "bisexuals are queer actually!" arguments, or my personal pet peeve "every relationship a bi person has is queer," which is both factually untrue and appealing to this idea that queerness is somehow morally superior to straightness.

Fundamentally, a lot of arguments circling the topic of bisexuality have lost from step one because they buy into the idea that the end goal is to label all possible sexual orientations and declare them "valid."

(This is how we get stuck in the bi v queer v pan v omni v multi v poly loop, which, who care)

But I'm not interested in arguing for the validity of bisexuality because I'm not interested in arguing that *any* sexual orientation is "valid." In fact I think the very argument that society needs to be segmented and labeled by who we want to fuck is the root of the problem!

At this point, it doesn't matter to me what you think of me and my sexual history. You thinking I'm a straight girl chasing attention doesn't change the fact that dating men made me miserable and I'm more attracted to women than men.

What matters to me is that a corrosive sense of shame kept me from really seeing who *I* am, and pursuing what *I* want, for decades.

What I care about is not saying "there are straight people and gay/lesbian people and bi people and ace people and they're all valid" — what I care about is saying, "there are people and whatever people you connect with in this moment, great"

Failing that, I'm interested in just pointing out that bi problems seem trivial primarily because the language and framework to talk about and understand them have been muted; and that you can't truly understand the impact of biphobia unless you shift your mental frame.

Basically: bi people are drowning, but no one can see the waves that are pushing us under. All we have right now are these statistics that show we're doing horribly, and some vague hunches as to why.

TL;DR: The second you buy into the idea that people are defined by their sexual attractions rather than simply harmed by the false idea that their sexual attractions say anything about who they are as a person, you have lost.

This is, btw, also how I feel about gender to a degree, and forms the spine of my book's thesis (#BuyMyBook). "Womanhood" is a fictional idea that women are expected to adhere to and punished if we don't; women lie to conform to that fictional creation. sealpress.com/titles/lux-alp…