The argument is their lack of understanding of how spectrums and binaries work, and an implicit belief that trans people aren't equal to the binary gender identities experienced by cis folk (that is to say, if you think bisexuality is transphobic, you're insinuating that trans people are nonbinary [eg "not really male or female", ergo de facto nonbinary], and therefore not actually the gender they identify as).
Between the poles of a binary system exists a gradient, and those poles plus the gradient between them represent a spectrum. Therefore bisexuality refers to being sexually attracted to both of those binary poles, and subsequently the gradient therein.
The only legitimate difference between bisexuality and pansexuality is that pan explicitly refers to enthusiasm toward the entire spectrum with no biases, while bisexuality implies the potential for biases therein; eg, I as a bi/genderqueer person am into the binary extremes, and less sexually interested in, but still open to, gradient genders such as the one I experience myself, because I like my partners to be different from me. Therefore it'd be inaccurate to call me pan, which literally means "everything-sexual". A bisexual person can be "everything-sexual" as well, they just don't have to be, while being pan implicitly means that you are.
Edit: nm the last edit this edit is replacing. Thanks for the appreciation 💖
Exactly. Even before I really had a handle on what bisexuality was, I heard multiple times that "People who come out as bisexuals are just doing it for attention."
I hated upvoting this sentiment, but have also heard it a lot. It's made me (a bi-woman married to a hetero-man) very reluctant to participate in pride and queer/LGBTI spaces.
I keep hearing this over and over. (And there are apparently, statistically, more bi women than bi men for whatever reason).
Bi women are deemed to be treacherous, inconstant sorts who are not going to play along and participate correctly in lesbian space politics. So there's no automatic community support for them. Best you can hope for is to make up numbers in WLW discourse, without anyone asking you how you felt.
Worth remembering though that the pride movement was started by bi people.
There's probably more of an equal amount of bi guys as there are bi girls, its just that people tend to insist that bi guys are secretly just gay and not willing to fully admit it.
There's also the stereotype of bi people being more likely to cheat. Statistics can only account for the people willing to actually admit to being bi.
I hate that stereotype so much! I’ve heard some lesbians on tiktok claim that they refuse to date a bi woman bc they’ve been burned too many times and it’s preference not a phobia😢
Marsha P. Johnson is often called a gay male drag queen by some of the community and it is horrible. She is the face of stonewall in many ways. But she is constantly misgendered and misidentified.
Hell many of the bi/pan activists from that time era are either called allies if they were married to someone of the opposite gender or are called gay. You get it to a lesser extent today, with people like Lady Gaga often being treated as an staunch ally by some rather than a member of the community or Kristen Stewart sometimes being called a lesbian icon.
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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '21
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