A little thing that really pisses me off.
Whenever there is a conversation on monosexism, biphobia or anything bisexual orientated issue that uses the word privilege, that even only tangentally refers to the LG community, there’s this:
“How dare you! Lesbians/gay men do not have privilege over bisexuals”
and/or
“I’m bisexual and I am not oppressed by Lesbians and Gays, stop trying to blame them for every thing”
Like…that’s not even what we’re saying. Talking about biphobia from LG people is not blaming homosexuality for all the oppression of non-monosexuals or letting cishet people off the hook from oppressing everybody outside cishet people or claim that bisexuals have it the worst when it comes to oppression.
But since you are so keen to promote the idea that Lesbians and Gay men do not have privilege over us and don’t cause any shit for bisexuals whatsoever let’s break it down:
Bisexuals make up the majority of the LGB community yet recieve the least coverage and help for their needs, don’t even get me started on how that relates to bisexual trans* and non-binary people, it’s really freaking bad.
Nearly half of bi women have been raped, which directly relates to stereotypes of them being sexually available all of the time to cishet men and then blaming them for being attention-seeking sluts when they are raped, creating a package of misogyny and biphobia…and nobody but a handful of bisexuals are willing to talk about or publicise this fact let alone do anything about it. And no, just stating that “all rape is bad” and framing it as a womens/lesbophobia issue and ignoring how oppressive concepts of bisexuality are used against these women is not helping, in fact it actually causes more harm.
The biggest LGBT organisations online and offline, whether it is the HRC, The It Gets Better Project or Wipe Out Homophobia not only ignore attempts to discuss and include bisexuals but actively enable the exclusion and harrassment of bisexuals, even going so far as to paint us as “being divisive” and outright saying we don’t exist and don’t matter, and basing entire campaigns on enforcing monosexual ideals and rooting out bisexuals who exhibit “~straight privilege~” e.g. kissing girls in gay bars for fun or not being wholly disgusted with dating different genders.
We have a much higher suicide rate that lesbian and gay people, but again, I don’t hear anything outside the bisexual community even paying lip service to recognising and sorting that out.
We get fired, deported, harrassed and even killed for our sexuallity being painted as deviant and dangerous, yet even if there is a discrepency between how monosexuals and bisexuals are treated it will get very little coverage in comparrison to big LG news and will often be painted as a wholly LG issue.
And when we do discuss this and point these out we get a lot of push back online and offline about how this isn’t as important as other kinds of oppression, that it’s all in our heads and even start to stalk and harrass us. Once the pushback goes too far, there’s silence from LG groups, sometimes even mocking and condecention.
People seem so keen to bring up intersectionaity until somebody mentions bisexuality, then they’ll start suddenly caring about all kinds of groups to pin down why this is happening other than bisexuality. Did anybody care about rape statistics of trans* women before the bisexual rape statistic infographic was posted? Watch how they try to silence trans* bisexuals who posted it by telling them authoritivly that they should shut up about those stats and start fighting for trans* equality. Funny I never see those voices raised during transgender rememberance day, I guess they must be busy on days like that, they always make time to visit the biphobia tag though.
I’m just saying, if LG people didn’t have some power in these interactions, they wouldn’t have effectively silenced us, talked over us, shouted us down and rendered us invisable in these conversations and in our own community.
It’s not the same thing as heteronormativity, we never said it was. We’re saying that monosexuals are given the ability to throw non-monosexuals under the bus to strengthen ties in their own communities, and that results in our death and injury. Reasonable people usually recognise this and admit it’s fucked up. But as soon as we allude to the word privilege, suddenly we’re being unfair and irrational…I’m just saying, if it walks like a duck…thousands of monosexuals screaming it isn’t a duck won’t convince me.
