shut the fuck uppppppp you people make lesbians do EVERYTHING for you. bi women in het relationships DO NOT need lesbians to validate them, both because you are grown adults but also because you guys NEVER validate us. case in point, that entire little speech you wrote never once validated the unique experience of lesbians as non male attracted people in a patriarchal society. yes we all like women, but NOT liking men is almost always the greater burden and greater isolating factor in our day to day lives. stop thinking about yourselves and just LISTEN for once, all you EVER do is talk over lesbians and paint us as villains. and next time you are walking down the street hand in hand with your boyfriend take a moment and be grateful that you don't have to have your head on a swivel waiting to be harassed for daring to show affection to your partner in public. that sense of unease you feel brining your boyfriend to pride? that's what we feel the other 364 days a year, except the unease comes from the fear of ACTUAL VIOLENCE not of SOCIAL DISAPPROVAL from a minority group comprising 3% of the population.
Ma’am I am a brown bisexual woman in a Muslim-majority country in the global south and I’ve been dating my (also bisexual) girlfriend since we were 20. It has been five years and even our best friends don’t know we’re dating because we’re afraid of word getting out and being targeted and killed. (People are murdered for less.) There is some minimal social acceptance of transfem folks in our country but even they are treated like garbage. Anybody found to have same sex attraction is cast out by their families. (Families are known for disowning you for even interreligious marriages.) Or worse, they might force conversion therapy on you. They would not distinguish between you being bisexual or gay. The last queer activist in our country was murdered in cold blood 10 years ago and we haven’t had a strong movement since. LGBTQ+ community exists in small, secret bubbles. We’re all afraid.
My relationship takes place only behind closed doors. In a more accepting country, my girlfriend and I would be thinking about marriage and kids by now. She is my soulmate and we initially tried to keep it casual but we couldn’t. Despite all of the above, we chose each other, even though we could hypothetically look for legitimate partner in a man. I didn’t even realize I was bi until adulthood after I broke up with my high school boyfriend, though my girlfriend has known she is queer since she was young. My girlfriend and I spent two years (the worst mental health period of my life, when I made this account to document it) of struggling to unlearn comphet, because I often felt this overwhelming imposter syndrome that I was “faking” my very genuine attraction and romantic love for her. (if you’re a baby gay reading this and struggling with that, it passes I promise!) We also had to deal with the very special bisexual guilt of actively choosing to be in a same-sex relationship every day. We still do.
I wish I could avoid coming out to our families forever to protect the pain and heartbreak that will cause them. They really love me and have given me everything I’ve asked for (I wish I could say I was romanticising, but it’s true), however they have not been raised in a society to understand queerness and I’m afraid they’re too old now. In my darkest moments, I wish that my parents will be able to die without knowing, while still fully loving, supporting, proud, and happy for me. But that’s not sustainable, because already our parents are already asking us when we’re going to get married (to men, of course). Soon, that will become constant nagging, confusion, disappointment and eventually suspicion. If I did come out (which will hopefully happen when I’m much older and wiser and can survive without anyone’s support), I would say I was a lesbian, because 1) they don’t know what bisexual is and I can’t teach them; and 2) if they know I’m bi, they might have more hope they can “correct” me, or even try to sabotage my relationship. And you can be sure as hell I’m not asking some internet lesbian stranger for permission beforehand.
We have gone long-distance across the globe more often than not. We are trying to secure permanent residency in a more queer-friendly country by migrating with stable jobs (which can be a 10+ year process of proving to a country that you are worth giving residency to). We wonder if we’re doing the “right” thing taking it a day at a time, how many people we’re going to hurt for our own selfish happiness. If we’ll ever be able to visit our home country and culture again if word gets out. If we’ll ever have children, and would they be accepted by our families. If we’ll ever be 100% safe. Sometimes, I wish I was a lesbian like you, so I would not have to bear all that AND the guilt of the knowledge I could give it all up for a different loving relationship. If I were a lesbian, at least I would have the conviction of not having a choice. And that is a bisexual struggle you won’t understand, just like you have lesbian struggles that I won’t understand. I am ok with admitting the latter—are you ok with admitting the former?
I have a bisexual friend whose husband abuses her specifically because he suspects she is queer. I have a bisexual friend (in denial) whose fiancé insecurely and derogatorily jokes about her possibly being queer (much like my ex) and because of that she will never come to terms with her own sexuality, and will suppress it for her entire life. I have bisexual friends in very happy and loving M/F relationships. Some of these bisexuals do the work for the community from their position of privilege, others who are annoying mansplainers (much like yourself) to those of us who they perceive as more privileged (because, y’know, we’re not out to them as a WLW couple or even as queer). I’ll tell you now (if it still needs to be said) that most of the bisexuals in the world are actually not privileged at all. If you made a scale of “most privileged” to “most oppressed” (which is nonsensical but this is apparently the intelligence level we’re working with), then bi people in M/F relationships would be pretty much right next to other queer people, and not even close to endo allocishetero people. I have a difficult queer life to build so I have zero interest in playing stupid oppression Olympics and decide whether or not any other letter is “more” oppressed for the sake of internet keyboard warriors who can’t check themselves (or read a book, a paper, a research article anything). What I will do is fight for everyone’s rights (yes, even yours) to talk about their unique personal struggles.
At the end of the day, the bisexuals in privileged M/F marriages are allies to me and my girlfriend. And that means the world to us. When our entire society (and our families) turns their back on us, our queer friends will be all we will have left. Their straight boyfriends will be allies to us and welcome to our community, and symbolic of a world where more endosex allocishetero folks accept us. I want good straight men at Pride. The world listens to them. The point of queerness is deviance, but the point of Pride is liberation, and movement needs numbers. Immersion and understanding leads to acceptance. Are you with the cause or not?
Back when I was with my boyfriend, I avoided addressing my own queerness. And it was in part thanks to gatekeepers like you. Do you guys want more WLW or not? If you do, be kind to bisexual women. Celebrate their love, regardless of their partner. If more bi women were encouraged to find genuine love, if they were told unlearning comphet is not lesbian-only experience, if they had a queer support system when they faced statistically high rates of intimate partner violence due to their bisexuality, if everyone actually validated the unique struggles that lead to statistically poor bisexual mental health and substance abuse, then more of them would seek out healthy relationships with partners that see them for who they are, rather than any available subpar man. If you don’t want to date bi women, that’s fine. But if we include them in our community, they’ll have the opportunity to immerse in the culture, know themselves better, and eventually find each other. We contain multitudes. We do not exist in phases of “straight” and “gay”. Being rude to us when we’re in hetero-presenting relationships only makes us more likely to associate with queerness. Our identity is not inherently privileged, it’s intersectional. We are your peers. And we have every right to point out when anyone is being exclusionary and biphobic towards us, which includes the LGBTQ+ community.
I believe that someone who can afford to be unkind and unempathetic to another queer person, who dares play oppression Olympics like it’s a little game, doesn’t know what it’s like to actually be oppressed. Or maybe they have some insecurities and frustrations they need to work out in therapy. I have so many reasons to be jealous of my foreign queer friends (including lesbians, including trans people) flaunting their privileges, but I’m happy for them instead, I even listen to them when they talk about their (relatively minor) queer struggles in life, and I sure as hell did not have access to therapy to help me with that. I have not met a single queer person who actually engaged in community organising and mutual aid, that is also argumentative like people are on the internet. I don’t know if you’re aware it was proto-TERFs during second-wave feminism that separated the lesbian and bi women in the US, and that some of you have been unknowingly parroting frankly dumb purity culture rhetoric that harms trans people as well as bisexuals.
One of my deep regrets is not having queer elders in my part of the world to represent what my life could look like in the future. I literally contemplated on the phone for two hours with my partner this morning about what the fuck to do with our lives. As you’ve decided to graciously bring so much lesbian wisdom (not at all in the tone of a villain) to my account whilst so bravely hiding as an anon, tell me—what the fuck should we, lowly bisexuals who haven’t even “decentered men”, do? Or do I suddenly strike you as a different person now that you know I’m WLW, or about my other intersectional identities? Do you think I don’t understand your experiences? Do you think I don’t face lesbophobia—because people perceive all WLW as a lesbian? Do you still feel the need for me to acknowledge a bunch of other identities just because I spoke about my bisexuality? I was the same person when I was with my boyfriend. I will be the same if (God forbid) it doesn’t work out with my partner and I find myself with a man at some point again, and I will have to live with the truth of having my heart broken by a woman that I chose (in EVERY sense of the word) to be with. I will forever be queer enough. My hypothetical boyfriend WILL be coming with me to Pride. And if I sense unease because of that, I WILL call you out on it.
