I've been trying to find queer community where I live for almost 4 years now, both online and in person. I had a great community on the West Coast but ever since moving back to my hometown, it's been abysmal. I assumed it was in some way related to my autism, maybe COVID, it was hard to be sure. But now, I have a word and a framework for why it's felt so difficult. As an Annoying queer I fully understand I'm not the intended audience of this article. But, it has had a big impact on me.
I get it now and I am finally ready to stop trying so hard. That is a weight lifted for me for sure, but only because I am in a decent place with depression. If I wasn't this realization might be dangerous. My gay Uncle who was still closeted in many circles would have also been an Annoying queer by definition of this article, but he took his life last month. We had many conversations about how we both felt way too queer for our family and never queer enough in queer communities.
The fact remains that I and many other Annoying queers remain community-less. People who are Annoying queers (nonbinary, bisexual, etc) by way of identity versus lack of experience aren't going to just get less Annoying over time unless their identity changes. I get and respect what you are trying to do by writing this article, but also reading it from the perspective of someone who will never cease to be Annoying is fucking rough. That said, I also really, really appreciate it for saying the quiet thing I've long suspected out loud.
One more somewhat related thing to add: Unlearning Shame was extremely helpful for me in processing the death of my Uncle. Thank you for writing it.
I also think we need to point out to the gatekeepers that they are being entirely unserious about the rising fascism that the queer community is facing. We are way stronger if every economically-privileged "hetero"-married bisexual/demisexual/non-transitioning trans person comes out and bonds with and identifies with our community than we are if those people stay quietly in the closet while the rest of us deal with onslaught after onslaught.
Queerness is *supposed* to dismantle notions of gender and sexuality that keep people stuck performing social roles they don't come fully alive in, not create new rigid categories in which a few gay and a few trans people will be permanent discriminated-against minorities. Maybe the gatekeepers are out here to have exclusive little clubs where they have drinks with people as exactly like themselves as possible, but I'm here to organize against cisheteropatriarchy so we can *all* survive and thrive.
Another thing that factors hugely into being seen as an annoying queer person: neurodivergency. Society at large already sees us as weird and annoying, and the queer community is no stranger to this either. I can't count the amount of times a queer person, especially a trans woman, has been labelled as cringe or weird or problematic, when they were just visibly autistic. However, it goes beyond just replicating those patterns.
I'll speak mostly from my own experience as an autistic person but feel that it applies broadly to other flavors of neurodivergency. Because we are so often isolated from any sort of community growing up, we have no idea what it's like to be in one. Which leads to a lot of awkwardness as we have to learn how to be in very little time. Even if we somehow did already have experience with being in community, the queer community has its own plethora of unwritten rules and codes, and violating them will get you labelled as annoying at best. Autistic people also are wildly disproportionately unemployed, or to put it bluntly: poor as shit. Which makes participating in much of queer life tricky, as most events seem to be centered around upper middle-class income level people in expensive areas. Or when it comes to aesthetics, dressing visibly queer is cool as fuck, but it comes at a cost. Financially, as nice clothes are just plain more expensive, and socially, because if you're not living in a chill area, being very visibly queer can lead to really undesirable attention from exactly the wrong people. Lastly, there's also the participation in certain rituals that affirm one's identity. Specifically, there is (or at least was around when I figured myself out) the whole "throw out old wardrobe, get all new one" thing in trans circles. Which is fraught in both a financial sense (clothes expensive, especially nice ones if your body is outside mainstream parameters), and in its harkening to gendered norms (how do you acknowledge a non-binary identity like that, or for that matter, a binary female identity without going full 50s suburban housewife?)
Also, don't disregard the trauma from interfacing with the medical system. Speaking really for trans people here, but it's rough. I still flinch when thinking about when I pursued mine. The gatekeeping process was already intense, but I got the extra helping of having to argue for myself to be allowed a medical transition because I'm autistic. Because somehow being autistic means you're not capable to make such decisions for yourself. The infantilization inherent in such a thing hurts. It's been a few years, but attacks on trans people in the public arena have been focusing on autistic people which makes it hard to let the trauma heal because people with very real and tangible power are intent to inflict their hateful views on us.
Devon, I was not ready to re-confront myself in reading your post, but thank you. Especially in the section about "annoying bisexuals". As a Black agender femme who has mostly dated folks who aren't cishet, I have had to get super clear about my resentment and my own pain in order to not be dismissive of the pain of cis and afab bisexuals who only date cis men. I pinpointed that a lot of my pain was being told that I am "intimidating" and hearing how "intimidating" it is to date non-men by cis bisexual women. It is pain from hearing constantly that "men are easier to date", that the problem is who the cis bisexual person is dating, not the insecurity of the cis bisexual who is generalizing. I felt like my courage to be forward and take risks in love was not seen or held and that was why I was resentful. Relationships take work and don't just magically happen. I wish that more folks would have owned their feelings and were clear that they are "intimidated" or insecure about the prospect of not dating cishet men, rather than putting that on me or people like me. I am still working on the grief of being told I am "intimidating", in essence "too much", of being pushed away or put on a pedestal I don't fuckin' want for so much of my life. In being clear about my pain, I can hold a little more space for the "annoying bisexual". It is still hard when they do not own their fear. It sounds like you have had more interactions with folks who have been able to do that.
You are right that these annoyances of closeted, questioning and cringe queers do not hurt us. What I hear is that there is a need for more intracommunity care, as well as care for our own processes and journeys, and that we can't use oppression olympics as a way to justify our callousness or internalized shame.
I think at the end of the day, when I find myself the most annoyed, it is usually tied to 1) lack of self-compassion for an older version of me/unaddressed pain and 2) I am struggling with internal boundaries around where I pour my attention.
The last thing I will say, I think there might be a lot of vulnerability our community might feel, especially when a lot of the prominent and online voices skew young and are figuring themselves out still. They're still learning about themselves, how to talk about themselves, still learning conflict skills, emotional regulation skills, etc. We live in a society where a lot of non-queer reporting on queer and transness erases older folks and the wisdom of aging and experienced queerness. We are also still dealing with the loss of who would have been elders in our community. So perhaps the impulse to feel annoyance and shame over the folks who are still working through the identity formation has to do in part with how deeply vulnerable our community is. Not an excuse, though. While newer folks are not dangerous to us or oppressing us, having a lot of folks in our community that are not solid on themselves leaves us more vulnerable than if more of us were more grounded and experienced. That also puts a lot of pressure on those of us who do carework and care about the development of younger queers. (I work directly with younger folks in higher ed). I am glad to support folks who are still forming their identity, but this can be harder for older queers in carework within a landscape that doesn't value carework.
Very powerful and important, but there is one thing that I feel like needs to be touched upon. Part of the reason that older queers or those with more traditional labels often find younger queers and microlable-users not just annoying but disturbing is because of a sort of unsettled ontology. When someone adopts a label, they are implicitly adopting a body of theory that gives it meaning, and a lot of old queers may have a completely different idea of what their own identities even mean. There are femme gay men for whom being feminine and calling yourself a woman sometimes are just part of being gay, so when people started making gender identity and sexuality separate axes they pushed back. Similarly, for a lot of older trans-women, their sexual attraction to men was an essential component of what solidified their gender identity, and the identity of a trans-lesbian was hard to wrap their heads around, especially if they knew old bulls for whom being gender non-conforming was the first sign that they were lesbian.
In the era before stonewall, a lot of these terms weren’t codified the way they are now. Historically speaking, we aren’t all that far from the days when the phrase “the third sex” referred to those we now referred to as gay men, and even into the early 2000s there were elder activists who maintained that view. The introduction of concept like “gender identity” “sexual orientation” “romance orientation” actually redefined words that predated them, and some folks weren’t on-board. To this day, what exactly a gender identity means can be very hard to put into words, and some of the ways fresh queers are disrespected arise from the fact that their identities only make sense within a paradigm that older queers haven’t adopted yet, and still might not. To someone who accepted and made peace with the idea that he was gay because his mother was a strong influence in his life or his brain was exposed to xenoestrogens during prenatal develop, and that the trans women who also hung out at gay bars just got more of it than he did, convincing him that “stargender” is conceptually related to what makes the trans women transgender is just as much of an up-hill battle as it would be for any straight grandpa.
Thanks for this essay - a lot of great points, and I really appreciate your willingness to examine your past behaviour in a new light.
"I am not meant to be a man or a woman, I’m meant to be dissatisfied with a world that owes us all more options than that."
As an Annoying they/them that's usually just seen as a cis woman, that hit hard. I indeed, do not need to transition, not because of internalized transphobia, but because I don't aspire to be anything else than what I already am.
"I cannot view any less-experienced queer person as carrying more privilege than me."
What kind of experience are we talking about? The experience of being part of a group that doesn't want me and therefore doesn't have much to offer me? Of experiencing bisexuality in a specific way? Otherwise, I'm 41 and have been out as bi for 26 years, so I have quite a bit of experience in that. I happen to also be an Annoying they/them and demisexual, so I guess I win the Annoying Bingo - lucky me. But although having a non-binary vocabulary is newer to me, it hasn't changed how I perceive myself - it has just given me a shorthand to communicate that to someone who might be interested. To the rest of the world, I'm still a cis woman, and compared to the pain of maybe never finding love because of biphobia, it really doesn't matter much. I wish it were different, but the way things are, I don't want to have more experience in a community that is hostile to me, and I don't see what I would get from it since people like me are nowhere to be found.
I hear what you're saying and I see who you're talking about (I feel too old to use the label demisexual, because it doesn't serve me. I do identify mostly as tired, as the Hannah Gadsby joke goes). But generalizing by considering the Annoying as inexperienced isn't very helpful to those who just have a different experience. I've been out for a long time. I have an experience, and it is queer because I am queer, even if I was not considered or felt part of the community.
I appreciate you making explicit how those identities are perceived. The irony isn't lost on my autistic ass either that once again, I'm being considered annoying just for existing -- and by those who are supposedly my community.
thank you so much for this piece!! a few years ago when it was really popular to be an ace exclusionist, it never really sat right with me. i don’t think gatekeeping queerness does us any favors! i eventually slowly phased out anyone in my life who was saying ace ppl aren’t queer.
i actually fit into most of the categories you named here (bi person in a “straight” relationship, non-transitioning trans person, and tenderqueer lol) and … i’ve been really fortunate to only be welcomed by community, but there’s definitely a lot that happens internally that makes me think i should just excuse myself from community spaces even though no one has ever told me to do that. i also often think of how bi people make up most of the queer community, and the health disparities faced by bisexual ppl. we carry so much!
this perspective was really validating to read, so thank you again. 💖
As a Sapphic Gen X Transfeminine Demigirl Riot Grrrl who finally realized they were on the feminine spectrum and needed to transition in their late 40s, and even having been an activist with ACT-UP and Queer Nation in the early 90s spent most of their adult life until 47 appearing to be a straight dude, I have to say I feel this oh so much and wonder what could have been if we'd had the language we have today back in the early 90s when I read The Left Hand of Darkness and wished I were Gethenian...
Thank you for talking about ace people on here - this is my experience. Before I felt aware that that label existed I thought I was ‘broken’. Now I know I’m ace (or grey ace, or demi, whatever, I tend to say ‘ace spectrum’) I know I’m not.
Thanks for another great essay! Reminds me of how I embraced respectability politics when I was newly out and still struggling to reject the conservatism that had been my identity for so long up to that point.
Thank you so much for writing this piece, from a Very Annoying Queer Demisexual Woman Married to a Straight Man who Recently Discovered She is Neurodivergent. THE MOST ANNOYING!
I sort of came out on my Substack a while back and it was about the most fucking petrified I've ever been. What's saddest to me is that I feared the judgment from my queer friends (who are the vast majority of my social circle) than the straight ones.
Thank the universe for all "annoying" queers! I am one of them, no doubt. But in my younger years, I felt compelled to fit in, to belong, to be accepted, especially by my own community. I needed that, I thought. It's been a while now since I see things in quite a different way. I no longer seek permission to be me. Thank you for this wonderful piece.
At the personal level, it is also okay to feel exasperated running into, say, timid bisexuals while dating. It IS a real phenomenon across genders, as both I and my bisexual fem partner can attest. Having said that, all I do is ghost such bis and complain about them privately. There's nothing wrong with them, I just feel annoyed (sorry) at a wasted date.
I wanna say something really smart and analytical about this entire essay, but all I'm left with his a head nod and a "yeah, definitely." So... thank you for articulating all of this so eloquently.
I loved this article! I found it very affirming as a bisexual she/they married to a cishet man.
I was a bit confused by the example you gave of a bisexual woman married to a man. If her husband is coercing her into sex, that is inherently problematic regardless of her sexuality. A straight woman could also reasonably be suicidal in that context. So to me it didn’t seem related to her sexuality.
I am not meaning to take anything away from the legitimacy of her story, there is just something about the way you told it that didn’t make sense to me.
I definitely related to the part of her story in which she just got funnelled into the husband and children track. That happened to me and I didn’t decondition from purity culture until after I got together with my husband, so I am only now exploring my gender and sexuality from the context of a functionally monogamous relationship that reads as heteronormative.
Fortunately I haven’t come across biphobia in my own queer community.
I've been trying to find queer community where I live for almost 4 years now, both online and in person. I had a great community on the West Coast but ever since moving back to my hometown, it's been abysmal. I assumed it was in some way related to my autism, maybe COVID, it was hard to be sure. But now, I have a word and a framework for why it's felt so difficult. As an Annoying queer I fully understand I'm not the intended audience of this article. But, it has had a big impact on me.
I get it now and I am finally ready to stop trying so hard. That is a weight lifted for me for sure, but only because I am in a decent place with depression. If I wasn't this realization might be dangerous. My gay Uncle who was still closeted in many circles would have also been an Annoying queer by definition of this article, but he took his life last month. We had many conversations about how we both felt way too queer for our family and never queer enough in queer communities.
The fact remains that I and many other Annoying queers remain community-less. People who are Annoying queers (nonbinary, bisexual, etc) by way of identity versus lack of experience aren't going to just get less Annoying over time unless their identity changes. I get and respect what you are trying to do by writing this article, but also reading it from the perspective of someone who will never cease to be Annoying is fucking rough. That said, I also really, really appreciate it for saying the quiet thing I've long suspected out loud.
One more somewhat related thing to add: Unlearning Shame was extremely helpful for me in processing the death of my Uncle. Thank you for writing it.
I also think we need to point out to the gatekeepers that they are being entirely unserious about the rising fascism that the queer community is facing. We are way stronger if every economically-privileged "hetero"-married bisexual/demisexual/non-transitioning trans person comes out and bonds with and identifies with our community than we are if those people stay quietly in the closet while the rest of us deal with onslaught after onslaught.
Queerness is *supposed* to dismantle notions of gender and sexuality that keep people stuck performing social roles they don't come fully alive in, not create new rigid categories in which a few gay and a few trans people will be permanent discriminated-against minorities. Maybe the gatekeepers are out here to have exclusive little clubs where they have drinks with people as exactly like themselves as possible, but I'm here to organize against cisheteropatriarchy so we can *all* survive and thrive.
Another thing that factors hugely into being seen as an annoying queer person: neurodivergency. Society at large already sees us as weird and annoying, and the queer community is no stranger to this either. I can't count the amount of times a queer person, especially a trans woman, has been labelled as cringe or weird or problematic, when they were just visibly autistic. However, it goes beyond just replicating those patterns.
I'll speak mostly from my own experience as an autistic person but feel that it applies broadly to other flavors of neurodivergency. Because we are so often isolated from any sort of community growing up, we have no idea what it's like to be in one. Which leads to a lot of awkwardness as we have to learn how to be in very little time. Even if we somehow did already have experience with being in community, the queer community has its own plethora of unwritten rules and codes, and violating them will get you labelled as annoying at best. Autistic people also are wildly disproportionately unemployed, or to put it bluntly: poor as shit. Which makes participating in much of queer life tricky, as most events seem to be centered around upper middle-class income level people in expensive areas. Or when it comes to aesthetics, dressing visibly queer is cool as fuck, but it comes at a cost. Financially, as nice clothes are just plain more expensive, and socially, because if you're not living in a chill area, being very visibly queer can lead to really undesirable attention from exactly the wrong people. Lastly, there's also the participation in certain rituals that affirm one's identity. Specifically, there is (or at least was around when I figured myself out) the whole "throw out old wardrobe, get all new one" thing in trans circles. Which is fraught in both a financial sense (clothes expensive, especially nice ones if your body is outside mainstream parameters), and in its harkening to gendered norms (how do you acknowledge a non-binary identity like that, or for that matter, a binary female identity without going full 50s suburban housewife?)
Also, don't disregard the trauma from interfacing with the medical system. Speaking really for trans people here, but it's rough. I still flinch when thinking about when I pursued mine. The gatekeeping process was already intense, but I got the extra helping of having to argue for myself to be allowed a medical transition because I'm autistic. Because somehow being autistic means you're not capable to make such decisions for yourself. The infantilization inherent in such a thing hurts. It's been a few years, but attacks on trans people in the public arena have been focusing on autistic people which makes it hard to let the trauma heal because people with very real and tangible power are intent to inflict their hateful views on us.
Devon, I was not ready to re-confront myself in reading your post, but thank you. Especially in the section about "annoying bisexuals". As a Black agender femme who has mostly dated folks who aren't cishet, I have had to get super clear about my resentment and my own pain in order to not be dismissive of the pain of cis and afab bisexuals who only date cis men. I pinpointed that a lot of my pain was being told that I am "intimidating" and hearing how "intimidating" it is to date non-men by cis bisexual women. It is pain from hearing constantly that "men are easier to date", that the problem is who the cis bisexual person is dating, not the insecurity of the cis bisexual who is generalizing. I felt like my courage to be forward and take risks in love was not seen or held and that was why I was resentful. Relationships take work and don't just magically happen. I wish that more folks would have owned their feelings and were clear that they are "intimidated" or insecure about the prospect of not dating cishet men, rather than putting that on me or people like me. I am still working on the grief of being told I am "intimidating", in essence "too much", of being pushed away or put on a pedestal I don't fuckin' want for so much of my life. In being clear about my pain, I can hold a little more space for the "annoying bisexual". It is still hard when they do not own their fear. It sounds like you have had more interactions with folks who have been able to do that.
You are right that these annoyances of closeted, questioning and cringe queers do not hurt us. What I hear is that there is a need for more intracommunity care, as well as care for our own processes and journeys, and that we can't use oppression olympics as a way to justify our callousness or internalized shame.
I think at the end of the day, when I find myself the most annoyed, it is usually tied to 1) lack of self-compassion for an older version of me/unaddressed pain and 2) I am struggling with internal boundaries around where I pour my attention.
The last thing I will say, I think there might be a lot of vulnerability our community might feel, especially when a lot of the prominent and online voices skew young and are figuring themselves out still. They're still learning about themselves, how to talk about themselves, still learning conflict skills, emotional regulation skills, etc. We live in a society where a lot of non-queer reporting on queer and transness erases older folks and the wisdom of aging and experienced queerness. We are also still dealing with the loss of who would have been elders in our community. So perhaps the impulse to feel annoyance and shame over the folks who are still working through the identity formation has to do in part with how deeply vulnerable our community is. Not an excuse, though. While newer folks are not dangerous to us or oppressing us, having a lot of folks in our community that are not solid on themselves leaves us more vulnerable than if more of us were more grounded and experienced. That also puts a lot of pressure on those of us who do carework and care about the development of younger queers. (I work directly with younger folks in higher ed). I am glad to support folks who are still forming their identity, but this can be harder for older queers in carework within a landscape that doesn't value carework.
Very powerful and important, but there is one thing that I feel like needs to be touched upon. Part of the reason that older queers or those with more traditional labels often find younger queers and microlable-users not just annoying but disturbing is because of a sort of unsettled ontology. When someone adopts a label, they are implicitly adopting a body of theory that gives it meaning, and a lot of old queers may have a completely different idea of what their own identities even mean. There are femme gay men for whom being feminine and calling yourself a woman sometimes are just part of being gay, so when people started making gender identity and sexuality separate axes they pushed back. Similarly, for a lot of older trans-women, their sexual attraction to men was an essential component of what solidified their gender identity, and the identity of a trans-lesbian was hard to wrap their heads around, especially if they knew old bulls for whom being gender non-conforming was the first sign that they were lesbian.
In the era before stonewall, a lot of these terms weren’t codified the way they are now. Historically speaking, we aren’t all that far from the days when the phrase “the third sex” referred to those we now referred to as gay men, and even into the early 2000s there were elder activists who maintained that view. The introduction of concept like “gender identity” “sexual orientation” “romance orientation” actually redefined words that predated them, and some folks weren’t on-board. To this day, what exactly a gender identity means can be very hard to put into words, and some of the ways fresh queers are disrespected arise from the fact that their identities only make sense within a paradigm that older queers haven’t adopted yet, and still might not. To someone who accepted and made peace with the idea that he was gay because his mother was a strong influence in his life or his brain was exposed to xenoestrogens during prenatal develop, and that the trans women who also hung out at gay bars just got more of it than he did, convincing him that “stargender” is conceptually related to what makes the trans women transgender is just as much of an up-hill battle as it would be for any straight grandpa.
Thanks for this essay - a lot of great points, and I really appreciate your willingness to examine your past behaviour in a new light.
"I am not meant to be a man or a woman, I’m meant to be dissatisfied with a world that owes us all more options than that."
As an Annoying they/them that's usually just seen as a cis woman, that hit hard. I indeed, do not need to transition, not because of internalized transphobia, but because I don't aspire to be anything else than what I already am.
"I cannot view any less-experienced queer person as carrying more privilege than me."
What kind of experience are we talking about? The experience of being part of a group that doesn't want me and therefore doesn't have much to offer me? Of experiencing bisexuality in a specific way? Otherwise, I'm 41 and have been out as bi for 26 years, so I have quite a bit of experience in that. I happen to also be an Annoying they/them and demisexual, so I guess I win the Annoying Bingo - lucky me. But although having a non-binary vocabulary is newer to me, it hasn't changed how I perceive myself - it has just given me a shorthand to communicate that to someone who might be interested. To the rest of the world, I'm still a cis woman, and compared to the pain of maybe never finding love because of biphobia, it really doesn't matter much. I wish it were different, but the way things are, I don't want to have more experience in a community that is hostile to me, and I don't see what I would get from it since people like me are nowhere to be found.
I hear what you're saying and I see who you're talking about (I feel too old to use the label demisexual, because it doesn't serve me. I do identify mostly as tired, as the Hannah Gadsby joke goes). But generalizing by considering the Annoying as inexperienced isn't very helpful to those who just have a different experience. I've been out for a long time. I have an experience, and it is queer because I am queer, even if I was not considered or felt part of the community.
I appreciate you making explicit how those identities are perceived. The irony isn't lost on my autistic ass either that once again, I'm being considered annoying just for existing -- and by those who are supposedly my community.
Ooohhh I have so many thoughts about this. Not sure I’m up for sharing, but thank you for this beautiful defense of queer messiness!
thank you so much for this piece!! a few years ago when it was really popular to be an ace exclusionist, it never really sat right with me. i don’t think gatekeeping queerness does us any favors! i eventually slowly phased out anyone in my life who was saying ace ppl aren’t queer.
i actually fit into most of the categories you named here (bi person in a “straight” relationship, non-transitioning trans person, and tenderqueer lol) and … i’ve been really fortunate to only be welcomed by community, but there’s definitely a lot that happens internally that makes me think i should just excuse myself from community spaces even though no one has ever told me to do that. i also often think of how bi people make up most of the queer community, and the health disparities faced by bisexual ppl. we carry so much!
this perspective was really validating to read, so thank you again. 💖
As a Sapphic Gen X Transfeminine Demigirl Riot Grrrl who finally realized they were on the feminine spectrum and needed to transition in their late 40s, and even having been an activist with ACT-UP and Queer Nation in the early 90s spent most of their adult life until 47 appearing to be a straight dude, I have to say I feel this oh so much and wonder what could have been if we'd had the language we have today back in the early 90s when I read The Left Hand of Darkness and wished I were Gethenian...
Thank you for talking about ace people on here - this is my experience. Before I felt aware that that label existed I thought I was ‘broken’. Now I know I’m ace (or grey ace, or demi, whatever, I tend to say ‘ace spectrum’) I know I’m not.
Thanks for another great essay! Reminds me of how I embraced respectability politics when I was newly out and still struggling to reject the conservatism that had been my identity for so long up to that point.
Thank you so much for writing this piece, from a Very Annoying Queer Demisexual Woman Married to a Straight Man who Recently Discovered She is Neurodivergent. THE MOST ANNOYING!
I sort of came out on my Substack a while back and it was about the most fucking petrified I've ever been. What's saddest to me is that I feared the judgment from my queer friends (who are the vast majority of my social circle) than the straight ones.
Thank the universe for all "annoying" queers! I am one of them, no doubt. But in my younger years, I felt compelled to fit in, to belong, to be accepted, especially by my own community. I needed that, I thought. It's been a while now since I see things in quite a different way. I no longer seek permission to be me. Thank you for this wonderful piece.
Interesting and good take.
At the personal level, it is also okay to feel exasperated running into, say, timid bisexuals while dating. It IS a real phenomenon across genders, as both I and my bisexual fem partner can attest. Having said that, all I do is ghost such bis and complain about them privately. There's nothing wrong with them, I just feel annoyed (sorry) at a wasted date.
I wanna say something really smart and analytical about this entire essay, but all I'm left with his a head nod and a "yeah, definitely." So... thank you for articulating all of this so eloquently.
I loved this article! I found it very affirming as a bisexual she/they married to a cishet man.
I was a bit confused by the example you gave of a bisexual woman married to a man. If her husband is coercing her into sex, that is inherently problematic regardless of her sexuality. A straight woman could also reasonably be suicidal in that context. So to me it didn’t seem related to her sexuality.
I am not meaning to take anything away from the legitimacy of her story, there is just something about the way you told it that didn’t make sense to me.
I definitely related to the part of her story in which she just got funnelled into the husband and children track. That happened to me and I didn’t decondition from purity culture until after I got together with my husband, so I am only now exploring my gender and sexuality from the context of a functionally monogamous relationship that reads as heteronormative.
Fortunately I haven’t come across biphobia in my own queer community.