diary of a simp

This is obviously bonkers, but it’s also incredibly rude. It sets up sexuality as something determined by outsiders. It implies that outside observers can detect gender by looking. But most worryingly to me, it sets up the implication that queerness can be erased by partnering: in which case, of course, all inconvenient cases of queerness could simply be erased by force.

Queerness has never been a property that can be destroyed by marriage, because if that were possible, it would have been. It would be very, very favourable, to enforcers of the majority, if sexual identity could be destroyed by forced marriage or corrective sexual violence. Despite tremendous efforts, queerness resists. Despite pressures, it remains innate. Despite destruction, it blooms. Every day queer children are born into violently heteronormative cultures and forced to conform in every aspect of their lives; regardless; they are not straight, and cannot be forced so.

If we can understand, on easy mode, that:

gay and lesbian people in m/f partnerships are not straight in those partnerships.

Gay and lesbian people who were married, perhaps coercively, throughout history were not straight.

Gay and lesbian people who are coercively married to female and male partners today are not straight because a marriage has been forced on them.

gay and lesbian people who married each other throughout quite a lot of history - for companionship, safety, children, finance, and all the other perfectly good reasons for which people pair off with a friend - were not straight.

Gay and lesbian people who have been in relationships before coming out were not straight for the period of the relationship.

That’s easy mode, but if we can recognise that, we can understand that the queerness of gay and lesbian people is not a fragile property that can be destroyed or displaced by their partners.

From there, it should be possible to understand how this extends to bisexual and asexual people; and if you didn’t see how that works before, I’m glad that I got to tell you it now.

When we recognise that there are benefits to being partnered - the old idea that bi people enter m/f relationships simply out of greed for these benefits - we must also recognise that lavender marriages have brought security, comfort, joy, pleasure and companionship to countless queer people, who were, also, always living through history in quiet sufficiency and joy. There are benefits of lavender marriages today. Plenty of gay, lesbian, bi and ace people are partnered to people they aren’t particularly sexually attracted to, and sexual attraction is not always the only reason to be partnered. Plenty of straight people are as well.

We should recognise there are plenty of reasons to be in relationships, and that the enjoyment of a pleasant and comfortable household with a good friend and perhaps a family, can, in fact, have nothing to do with one’s sexuality or sex life. This, for much of queer history, has been queer history. (It has a genetic component, you know. If you’re the first queer person in your family, no you’re not.)

Then for the next levels of understanding: you cannot know who is, or who is not, trans.

You cannot know what is, or is not, an m/f relationship just by looking. If you believe you can, you are probably a bad judge.

You cannot understand a relationship by (for example) a coworker referring to their husband or wife, because the coworker may be deliberately choosing what personal information to reveal to you. You have to face the fact that you may not be a safe space, or, more broadly, that people may not always be out to you.

You cannot infer a sex life from the information that someone is in a m/f relationship. People are polyamorous, and why the hell would they tell you?

You cannot infer a sex life from the information that someone is in a m/f relationship. People may be cheating. (It’s funny how the trope of “the stupid/ignorant/abusive spouse doesn’t realise their partner is bi/gay and running around in them” vanishes from people’s consciousness when they want to erase bi people.)

And people can be trans. Trans people can be in m/f relationships. Trans people can be in m/f t4t relationships that you can’t tell by looking.

What appears to be an m/f relationship could be a gender-non-conforming relationship.

Nonbinary, genderfluid and genderqueer people are quite often in what appear, to outside observers, as m/f relationships. Their partners may or may not identify as straight or queer.

Although this may be astonishing to people who were born yesterday, bi people in m/f relationships are often both bi.

And not only that, but a bi person in what seems to be an m/f relationship with “a really straight cishet person” is often with someone who’s quietly a bit gnc or queer, or will be in the future; and that’s honestly not anyone else’s business: what the hell about one partner being Out implies that both of them should be?

In conclusion, you cannot really say very much at all about the status of people in an m/f relationship, except for what they’ve told you. And if they are telling you that they are bi, then you’ve received information about their sexuality and need no further info. You can say, “thanks for sharing that with me.”

Hopefully, if you were confused about this before, this has helped.

It would have sounded really scary and over-the-top to say right away at the beginning of this reply that the logic of “bi people in m/f relationships can’t be bi” is the same logic of “queerness can be destroyed through corrective violence, conversion camps, forced marriage.” But it is the same logic - the idea that queerness is fragile and breakable, and can be scared or forced or shaped out of someone, if the majority simply finds the correct formula. It’s a violent idea, and no less violent when queer people are enacting it on each other.