Not A Transmed Either

“The word bisexual makes me cringe at times, but saying I’m heterosexual or a lesbian feels inaccurate - regardless of who I am in a relationship with. So, cringing all the while, I use the label. Because of my relationship to the term feminist, I have learned that cringing is often a sign of unfinished political business: the label bi sounds bad because, at least in some ways, bisexuals are an unliberated, invisible, and disparaged social group.” — Look both ways : bisexual politics, Jennifer Baumgardner, 2007

By encouraging this idea that a word can “just not sound right” or “makes me cringe”, we encourage internalised biphobia, internalised homophobia, and other internalised prejudices. 

Making new identity labels can be an elaborate system of avoiding using words based on internalised prejudices. Are people basing their sense of self on what makes them unique rather than what unifies them with a marginalised group they hold prejudices towards? Those prejudices are going unexamined. 

I’ve found that people who avoid the word bisexual generally know nothing about it. They’ve never read a book on bisexuality, they don’t know anything about the history, about bisexual political activists, about existing organisations or conferences, about whether in reality bisexuals date nonbinary people or not (we do). People don’t reject the word based on educated opinion, although there are people online who do their best to create false definitions to discourage people from using it, which I suppose is in their best interest if they want to avoid analysing their own prejudices.