Moonlight Sapphic

maybe peace was worth losing people for

Also! Stress tolerance is such an important skill that having a learning disability in that area is a major symptom of a whole lot of other disabilities/mental illnesses! Struggling with it is a huge part of life! It sucks!

Am I saying everyone with misophonia needs to listen to chewing noises all day? No. But you need to find ways to tolerate it enough that you don't treat others like shit if they make a mouth noise near you.

No, you don't have to read the fic with your trigger tags. But you do need to be able to handle scrolling past the tags without being upset.

It is hard! But not having it also makes you so so so easy to manipulate. That grandma is racist AF because her mom raised her to be uncomfortable around black people and she never fought that discomfort. Trans people make so many cis people uncomfortable and that discomfort turns into bigotry real fast.

It is certainly a (conditional/situational) benefit not afforded to visibly queer folks when a bisexual person (or any queer person, for that matter) is able to easily pass as non-queer in some contexts, but to act like this is a universal advantage afforded to bisexual women in het presenting relationships is inaccurate. Also, I think that since the advantage of being non-queer passing is highly situational, it’s a spectrum of experiences, not an advantage you either universally experience or universally don’t.

This is my experience as someone who identified as a predominately sapphic bisexual girl (at one point even identifying as a lesbian for about a year at 14) with a fluid sense of gender expression before I realized I was or came out as trans/nonbinary/multigender. My peers assumed I was gay and bullied me and otherized me for it before the age of 11, before I had even realized I was queer yet. When I got to high school, I briefly dated one cishet guy, and after that, I dated a bisexual “cis guy” for several years (the second one of them actually being an at the time unrealized transfem egg).

Even throughout this time period of several years in high school where I was perceived as being in “heterosexual presenting” relationships and treated with open disdain by some of my queer friends for “not being gay enough” or whatever, I was not functionally as “straight passing” as my monosexual gay friends often assumed that I was. Strangers and acquaintances still frequently assumed that I was queer in the same ways I always had been before I started dating, and treated me as such (often in a negative/microaggressive way, given the area I live in). Even people who knew I had a “boyfriend” still (correctly) assumed that I was queer quite often without me ever mentioning or implying it in any way. I wanna say I even had a few people assume that me and my bi “guy” egg partner, who I was very openly romantically affectionate with in public, were not even dating and that we were actually just a pair of lesbian and gay dude besties who happened to be very cuddly with each other.

Nothing about any of that feels very “straight/nonqueer passing” to me, even if I wasn’t at the time experiencing the same kinds of discrimination people publicly in visibly gay relationships experience (btw, at this point in my life, I’ve been in visibly gay relationships too, so I’m not talking out of my ass here). If anything, I feel like the types of queer discrimination I faced while in those relationships was at certain times indistinguishable to the kinds of discrimination that gay people who are visibly gay, but aren’t actively in visibly, publicly gay romantic/sexual relationships experience while going about their day to day lives in public.

The implication here is that we are supposed to “truly” be heterosexual, but the problem with that is that these same biphobes often also seem to have trouble believing that bi women can genuinely love men. When they talk about bi women dating men it’s often with all sorts of underlying assumptions:

She’s with him to enjoy heterosexual privilege.

She’s with him because she dated a woman previously and “needs both”.

She’s with him because bi women can’t help but be male-obsessed.

At no point does it ever seem to occur to anyone that she might simply be in love with the guy. Even the well-intentioned “men are just easier to find/date” is arguably an example of this, because it still hinges on the idea of bi women going for convenience rather than actual feelings.

You'll see trans folk, who cannot afford to begin their transition; non binary people, who chose to present as masculine today; people so early on their self discovery journey, that they're apprehensive about expressing themselves; closeted teens, trying to test the waters and questioning teens, wanting to find themselves. All of those people can pass as a bi woman's boyfriend. Many LGBTQ+ experiences are too complex and nuanced to fit in a binary, and by extension, to spot at first glance.

Passing is a privilege. Being out is a privilege. Snap judgments have NO PLACE at Pride.

"But hey," you say, "If someone is coming to Pride, are they not out?" No. Because if you assume they're only going for their dreaded bisexual partner, so can their parents. You don't know people's stories, and they don't owe them to you.