I get tired of fandom bullshit where they say yeah, this character is bi, but it's problematic for them to be shipped with people of the opposite sex. What you're really saying is that the only acceptable bi rep is that which is indistinguishable from gay/lesbian rep. That's exactly the same thing as saying bi people don't need representation and trying to provide it is homophobic. Can you not?
I'm seeing this particularly loudly with the reactions to Shiro on Voltron. Apparently, it's not okay to ship him with a female character because he has a former lover that's male. What biphobic garbage is this? There is no law saying a man can't date a man and then date a woman if he damn well pleases. If he's exclusively attracted to men there's no reason he would want to, but nothing in-universe nor the official word of the showrunners when directly asked if he is gay indicates that's how Shiro feels about the subject. People that are not gay get into same-sex relationships too. Bi people, pan people, asexual people, questioning people, people that eschew sexual orientation labels, even some people that, bafflingly, would use the term straight to describe themselves have same-sex relationships as well.
The biphobic assumption that bi people don't really desire people of multiple genders and that their attractions to some genders (generally those that are not cis male) are not real, valid attractions is a harmful one with real negative consequences for bi people. What happens when you cast doubt on the validity of bisexual people's attractions to the opposite sex by insinuating they're gay and just don't know it is that you undermine their relationships, encourage their partners to distrust then, and invalidate their feelings. That often forces people into pretending to be gay and repressing their feelings for the opposite sex. That is forcing them into the closet and comes with all the negative emotional consequences associated with that. When you go the other direction and force a bi person to pretend to be straight and deny their feelings for people of the same sex, you're doing the same thing. The latter matches the experiences of gay/lesbian people, so they tend to have sympathy for that, but it would be nice for them to also have sympathy for things that happen to those of us in the lgbt+ community that are not shared experiences and avoid replicating those harms.
If you see Shiro as bi because you are bi and see yourself in him, that’s valid. If you see him as bi because you observe his interactions with individuals of multiple genders and interpret it as romantic interest in multiple people, that’s valid. If you just feel like there aren’t enough characters that are positive representations of bi people and it makes you feel good to claim him, that’s valid. Just because we don’t all agree on a character’s sexuality doesn’t mean that any of us are bad people for having different analyses of the same text. And just because a person ships a character with one person doesn’t mean they don’t also ship them with other people. You can multiship and/or polyship. They can ship some things in canon, others in fanon. They can like an aesthetic or potential dynamic between characters without having that be their preference for the canon resolution. How about we leave the accusing people of being homophobic to the people that are pissed he isn’t straight and simply pretending any indication to the contrary never happened.
