No, YOU Aren’t Bisexual

If I write my best essays in a heated state of reactionary pissy-ness, this might well be a masterpiece.

Substack dumped a bomb into my inbox, and I think that description perfectly summarizes what I found in the essay pushed to me, an ideal audience: an absolute shit explosion. The essay was titled "no, you aren’t bisexual", and was written by a straight author, claiming to represent her queer friends' opinions on the flood of apparent bisexual performativity drowning out the true queer women of TikTok. As a bisexual, and a former woman, the title tripped a wire in my brain, rigged to a clusterbomb of trauma, violence, and humiliation. I read the essay twice, hoping I wouldn't find the same cesspit of biphobia that usually accompanies the notion of "real" bisexuality, and although it lacked the teeth of true phobia, it still had the shit stink of bigotry - perhaps sprinkled with a little tasteful potpourri, a smattering of thoughtful sappho-centric remarks that made the case for the "real queers" being harmed. Well, as one of the "real queers" who has been through that harm, I had some thoughts of my own—actually my own, not on behalf of an invoked audience I am white knighting for. This one is just for me. 

Liminal Disbelief

"Are bisexuals even real?" 

It wasn't the first time I had heard the remark. It wasn't even the first time I'd heard it from a crush, this time a beautiful, soft-spoken lesbian with cheeks that blushed like crab apples. But it was devastating all the same. Queer women thought I wanted to experiment; straight women thought I was a pervert; straight men egged me on for their pleasure; gay men thought I was out for a gay bestie and some social clout. The only people who trusted me, it seemed, were fellow bisexuals—but even that got murky. My lesbian crush who started a pub debate on the reality of my existence went on to date two cis men in our circle, dipping into Sappho's fountain in between these relationships. Was she a bisexual in denial? A lesbian flirting with conversion, much like the wide-eyed novice Christians I had seen at an Alpha meeting I was forced to attend? (It was a condition of staying on a friend's sofa). I never got to the bottom of her mysterious sexuality, but I knew what I needed to: she didn't believe I was real. The debate went on for over an hour (we were philosophy society members down the pub), during which I explicitly pointed out the absurdity of the question. 

"Guys. I'm right here." 
But my lived experience was not enough.

"Yeah, but...you've never had a girlfriend", one of my male companions smirked. 

I doubt he had either—he was clever but too smug with it, shielding insecurity with his intelligence as effectively as holding up a wet tissue to cover his modesty. No, I hadn't had a girlfriend. I had fallen in love with a woman; I had suffered devastating crushes and their rejections; I had shared secret kisses that were one-offs, or afterwards reclassified as "showing off for the boys." But I had never dated a woman. Did my sexuality depend, not on my internal understanding or emotional reality, but on externalised, objective experience—and by extension, my acceptance by a woman, as a full partner? 

Liminal experiences—those that refuse to fall in line with normative categories—always live in a haze of doubt, under the burden of proof-seekers. Much like my transness (which I would come to realise over a decade after this ruined pub outing), my bisexuality has always been the subject of skepticism. You are gay, you are straight; you are man, you are woman; and if you claim to be better understood as a mix of attributes, tastes, desires, affections and affectations, expressions and experiences, you aren't authentic, but delusional, appropriative, stealing from the real people who live fully within the established boundaries of identity to form a mockery of their real identities, many of which have been bravely embraced despite pain and judgement. To be neither or both or a mix of sexual and gender identities is an act of stolen queer valour. The Linnean categorisation of human experience is dogmatically forced upon the non-conformers, because our experience cannot be parsed along traditional lines, and to anyone who can't see that the boxes are just guidelines, we become unintelligible. After we are rendered this way, we become one of two things: clowns (cartoonish buffoons whose social actions are hyperbolic and beyond the pale, whose emotions are purely performative, and shouldn't expect to be taken seriously), or horrors (disarticulated into parts—male, female, straight, gay, a monstrous stitched-together entity of recognisable features that have been reconstructed from pure Platonic forms into a gruesome, mismatched whole that lumbers around believing itself to be a real creature). In either case: we are no longer human. 

Policing Authenticity

"I have spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to pinpoint, articulate and pen down the very specific kind of irritation I feel watching a straight girl tag her TikTok lipsync with #wlw. I don’t think it’s anger actually, probably disgust."

These are the opening lines that lit me up like a firecracker. Dear author, I see your disgust. I hear it, loud and clear. It is in harmony with the disgust that has echoed around me since I was fourteen, and came out to my high school friends as bisexual. You claim it isn't about hating the queer community, that it is allyship, but as someone who has spent a lifetime on the receiving end of disgust, both blatant and disguised, I am calling bullshit. The "queer community", as you call us, are not a monolith. For those of us in the B and T categories (and I am both), we are subject to this disgust not only from the straight, cis world around us (you), but also from within: many of our own peers, whose opinions you claim to reflect, also revile us. You may have believed that speaking on their behalf shielded you from bigotry, but what I read sounded like so much of the biphobia I have suffered from inside the supposed safety of my own community, regurgitated by a straight bystander who lacks the context to understand what they're repeating. Out of the mouths of babes, as they say; except in your naivety, you have recreated the rejection, real and substantial, that I live through daily. You say "The [queer] community fought actual battles, whether legal, social or physical for the right to exist openly." I find your use of the past tense a fascinating tell. We fight still, and some of us fight for space within the spaces we wrested for our safety. You describe what you're seeing in pop culture as "a slow colonization of that hard-won space by people who want the aesthetic without the adversity"—but babe, they call me colonizer. 

I'd give you the statistics on sexualised and intimate partner violence suffered by bisexuals (higher than our gay or straight counterparts), but today I'm just speaking for myself. I will tell you instead how my humanity has been stripped by the constant side-eye bisexuals receive in all circles; how, like skin, it grows back, slowly, painfully, only to be torn off again. I am married to a male-presenting non-binary person, which awards me with the perception and privilege of straightness, but that aesthetic, which was conferred and shoved on me, not requested, isn't free. On a shelf in my memory palace sits a row of books representing my bisexual experience, and while some of those volumes are pristine, many are in tatters. The girl who threatened to beat me senseless for being queer in a changing room in high school—a hundred faces pressed in a tight circle around us, hungry for the fight, before I was pulled away by the butch art teacher—slumps against the relieved faces of relatives at my wedding, happy I was out of my "phase", confused that the theme we had chosen, to represent our authentic selves in the middle of the most heteronormative ritual we would ever perform, was "bi pride." The face of the first woman I ever told "I love you", haloed in red curls, is squashed in against a memory from a different girlfriend, as teenagers hurled stones while I held her hand down the street. A date with a woman that turned from fire to ice when she realized I was bi ("you'll just cheat with a man"). A boss in Vancouver confiding that he was sick of "all this gay rights stuff"—and his blood-drained face when I told him that was my family he was talking about. If I don't hide my identity, I am still shrouded in straight assumption; if I try to foreground it, to declare with pride who I am, I am accused of performativity. Inside the community, and out, it is the same reaction, over and again: disgust. I am disgusting. I disgust you. 

You are disgusted by bisexuality. Its potential fakeness. Its perceived performitivity. You demand proof. But if I kiss a woman to prove it to you, aren't you going to call it a performance? If I fall in love with a man, won't you say I was straight all along? You acknowledge your policing, in a backhanded way. You say:

"[T]he tools for identifying genuine members of a community have been effectively disabled, and in which any attempt to question whether someone’s queer identity is sincere can be painted as bigotry."

I say: what an excellent way to shut down critique! How very "I'm just asking questions!" of you (quite literally). I see the rhetorical judo: if the community you're hurting complains, our pain is flipped back on us—we are in the wrong for insulting you as a bigot. It's a common trap, sprung to avoid responsibility—but it's also easily disabled. 

Here's a better question: why do you need us to be hashtagged and labelled? You say it's because the invasion of #wlw by women you suspect to be straight will make it harder for our community to find each other, but that just betrays your lack of knowledge. Queer people will always find each other. We always have. We have our signs, our hints and clues we drop each other—handkerchiefs, haircuts, slang, poetry, hang-out spots, references, memories—we speak to one another under your straight radar, where we can see one another without your oversight or detection. Straight women colonize gay bars, but queer couples still meet and fall in love, often in those very same spaces. Tell me, author: why do you, a straight person, need to verify the authenticity of a woman's sexuality? What use is that question in the mouth of anyone who isn't trying to date her? What purpose does your question serve?

An Offer of Truce

Put aside the word "bigotry" for a second. Let's abandon the semantics of accusation and self-defence. Take off your armour, white knight. Climb down from your horse. Come sit with me in the grass, as vulnerable and unshielded as I am, and listen to me—not as your vulnerable charge, nor as your accuser—but as your peer. 

I am not "painting you" as a bigot. I'm neither applying a veneer to colour your character, nor examining if you, as a person, have bigoted thoughts. I don't know you. All I know is your words. So let's lay them out between us and figure out what they mean.

"No, you aren’t bisexual."

I am. I always have been. And yet I have heard that phrase, over and over again, from straight and queer alike. And because you're actually not bisexual, you don't know what those words mean.

"Is your queer identity sincere?"

You didn’t ask this, but it’s the question at the heart of your essay. You act as if this question is protecting the vulnerable, but it's not—it's casting suspicion about queerness, when queerness has always been suspect. Your eyebrow-raise does not help us. It is a reminder of the surveillance queer lives are always under, usually from straight eyes just like yours. That surveillance has always been used to corral us into a manageable group, something easily identified, and, if the moral panic surges high enough, culled.  

I don't care for your intention. I care for your impact. So before you run to your keyboard and hammer out a defense of your defense or some hasty apologia, I urge you to ignore the externalised expression of your true beliefs—the performance, you might say—and work on the internal reality of your own perception. 

In closing, both dear author and whichever dear readers have tagged along to observe, I have a favour to ask. When you next see a woman acting queer who fills you with disgust, and questions about her authenticity bubble in the back of your throat, shut your mouth and quietly, internally, ask yourself these questions instead:

Is the question I'm asking harmful?

If so, who does it harm?

What is the history of that question?

How has it been used, to deny and ridicule, to dehumanize and ostracize? 

Afterwards, come back to this essay and re-read what I have said. You'll find your answers there.