[198/366] a little new insight for me on the old bi/pan debate

[cosmolinguist]

Thank you for the good wishes yesterday, friends, but I'm afraid I didn't sleep well and today hasn't been much better.

Still procrastinating hard on my essays, I ended up in a couple of online arguments today. One, this afternoon/evening blew up into a thing that I thought might nuke an old friendship that was once very dear to me (it'd drifted a bit in the last year or two) but I did get a bedtime apology that actually named the bad behavior and changes that can be made, so I'm cautiously optimistic. But very cautiously. Everything that says "white people, you will lose friends if you do anti-racism work" isn't kidding, and osme of them might be people you used to see every week whose kid loves you and...yeah. Anyway.

The other one, which wasn't really an argument but did lead to some interesting trains of thought, started from someone saying "but bi means 2, my thoughts are that pan just expands that definition." Me and a couple of friends shot that down pretty quickly -- a particular biphobic challenge that is now older than some of the peopel I've seen making it -- but it got me thinking.

One of the friends and I, in backchannel catching-up later, were talking about how bi can be not just a label we're stuck with because some sexologists thought it up so long ago that western culture still thought there were only two genders, but one that does actually have some benefits. My friend said "I like bi because as my attractions have shifted, my label hasn’t" and I think that's such a good point! It's one I never would've thought of because since my early 20s, I've thought that I'm attracted to people regardless of gender and that is still the case. (Which is not to say that how they portray or think about or make use of their gender doen't ever appeal to me, but it's like anything else: I will notice if they're tall or short, but I will date both people as short as me and people who will buy me platform boots so I'm anything approaching tall enough to kiss comfortably.)

So I tried to think about why I am so attached to bi as a label, since I couldn't like it for the reason my friend did. And I was thinking about what this person said about pan being "more expansive." Well, it's no more expansive in terms of gender once you catch up with the definition bi activists and organizations have been using since the 90s (which I think is pretty much as long as bi stuff has been its own recognized thing), which is "attraction to more than one gender." But I think I like bi actually because it is more expansive in terms of who is welcome under this definition.

I mean, I started calling myself "bisexual" because I hadn't heard any other words for attraction to more than one gender at the time. But I think I stuck with bi and I value it as an umbrella term partly because it includes my friend who really does only fancy binary genders, and the "all genders except cis men" types, and all the pansexuals. It's about solidarity. The B in LGBT gets little enough understanding or attention as it is, and yes it's nice to have the longer acronyms and the + at the end and stuff, but I feel good about aligning myself with that B rather than anything even more niche.

My goal in definiing my sexuality hasn't been to give the most exhaustively accurate description of myself, but to find the people I can share goals with. So I guess "I want you to know am expansive towards the genders I fancy" is one way of a person looking at their non-monosexuality, but mine is less interested in gender (heh, how unexpected from an agender person!) and more "I'm expansive in who I feel affinity with."

Comments

[belleweather]

I grew up with the B and fought and bled and agitated to be recognized as bisexual as a discrete, actual thing. At this point, 26 years in, I'm pretty ride-or-die for that term as a way of thinking of myself. But I also like the idea of bi as representing a choice of both/and/all, and the choice not to chose or label. I get that Pan holds that meaning for a lot of people, but I guess I'm old now and while I'll fight to the death for other people's right to use it, I still kinda want allayall kids to get off my lawn.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah I'm the same: I'm bi because I'm Old, any further rationale is applied after the fact. :) I think I'm only...15 years? into it but that's long enough ago that bi was the word I heard and pansexual wasn't on my radar for a while later. And for the first several years, every single definition of pansexual I heard was biphobic (either a general "I fancy more than one gender but I'm not [other biphobic stereotype like a cheater, etc.]" or specifically "I'm not bi because bi is transphobic because it means two!"

Heard that a lot and it always drove me bonkers because almost none of the many bi people I knew thought that they fancied only two genders, and I'm not sure I know any who think there only are two genders and everyone has to have one of those. It didn't fit the experience or values of any bi activist or organization, certainly, and yet here it was being thrown in our faces all the time by people who somehow believed they were avoiding transphobia while telling us that the two genders all bisexuals fancy are cis men and cis women, as if binary trans people are not also part of the same genders as cis people.

I've mellowed a lot in recent years but it was definitely enough to put me off ever labeling myself as anything other than bi, in case I needed any help with that. :)

[belleweather]

I also have a tough time internally with pansexual as an identity because when I first learned about it (in the mid 1990s) it was through a published essay about someone who wanted to have a loving sexual relationship with a tree. While I intellectually understand that it's used in a very different way now and applies to the spectrum of possibly gender identities for human beings, and while I support that change and totally acknowledge that this is 110% my own problem, I still automatically think about bark and my private bits and get kinda hung up. :(

[shewhostaples]

I first came across the word 'bisexual' at the age of 20, in a meme on LJ, and immediately felt as if I'd known it all my life, and that it described who I was in a way that nothing I'd previously heard of could.

I don't think I could think of myself as being pansexual. I don't fancy very many people at all!

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah I made the joke yesterday that I don't even know what all the genders are, much less than I fancy at least one person of each, so there's no way I could be pansexual. :) I don't fancy many people at all either.

[askygoneonfire]

This was interesting to read and something I share very similar thoughts about regarding using bisexual more often than anything else. Thanks for sharing

[cosmolinguist]

I'm glad it was interesting! I worried it'd be a bit too navel-gazey.

[meepettemu]

It’s interesting isn’t it- ‘bi’ includes individually all the pan people. But it’s a different group when you look at them categorically

Also there needs to be a sexuality for ‘everyone except cis men’ specifically :D

[cosmolinguist]

I know several people who want a "not cis men" sexuality label.

[meepettemu]

Yep that’s what I mean! As a description I often say I can’t deal with ‘penis+privilege’ but that is somewhat simplistic and not exactly a label...

[silveradept]

I have read this and feel better educated from it.

[cosmolinguist]

I'm glad! It feels very inside-baseball, this bi/pan stuff. I don't know anyone who isn't at least one of those things who knows about it, much less cares. :)

[silveradept]

As someone who cares about precision in language (probably more than I should or that is good for me), I kayo want to be able to know Wendy's to put things so I don't make foolish assumptions based on wrong knowledge.

But also yes, I am connected to more than one person who are bi, so I am probably on the inside of the inside baseball and not the outside.

[haggis]

Apart from the reason Cosmo quoted about "My attractions have changed but my identity label hasn't", my reasons for IDing as bi basically come down to "Old" and "Grumpy".

- It was the word that I knew before I found LGBT+ community (I came out in 2002 but didn't find other bi people irl until 2006)
- It's still the non-monosexual identity that is most familiar to people outside the LGBT+ community. I am particularly interested in outreach to isolated bisexuals, esp those who don't have contact with LGBT+ stuff.
- It's the word that people like Brenda Howard used for themselves and I want to acknowledge my debts to community elders.
- While I like that pan explicitly acknowledges multiple genders, it's hard to get over my first experience with it was being told that I was transphobic for using it (while dating a trans person and engaging with local bi community with lots of trans/NB people involved). I am really happy for other people to use it (in non-biphobic ways) but it will never fit me comfortably.
- I have a sneaking suspicion that some of the motivation for people pushing pan so hard was an attempt to evade unfair biphobic stereotypes or try to portray themselves as acceptable to biphobes. While I have a lot of sympathy for bis whose local community is biphobic*, that is not an effective strategy. Biphobes hate bi people, not just our word.
- I note that the people who hated on bisexuals for liking too many genders in the 70s&80s flipped to hating on bisexuals for liking too few genders. Changing my ID would feel like capitulating to that bullshit.


*I feel a similar way about "born this way". It's clear to me that it is rooted in trying to justify yourself in an aggressively LGBTphobic Christian culture, where arguments like "But this makes me feel happy and alive!" or "But who is actually hurt by me having same-sex relationships?" are pre-emptively shot down as being sinful selfishness. It's a horrible place to be and I support LGBT people doing whatever they need to get by in that context (except shitting on other LGBT people).

However, outside of that context, it makes it sound like being LGBT is a personality flaw that we would fix if we could! It also encourages stuff like "Gay gene identified - parents could be offered choice to abort!" (paraphrased headlines from the early 90s). Bugger that, being bi gives me joy and community and pride.

Finally, "born this way" vs "queer by choice" is a stupid binary, like "Nature or Nurture?" where the answers is "both and neither."

[softfruit]

I think the Born This Way vs The Right To Be Different thing is in part a fine illustration of how different US and UK culture is. Both arguments work on both audiences but they have a clearly different priority order, I think due to the different levels of theism. Possibly in the 70s the UK would have been a place for Born This Way-ism?

[haggis]

Agreed, it's definitely about Christian culture and how much that affects the general culture.

I grew up in a fairly relaxed church that didn't bang on about ho-mo-sex-ual-itee and how it was a sin and it was still hard to argue that "This makes me feel happy, it makes me feel alive, therefore the Bible-derived rules I was taught are wrong". OTOH, the rest of my world didn't have that hang up.