weareallstilllearningright:
autismserenity:
I’ve been exploring monosexism and the concept of privilege a lot lately. I was just reading a Facebook conversation, among bisexuals, about how we (supposedly) have “passing privilege”. And it really made a lot of stuff gel for me.
The problem is that by calling it passing privilege, we confuse it with what is usually meant by privilege.
You do not have to pay for privilege. You can’t pay for privilege.
I am white; I have white privilege no matter what I do.
There is a whole system in place that puts a ton of money and effort and privilege into giving me and other white people privilege by stealing from people of color.
I can choose to play into and support that system to perhaps, arguably, access a little more of that privilege, and to help keep the racist system going.
Or I can work to unlearn racism and learn the ways I have been feeding the system, and work to cut them off, and work to support and defend people of color.
But I don’t earn white privilege through some kind of points system. It’s just there.
If I have to pay for privilege by giving up who I am, lying about who and what I am, hiding my past and present, then it is not privilege. By definition. Because I am paying for it – paying a very high price.
If safety and danger are thrust upon me at random based on people’s perception of me – as they are also done with my gender, as a genderqueer, and as they are done to gays and lesbians all the time as well – then that, likewise, is not privilege. It is Russian roulette.
This does not only happen to bi/pan and trans people, of course. Asexuals get the same bullshit. Biracial people get it. All sorts of light-skinned people of color get it. Femme women of all types get it. Butch gay, bi, ace, and trans men get it. Intersex people get it. People with invisible disabilities get it. All us liminal people get it. Who am I leaving out?
Privilege is when you have access to safety and acceptance that others don’t, based on things you cannot control.
It especially becomes a problem when we accept it and use it and (no matter how obliviously or intentionally) support the harm of others.
Whether that’s active, like telling bi people that we should stop whining about erasure, or passive, like ignoring bi experience, politics, and culture in favor of the vicious cycle of bias confirmation.
(Like only hearing about bi history as bits of tiny scraps in the context of gay history, where it’s not mentioned when major figures were actually bi, or when something specific to the bi community happened. And then assuming that’s an accurate picture of community history instead of specifically of one piece of our community. And then assuming that bi people are in the minority, don’t do much of the work, and don’t have many problems. And then assuming that people who say differently are being divisive and self-centered, because they aren’t really oppressed, because you haven’t heard anything that says they are, so….)
Passing is not privilege. It is a form of blackmail, a threat.
“Pretend you are gay in this community, pretend you are straight in that one, and pass, and we’ll treat you as we treat each other. Admit you are bisexual, and we will take you down.”
That is not what privilege sounds like. That is what it looks like when people WITH privilege turn on you.
You can also tell it’s not privilege, because the same communities that shame and reject us when we DON’T pass, immediately turn around and use “passing privilege” to tell us we’re not oppressed – and certainly not oppressed by them!
The word for that isn’t “privilege”. It’s “abusive mindfuck”.
“This does not only happen to bi/pan and trans people, of course. Asexuals get the same bullshit. Biracial people get it. All sorts of light-skinned people of color get it. Femme women of all types get it. Butch gay, bi, ace, and trans men get it. Intersex people get it. People with invisible disabilities get it. All us liminal people get it. Who am I leaving out?”
This is an interesting idea. I started typing “I think it would be insincere to not admit that bi people are exposed less severe stigma” but I suppose that’s not really true its just different. I think the easiest way to understand it (for me personally) is comparing it to biracialism; light skinned mixed race people tend to experience less severe racism but are often outcasted from dark skinned communities. Ultimately though, even though the experience is difference the root of what we experience is homophobia and fear of dark skin. Most people aren’t biphobic they’re homophobic and bi people are affected because of that (same with racism faced by multiracial people.) For me personally though, the suspicion or rejection from the communities that are more severely hit by the root (i.e dark skinned people and gay/lesbian people) can’t be called oppression as the last paragraph insinuates “ we’re not oppressed – and certainly not oppressed by them!
“ those groups don’t really have the power to cause us systematic issues it can just feel bad which is unfortunate, but is just the side effect of living in a racist/homophobic society. To me its understandable why those communities might be apprehensive because, “at least bi people have the option to pretend” or “light skinned people are still treated better and benefiting from colourism”. Don’t get me wrong it would be wonderful if it wasn’t like that I just think its important to focus on the actual cause not the by-product (aka hate from other minorities.)
What I find fascinating about it is that, you know, I too see the world as a place where bi people are less stigmatized… BUT… at the same time, the more I learn, the clearer it becomes that that’s not true.
Like: when the Association of American Universities did a study in 2015 on sexual assault and harassment, bi students consistently reported significantly higher rates of everything than their gay and lesbian counterparts, who reported significantly higher rates that their straight counterparts.
(And most of the time, aces fell between bi students and gay/lesbian ones – and obviously, therefore, WAY above straight students. Which also counters the common perception that “nobody knows or cares if you’re ace.”)
Or like, 25% of bisexuals in the United States are on food stamps, compared to 14% of lesbians and gay men.
Or like, while portrayals of gay and trans people have been rising and becoming more respectful – not perfect, the bury your gays trope is really fucking people up, but the characters are more consistently positive real people, not jokes or stereotypes – portrayals of bisexuals are actually getting WORSE.
According to GLAAD’s “Where We Are In Tv” report for the 2015-16 season, “It appears that what the website TV Tropes calls ‘the Depraved Bisexual’ is only getting more common. Bisexuality in general on TV is on the rise; among television’s regular and recurring LGBT characters, 28 percent are bisexual.
“But while gay and lesbian characters on TV increasingly are portrayed in a way that doesn’t make their sexuality into a large and dubious metaphor about their character, bisexuality often is portrayed as… untrustworthy, prone to infidelity, and/or lacking a sense of morality… [using] sex as a means of manipulation or lacking the ability to form genuine relationships; associations with self-destructive behavior; [or used as] a temporary plot device that is rarely addressed again.“
Or like the Canadian study that found that whereas 9.6% of straight women and 29.5% of lesbian women reported feeling suicidal, suicidality among bisexual women was found to be as high as 45.4%. As for men, whereas 7.4% of straights and 25.2% of gays reported suicidality, bisexuals who reported suicidality made up 34.8% of the respondents.
Whereas in Britain, “young and middle-aged bisexual adults reported poorer mental health than any other sexual orientation group examined. The researchers even go as far as saying that ‘[p]revious studies may have overstated the risk of mental health problems for homosexuals by grouping them together with bisexuals.’”
I would agree that the gay community doesn’t have systemic power in and of itself. But it’s done an admirable, amazing job of fighting for and gaining SOME systemic power – for society to take seriously hate crimes, and marriage equality, and “the pink dollar,” and see gay people as real people, and as an important political force.
There are still tons and tons of barriers; there’s HB2, there’s the entire Republican party, there’s tons and tons of heterosexism. And all of this varies so widely from country to country.
But there’s a consistent pattern where the money donated to LGBT nonprofits, which is where most of that SMALL amount of legislative and media power comes from, does not go to bi organizations or bi issues.
“Funders for LGBTQ Issues” publishes an annual report showing where this money goes. From 2008 through 2010, $0 went to “bisexual-focused issues.” In the most recent report, which is for 2013, it had increased to “less than 1%” of the total grant money nationwide. Even though bisexuals make up about 50% of the community. (Even among trans people, about 50% of us are m-spec.)
So while gay people can’t oppress us, they can deny us the resources we help fight for. They can certainly, on an individual level, make us feel like we do not qualify for those resources, like we’re not bi enough or not gay enough to access them, like we’ll be turned away and rejected if we try to access them. And we can’t really say that the stuff we experience there is homophobia.
(Personally, I’ve seen a lot of straight people who are biased against both bi and gay people, for distinct reasons – my own in-laws aren’t comfortable with either group, but are definitely less happy with bi people and more judgmental of us. Because they see us as choosing to ignore God’s will, instead of just as pitiable souls who are allowed to be gay but celibate.)
They can, individually and as organizations, erase and silence us without even meaning to, to the point where we don’t know that we’re experiencing more of the effects of oppression and need more help. It becomes this vicious cycle where we all think that bi people are sort of unoppressed semi-straights, and just generation after generation buys into this idea in both groups.
Which can then lead to the same organizations that we participate in not dedicating any resources to bi issues. Not even knowing what bi issues are, often. Not having any specific bi programming, not having bi people very high up on their staff, often not having us in their name, just kind of… passively continuing to accept that we’re not important in this battle.
I totally agree that that kind of suspicion of “you must be suffering less, you look more like the oppressor to me” comes from the oppressive mainstream culture. It’s a divide and conquer tactic.
And that bi erasure originates in that culture, as much as gay erasure and all our other queer erasures do.
The root of our oppression is the same. All of it is rooted in cissexism and intersexism, tbh. All of it is this desperate ploy to protect the idea that everyone is supposed to be male or female in the “right” way – cis, and gender-conforming, and perisex, and sexually active with only the “opposite” sex (but definitely sexually and romantically active), and only within a monogamous relationship, and probably some other shit I forgot.
Presumably it all goes back to capitalism trying to generate more workers or something like that. And to the kyriarchy, the drive to divide every group into “good” and “bad” so that you can force yourself onto the “good” side and get power over other people.
Honestly I think SO much of it is probably intersectional, too. Like, I have a friend who would agree that she gets some kind of privilege from “passing” as straight. And also, she’s white and cis and gender-conforming and I think perisex and upper-middle-class. And I think that’s a big part of it.
And I don’t actually know, if she were with a same-gender partner, how much would change for her personally; she’s been with the same guy for freaking ever and has kids with him. I think it’s very easy to say things like, “Well, I don’t have to deal with any oppression at my work, because I’m perceived as straight,” and never measure the psychological cost of being closeted at your work and (if applicable) having a straight partner who may not understand your experiences and culture.
It’s even easier to stand in a position of relative privilege on all those other points, white and cis and etc., and think about it only in terms of “I’m not really experiencing oppression because I’m bi and het-partnered” instead of “I’m not really experiencing oppression because I’m cis and white and in a very accepting geographic area and have class privilege and….”
I’ve said this a lot, but I’ll say it again: “passing privilege” is just punishing people for being closeted.
Seriously, the classic example is that a bi woman walking around with a guy will be read as straight, while a bi woman with another woman will be read as lesbian: the first one “passes” and the second doesn’t. But that’s ignoring two major, major things:
When I see “passing privilege,” what I hear is “how dare you not out yourself at every opportunity?”
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