bi lines

[cjsmith]

~ waves at people who inspired this post ~

I use "I'm bisexual" to mean vaguely "The people I am attracted to can be, but are not necessarily, of the canonical binary gender opposite the one I was assigned at birth". I think that my meaning for it is in response to my presenting as female, being long-term partnered with a cis dude, and therefore being presumed straight most of the time. "Bi" merely means to me that nope, I don't fit in that box.

Not to mention I'm approximately as female as a doorknob or a window or a lampshade. (Also approximately as male as all those things.) The "my own gender and something else" definitions of "bi" get weird when mine is sort of... undefined.

I have found a variety of genders and physical presentations attractive, including nonbinary folk. Maybe if I were figuring myself out anew today I'd say pan, but I grew up with "bi" and am likely to keep it.

Comments

[batrachian]

*listens and nods*

This is always the problem I've had with Kinsey scale definitions and the like - building "who I like" on the sands of "who I am" is...conflating concepts.

[cjsmith]

YES!! Exactly. It’s so goofy.

[lcohen]

yeah--this is one of those "the world changed on me" things for me. when i was coming out (and i identified as a lesbian for the first 24 years after coming out) bisexuality was dismissed as a phase and so i fought alongside my bisexual friends for the visibility and inclusion of bisexual under the queer umbrella. now bisexual can be read as exclusionary and that's hard because i don't mean it that way, just that, having fought the fight, it's hard to give up. and you can still find people to dismiss it as a phase!

[cjsmith]

Yes to all of this. Some of it is just wearying, though it’s satisfying to see bi routinely included these days. That fight wasn’t fruitless.

[hitchhiker]

yeah, 'bi' is as good a word for it as any!

[cjsmith]

Indeed - considering the many and varied reasons that it totally sucks! But so do all the others! (See firecat's comment below and my response.)

[minoanmiss]

Makes sense to me. :)

[cjsmith]

Hah, cool! I’m never quite sure it makes sense to ME, and I’m the one that has to live in this brain. :-D

(See also comment above about defining “who I like” based on “who I am”. I sort of get a mental divide by zero when I try that. Ah, humans are complicated.)

[labelleizzy]

It took me most of my life to realize that I saw myself as a person first, and as having a gender (& therefore expectations around the myriad gods damned gender roles)... I'm just mad that I didn't break free of that till I was 40 and realized that *people* are neat, across the board, and I learned about attraction across genders...

I literally say bisexual because a) that was the first term I heard that matches what I realized, and b) ...I like the bi flag better than the pansexual flag.

[cjsmith]

Seeing oneself as a person is an amazing breakthrough and massively difficult to achieve for those of us brought up in female bodies in this culture. (The gender role stuff in the USA in particular has become enormous in the last 60 ish years / aftermath of WWII.)

And I agree with you 100% about the flag! ♥

[firecat]

I have yet to find a single word that both matches how my sexual orientation feels and is recognizable by other people.

Going by the original meanings of the prefixes: pansexual doesn't apply because I'm not attracted to (a) everybody (b) every gender (or (c) cooking utensils). Bisexual doesn't apply because I'm attracted to (a) more than two people (b) more than two genders.

"Attracted to many genders but not all"? Relevant prefixes are "poly-" (but polysexual is already taken for something else) or "multi-" (multisexual just makes people look at me and go "huh?").

My solution is to use "bi/pan."

And let's not even get into how I'm more reliably (but not exclusively) attracted to people whose relationship to gender is in some way alternative. I'm going to have to learn German if I want to come up with a single word for it all.

[cjsmith]

"Pan" reads to me also as "all", and as you mention, I too am not sure I fit that. Many, yes; all, probably not? How many are there, anyway? I have a friend, S. S. does not use pronouns at all. "S. picked up S.'s book" is how the grammar tends to go. That seems to make S.'s gender pretty darn unique. If I find I am not attracted to S., am I not pan? So yeah.

The more I think about gender, the more I realize that defining "who I'm attracted to" based on "who/what I am" is ... divide by zero. And while gender certainly plays some role in my landscape of "attractiveness", it is neither a deal-breaker nor a deal-maker. Maybe I just don't fit this set of labels at all. (which is fine too!)

And let's not even get into how I'm more reliably (but not exclusively) attracted to people whose relationship to gender is in some way alternative.

OH YES A TON OF THIS. For one thing, this hits my sapiosexual-ish buttons: these people have thought about this stuff instead of going through life doing what they were programmed to do. It also hits my justice/fairness/equality buttons: gender is a thing may people don't think much about, that fact has impacted my life in some enormously negative ways, and people meeting this description *have* bothered to think about it and may treat me less shittily as a result.

I'm with you. Gotta learn German. For now, I like the bi flag colors so... shrug? :-D