B is for Cognitive Dissonance

[cosmolinguist]

The International Day Against Homophobia is, this year, the day my parents leave and I collapse after a week of seeing the most touristy bits of London, putting up with Andrew's family, and being quiet about the fact that I think homophobia's a bad thing.

Which is a shame, because since I will be in a state of mental and emotional if not physical collapse by then, I won't be able to take up an offer to speak at the Lesbian and Gay Foundation's IDAHOT vigil.

And I really want to do that now. And it's probably good that I can't. Both of these are for the same reason: I'm really annoyed at IDAHOT right now.

I remember a few years ago thinking it was very clever when Twitter chums started talking about the "silent T" in IDAHO ("it's a French word, okay?"). But as always when people make a point of adding "transphobia" to stuff about "homophobia" (like "homophobic bullying in schools" turning into "homophobic and transphobic bullying in schools")...I couldn't help but think there might be something missing here.

My friends, taking their lead from I think Brighton's event a few years ago, call it IDAHOBIT. It's not just funnier, it's more inclusive! (It even makes you pronounce the T.) But for some reason, an acronym with the word "hobbit" in it hasn't caught on that widely yet.

And it needs to. Or the name needs overhauling. But something needs to happen. It needs to change.

And you know why? Because not only is it itself just another of those L&G things that I don't know if I'll feel welcome or included at, certainly not just because it's an example of bi erasure and bi invisibility, but because it's being used to justify other shit being biphobic! What fun.

I saw this on the facebooks today. A film festival in Australia is billing itself as "gay, lesbian and trans." So far so completely typical. But when the writer of this blog post asked them about the B-word, the reply was full of the industrial quantities of cognitive dissonance required to say "We do not intend to cause offense and we certainly do not mean to exclude" just after they say "we have chosen not to recognise “biphobia” or bisexuality in our communications as we believe (as does IDAHOT) that biphobia is inherently included under homophobia."

(Nice scare quotes. When was the last time you saw homophobia in scare quotes?)

Not to mention the fact that they've already moved the goalposts really oddly here. Why are we talking about biphobia now? It is not a "homophobic and transphobic" film festival; it's a "lesbian, gay and trans" one. Biphobia is not the same thing as bisexuals -- you can tell because bisexuals are people, and biphobia is something done to them; they are an object rather than a subject of it, and an answer about biphobia to a question about bisexuals denies any agency to bi people; we are acted-upon by biphobia and apparently that's all that's worth saying about us.

The festival poster depicted in the blog post has "International Day Against Homophobia" along with the sponsors at the bottom. IDAHOT's website (whose URL is still dayagainsthomophobia) says "the International Day Against Homophobia & Transphobia has established itself the single most important date for LGBTI communities..."

Including letters for minority sexual identities that it doesn't otherwise mention leads me to wonder if any of them have asked people from those groups. Bisexuals, for example, have found use for our own Bi Visibility Day. And why might that be?

Forgive my cynicism, but it's just based on years of bi erasure and bi invisibility in supposedly-LGBT things. The bigger and better-funded the "LGBT" things are, the more likely it seems that they'll be shitty. It still seems like all the bi and bi-friendly stuff is done on at best a shoestring budget by people you've never heard of who have unrelated day jobs.

I don't know where the film festival got the idea that IDAHOT thinks "biphobia is inherently included under homophobia" in the first place. A second's searching on their website brought up a bunch of stuff that mention biphobia, mostly between "homophobia" and "transphobia" (and in stuff clearly not written by them but copied from the details of various IDAHOT events) but they have a "position on biphobia and LGBTphobia" that says "Bisexuals also face a distinct form of stigma, both from people who are homophobic and from ones who aren’t. As a matter of fact, bisexuals face stigma and discrimination from within the lesbian and gay community itself."

Hmm. You don't say.

But the page also says

How feasible would it be to name all ‘categories’? Lesbophobia, of course, is distinctly different as it incorporates sexism. Intersexphobia is still very different. And so is ‘Queerphobia’.

Our ambition is eventually to move away from categories. We feel that another category like ‘biphobia’ just reinforces the categorisation dynamics, and eventually works against the acceptance of fluidity between categories of sexual orientations and gender expressions.

I'm writing a lot of sarcastic things I'm deleting here. But I will leave the one that says "Gosh, it's sure lucky that they got homophobia in there before they started rejecting categorization dynamics."

Cognitive dissonance again. Bisexuality is great, they say in one paragraph. "This challenging of categories is eventually the strongest single tool to dismantle prejudice: as long as we need to be either straight or homosexual, we’ll be put in nice little boxes which makes it easy to classify, and rank, people. To grant them rights, or not. To let gender and sex determine our right to love. Exactly what the conservatives are adamant about." They call bisexuality "one of the major keys to liberation."

And then they don't mention bisexuality again anywhere on their website. (Except for a couple of paragraphs on Bi Vis Day that were almost certainly C&Ped from its website. The "bi communities," "biphobia" and "bisexuality" tags all have the same two or three entries. And one of them is this one, which is hardly going to welcome any bisexuals or "bi communities" who want to see what IDAHOT has to say about them.) They defend the decision not to include bisexuality with so much more biphobia than the original erasure, literally adding insult to injury.

"LGBT" things can't even be expected to know what biphobia is. That's still the level we're at. Not only do they not understand the problem, they don't understand that there is a problem.

Remember that film festival poster that got me started down this rabbit hole? The reason they say biphobia is no more than a subset of homophobia is that "the phobic responses exhibited by persons toward those whom are bisexual are not in response to the heterosexual relationships those people maintain, but the same-sex (homosexual) relationships they maintain."

Phobic responses to bisexuals are not in response to the heterosexual relationships we maintain?

Tell that to the people who glared at me for holding hands with my boyfriend on Canal Street. I always worry about saying "my husband" or "my boyfriend" in any LGBT settings, because I've gotten a hostile reaction enough times that now that's what I expect if I don't already know the thing is explicitly bi-friendly. Almost all the "phobic responses" about bisexuals' "heterosexual relationships" [sic! this thing is like fractally biphobic] come from lesbian and gay people/groups/entities.

And I can't decide whether it'd be worse if this one is deliberately excluding from their definition the kind of biphobia they're engaging in here, or if they don't even know that's what they're doing. (I think the terrible grammar -- "the phobic responses exhibited by persons toward those whom are bisexual"?! Really?! When you could have just said "people being biphobic" -- belies a real discomfort with talking about the subject at all. "Those whom are bisexual" just sounds like it's keeping us at arm's length, doesn't it?)

Biphobia is so often itself invisible, just like bisexuals.

And that makes it all the more insidious. At least gay and lesbian people don't have to try to convince everyone that prejudice against them is a thing. People might argue whether or not something is homophobic, but they don't have to constantly defend the validity of homophobia or the reality of homosexuality.

And this is why I still get really excited on the rare occasions that I get to read stuff like "Bisexuality is clearly to move beyond bi-nary. And maybe the term ‘bisexuality’ itself carries a contradiction. Bisexuals, are maybe not so much people who can have a loving relationship with BOTH genders. But people who have loving relationships REGARDLESS of gender." My little heart soars. (Except, of course, what is this nonsense about "both genders," but then of course they're being transphobic and even their own word intersexphobic because it's not only bisexuals they're inconsistent about!)

Which is so fucking sad really. Because it's never, if it's written by an "LGBT" organization, for very long. Even the people who say good things about us still probably aren't our friends.

Watch out for the cognitive dissonance.

Comments

[andrewhickey.info]

But the B *is* in there -- homophoBIa! What more do you want?! [/Stonewall]

[cosmolinguist]

I bet Jen can do something clever with "homophoBIa." :)

[sfred]

*sigh*

Thanks for writing this, though. It needs spelling out to so many people and organisations.

[cosmolinguist]

I felt a bit better after writing it. :) Figured if I couldn't sleep, I might as well rant.

I did the tiniest bit of actual bi activism today, too, so that helped me feel a bit better about ineffectual ranting. :)

[askygoneonfire]

YES YES YES. Dear GOD YES

I'm writing a lot of sarcastic things I'm deleting here. But I will leave the one that says "Gosh, it's sure lucky that they got homophobia in there before they started rejecting categorization dynamics."
I spat out my tea at this, because it's so on the money. And it's always the same, the people calling for "all categories to be dispensed with" are always those in the dominant positions - even if it's dominant positions within a minority. It's so easy to dispense with a category that means nothing to you, ignoring the fact it's an erasure of an erasure.

Your post has allowed me to finally put a finger on what has always bothered me about IDAHOT, it just doesn't do what it should, and it erases much too much. In some ways tackling homophobia and transphobia (particularly in schools) has a lot in common - you're often combating ideas about normative gender performance and the impact of the heterosexual matrix. But biphobia is, in some respects (and I would not be ignorant enough to argue one is worse or better than another) more complex because it's about much more than gender, it's about the threat of indeterminacy, and a troubling of the binary - which is where biphobia comes back round to having a lot in common with transphobia.

And, finally, WOW at the how fundamentally they don't understand biphobia. WOW.

[cosmolinguist]

I think it's so fundamental because biphobia's always been really useful to the gay (and lesbian, but mostly gay, and definitely cis) movement. That gay and straight people are inherently different, that people don't choose to be gay...the existence of bisexuals threatens to problematize all these kinds of narratives that gay-rights people and groups have traditionally used. And now that the gay (and lesbian, but mostly gay, and definitely cis) people have been made kings of the LGBT mountain, they're not going to change the foundational beliefs that got them there.

I once helped do a presentation on biphobia for a trade union's LGBT network. So, a room full of mostly-L&G people, with the big bosses of All Equality And Diversity standing at the back. We worried that people would feel we were whinging about people being mean to us and making a bigger deal of biphobia than it is, but it turns out they were quite happy to say the most shocking things about bisexuals. And the big bosses, all straight cis people, were amazed and concerned, saying they'd never realized this was such an issue, whereas certain of the L&G contingent were quite happy to tell us "I'm never sleeping with a bi guy again because they always go mental on you after sex" or "forget the support group for bis, you need to run one for their partners because it must be awful for them to find out their partner's bi" and plenty else that leads me to believe we'll have a harder time stomping out biphobia within "LGBT" things than we would in mainstream society.

[andrewhickey.info]

Yeah. The other thing is that a lot of people assume their experiences generalise, and so many older gay men tried to "be straight" when they were young that they just assume all bi people are doing the same (q.v. Christopher "bisexuals don't exist" Biggins)...

[cosmolinguist]

One of Jennie's links today had an interesting thought in it (well several really but here's the one relevant here): “Many of them were bullied as kids for being geeks and believe that makes them incapable of bullying or oppressive behavior.” I think something similar goes on with cis gay and lesbian people.

[haggis]

That one experience has driven more of my bisexual activism than anything before or since.

And for utter, unthinking irony, one of the more vocal biphobes accused us of "splitting the LGBT movement" because we'd displayed a bisexual flag. Our orders are clear - turn up to swell the numbers of the LG community but keep fucking quiet about not being L or G.

[quirkytizzy]

People always got weirded out when they found out both David and I were bisexual. Like we both were simultaneously traumatized by the other's bi-ness and yet at double risk for cheating. That attitude got SO OLD SO FAST.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, when I heard "you should have support groups for the partners of bisexuals, not just the bis themselves," I must admit my first thought was "a lot of us could go to both groups!" It must be a goddam weird world these people live in, where the only bisexuals are the ones who are secret about it and unethical and it's devastating for their partners if they find out.

[quirkytizzy]

I consider myself really lucky that I've never run into "biphobia" before from LGBT folks. But I have run into straight people thinking I'm bi because it's trendy, I'm greedy, or because it turns my boyfriend on. It is frustrating. It makes me want to prove my sexuality by constantly talking about sex with women. Which is a bad way to handle those stereotypes.

Also, I hate the term "barsexual" (chicks who like girls when they are drunk because SEXY GIRL ON GIRL) because honestly - if you find chicks hot while drunk - well, that's part of the sexual spectrum, too. It's not fake. It's just a different set of circumstances in which you'll engage in homosexual activity. I dislike terms that cheapen the kind of sex other people like to have, and that's one of them. (You didn't bring this up, it's just on my mind.)

I get the whole "biphobia" should be a separate word thing because bi folks aren't exactly the same as gay or lesbian folks. Though sometimes I wonder at what point we all should stop clamoring for our seperate terms and band together?

I guess around the time when no LG people stop being dicks about bisexual people, huh? (Oddly enough, I've not heard trans folk say anything disparaging about bi people. I wonder if it's because you can have trans folks - like, a trans woman who identifies as gay, so she dates other women, even though the genetilia match up is biologically "straight". So they have a bit of the bi thing going on, too. I think.)

This was a FASCINATING entry to read and think about. Thank you for posting this.

[cosmolinguist]

well, that's part of the sexual spectrum, too. It's not fake.

I couldn't agree more. Has it never occurred to people that someone might need a few drinks to overcome their inhibitions? Especially when those inhibitions might well be reinforced by how many nasty ideas there are floating around about bisexuals! An attraction to someone of a gender that's not your "usual" preference could understandably be repressed if you think that'd make you greedy, indecisive, "fake" and not to be taken seriously, or any one of the hundred other negative things I've heard people say about bi folk. No wonder some people confine expression of some of their attractions to when they (and everybody around them!) is likely to be drunk.

I get the whole "biphobia" should be a separate word thing because bi folks aren't exactly the same as gay or lesbian folks. Though sometimes I wonder at what point we all should stop clamoring for our seperate terms and band together?

It's not just that bis are different from gays and lesbians, it's that we're treated differently. It's not just about our identity, it's about other people's behavior toward us. And yes there is some commonality becaise bi people do experience homophobia too -- if I'm walking down the street holding hands with a woman and someone shouts something abusive at us, it's not like I can calmly explain to them that not everyone I've held hands with is a woman...and even if I wanted to do that, it wouldn't make them any less homophobic toward me. But biphobia is distinct from that, and it is important to have words for things, because otherwise you have to spend even more time arguing that they exist, and that's tedious and dismaying work. Being able to name something is powerful.

he genetilia match up is biologically "straight". So they have a bit of the bi thing going on, too. I think

I strongly disagree, and I suggest you be careful with how you talk about trans people's gender. It's generally polite not to assume you know anything about anyone's genitals, for one thing. And it's also crucial to the respectful treatment of trans people not to define them by their genitals. Some trans people can't afford or don't want surgery or hormone treatments to change their bodies, but that certainly doesn't mean they should be taken any less seriously as the gender they feel they are and want to be. So to say a trans woman in a relationship with another woman (who may or may not be trans herself!) is still "a little bit bi" could well be read as insulting because it doesn't take seriously the identity of the trans woman as a woman because she must be "a little bit a man" for there to be anything "bi" about her relationship with another woman. Does that make sense? I'm sure you didn't mean this that way, but I wanted to flag up the potential for offense in what you were saying.

I do think you're correct in that generally trans people are less likely to be biphobic, but I think the reason is more like askygoneonfire said in a comment above: "it's about the threat of indeterminacy, and a troubling of the binary." Bisexuality creates this trouble for binary sexualities, and the whole trans* umbrella creates it for gender. So there is some understanding of common themes among these groups -- certainly I've learned a lot about trans people and trans life from being part of a local group and a national convention of the UK bi community. But of course being a member of one minority is no guarantee you'll be awesome to others, so there are always exceptions to this rule, too.

[quirkytizzy]

That is a good point about trans gender and attraction. I think what I was getting at was that a lot of people will feel that the whole "gay trans person" is nothing more than a confused way of saying "I'm straight" just because the genetilia (at least if they have not had surgery) would be traditional penis/vagina (which is generally considered a straight pairing.)

But I know when it comes to trans, it's the GENDER, not genetalia that matters. I didn't mean it to be offensive and I appreciate you pointing out to me where it could be offensive. Thank you! (I often will say the wrong things and it's always nice when someone gently points me to the offending behavior and says "Here, this is a better way of saying it."!)

That is also a good point about being treated differently, so it's part of why we need a different sort of label, too. I hadn't thought of it that way!

Especially when I realize that while gay people generally get shit from straight people, bi's get shit from straight AND gay people. I'm not meaning to play the Oppression Olympics, but it's definitely a problem that needs to be named and then addressed.

[cosmolinguist]

a lot of people will feel that the whole "gay trans person" is nothing more than a confused way of saying "I'm straight"

Ah yes, this is a really common form of transphobia, that trans men are just gay and don't want to admit it (like it's easier to get past all the medical gatekeepers and deal with a lifetime of discrimination and being more at risk of violent attacks and homelessness and abuse and all sorts of things, rather than be gay). It's a pretty heteronormative thing to think, too, like "obviously you want to be straight really, because everyone wants to be straight, so you're trying to fuck up your whole life to do that!" Yeah. Uh-huh.

A lot of straight cis people confuse and conflate gender and sexuality because they think part of what defines them as the gender they are is being attracted to and wanting relationships exclusively with the other gender. And so some people who don't even think they're straight or cis any more still kinda think that gender defines sexuality like this.

[haggis.livejournal.com]

I am so fucked off with this bullshit. I am so sick of biphobic lies that drive bisexuals out of LG spaces and leave people free to lie about our experiences without pushback. I am sick trying to work out how to respond in ways that don't confirm biphobic prejudices and stereotypes. I am sick of feeling inadequately queer / insufficiently involved in the community because of that biphobia.

[cosmolinguist]

The blog post I linked to made the point that the film festival was excluding probably the largest group in the LGBT acronym, which startled me a bit when I read it. Then I realized I know the stats on this and it sounds about right, but even I am so used to thinking of us as a "minority in a minority" because we are so often absent or silenced and so much of that is due to biphobia.

[halfshellvenus.livejournal.com]

Since some of the people who seem to think bisexuality does not even exist consider themselves to be gay... it seems as if biphobia is very much something that should be addressed at a LBGT event! But I guess it's hard to admit that some of the people who hate being discriminated against... also discriminate against THAT subgroup. :(