rain that falls is rain felt

so after a year and a half and over 100,000 notifications I’ve gotten on this post, most of which have been responding to this reply, I actually wanted to take a moment to address this because I’ve bounced back and forth

but I spent some time this morning reading a few more of your replies on the matter and I felt like I had finally pinpointed why there was a disconnect between the post I wrote and the response you gave

so my original post didn’t have any tags or clarifying information on it because it was a quick post made on my phone in anger at a specific situation – you said in a recent reply on this post: “ a post where the hypothetical girl knows she’s ‘queer’” – but I think that’s the root of the misunderstanding here. my original post wasn’t about a hypothetical girl, it was actually about a specific person, and the “mature and intelligent” qualifier there was in reference to said specific person who addressed the topic of her own sexuality with maturity and intelligence in a way that I know I, as a fourteen year old, would have been unable to do

it was particularly in reference to an interview where Rowan Blanchard talked about identifying as queer because of feeling that she has the potential to be attracted to women even if it’s not something she’s experienced, and to a fair amount of outrage over that article in which people were acting like she couldn’t possibly know that because she was a kid, and thus shouldn’t ID as queer

the point was not that she’s exceptionally mature for her age, or even that 14 year olds are mature, but that she handled the specific situation of her own sexuality with a maturity and intelligence that would probably be respected in someone not IDing as queer, but instead was written off 

I'm also sorry my addition made you feel guilty. I'm sorry people reblogging it made you feel guilty. I'm sorry I phrased it badly. I'm especially sorry I used the word "skeeved" in the tags.

Because that reblog was not really about you, and it definitely did not know your specific context -- it was me reacting to _the whole system,_ to what I saw as conceding a point we shouldn't have to concede -- and poor wording aside (very very poor wording, I cannot emphasize that enough), I honestly did not think that you _were_ sexualizing a child (not with all the baggage that phrase carries with it!).

I thought I spotted Unconscious Phrasing, a commonly Unexamined Concession. And I thought, IIRC, that your lack of direct response meant you understood I wasn't trying to accuse you of anything awful, that you somehow knew I was upset about the broader societal trend, but the fact remains that I threw those upset feelings onto your post -- and it got popular and you have been feeling crappy ever since.

I am exceedingly sorry.

I also sort of hate this website, the way it operates, the way you can make an off the cuff post about something personal in your life and it can get snatched up and read into and attacked and then circulated FOREVER by people who will never know that wasn't what you meant.

I know I'm phrasing that in a way that distances me from my culpability in doing exactly that. I've been on both sides, but this time I was on the other side. It sucks and I'm sorry I did that to you, full stop.

(Also, like, those original tags definitely underline the crappy way I conveyed the original message, and as you say it's been a year and a half so I could also be misremembering my own intent, but I think I got a couple of reblogs very soon after that that were upset with me for implying the OP was itself sexualizing kids, and I _remember_ being really surprised that that was the reading, despite having made it very recently. I can only conclude that I was upset and not thinking clearly when I wrote those tags because otherwise??? Wtf, self.

Like sure, heterosexuality is also a romantic default, but the sexuality element is there. If a pubescent kid stares a lot at boobs it’s also identified as a sorts of “precursor” to sexual desire and he’ll also be called a “player”. You can tell it’s always only a half-joke. So it’s definitely both sexual and romantic. 

This is because people acknowledge human beings are sexual. I get where you’re coming from, the issue of conflating queerness with promiscuity and shielding off predators and potential abusers. But you’re adding a lot of problems that Americans typically just absorb from their culture without question - the same culture which at times criminalizes sex between minors, pushes all sorts of misogynistic laws and ends up with skyrocketing teen pregnancy rates.

No sugarcoating it, you’re very ethnocentric. Look up any country’s mean age for first intercourse. Seeing stuff like 16 or even 15 is normal. What do you think teenagers are doing from puberty to 16. Not having sexual thoughts? Not having fantasies? Not exploring, most of all with people their own age? Not talking about masturbation, not looking at porn…? I’m not gonna spill my personal life here, but that’s where most non-penetrative sex that isn’t foreplay happens.

If a culture does not scrutinize its own puritanism and sex-negativity, it is the same culture that mystifies sexual stuff. It is the culture that treats it as taboo, as unnatural. Honestly, it skeeves me out you call a 14yo a child and then go on to say there’s a problem “sexualizing queer kids”, like sexualizing is a problem because a sexual teenager is inherently wrong or “overly mature” [???]. 

Do you know what the problem is in how culture conceptualizes queer sexuality? That queerness is conflated with “perversion” (eg kink, BDSM, paraphilia) and in turn “perversion” is conflated with criminal deviance (eg rape or abuse). A “goddamn qu**r” is seen as potentially deviant and his fundie parents will want to convert him because “gay people are promiscuous” and because anal sex is “antinatural”, a health hazard; because LGBT is “a bad, predatory influence on kids” that leads to a fundamentally bad “gay lifestyle”. 

So the blanket statement of “stop sexualizing queer kids!” rubs me off the wrong way in this context, especially because it’s not a child. Pay mind to the negative consequences. You’re 1) arbitrarily defining a sorts of ‘maturity’ to be allowed to be sexual that doesn’t match anything real, and only paying mind to your own culture 2) desexualizing any teenager who could naturally be exploring their sexuality safely at that age, 3) completely glossing over aromanticism and other queer identities, which obviously intersect with this subject (hi! gay aromantic!) 4) not criticizing sex-negativity, which in turn throws under the bus groups like people with hypersexuality (and queer/kinky/”deviant”/mentally ill minors are especially vulnerable to having sexuality be vilified or suppressed). 

The solution isn’t sticking our fingers in our ears and going “omg these are children, also sexuality is something you conveniently acquire at age 18, and which normal people don’t think about before!”, the solution is real sex ed, sex positivity, and not treating sexuality like it’s inherently evil and icky. 

I get the feeling that the recent spate of “”“discourse”“” where people have been screaming that queer kids (arbitrarily deciding what kid means as whatever is most convenient to the poster) are precious cinnamon rolls has had a disastrous effect on the reading of this post?

But my original point was just that a girl having a crush on a girl is not _more_ sexual (specifically, more NSFW) than having a crush on a boy, and doesn’t require _more_ maturity.

Not that fourteen year olds can’t feel _whatever they feel, to whatever degree they feel it, including sexual thoughts and feelings._ Because it varies a lot from fourteen-year-old to fourteen-year-old, but yeah! I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said really. I’m very firmly NOT against comprehensive sex ed for everyone, starting immediately in grade school so that we can keep everyone as safe as possible (including helping them protect themselves if and when they start engaging in sexual contact).

I was using “kid” (or in this case child) in the way that encompasses teenagers (and just means “!= an adult”) because that’s just kind of how I’ve used that word since I was a teen myself, and now I’m thirty+ and people younger than 23 look kind of like babies to me (in the same way that when you’re a high school senior, freshman sometimes look like babies to you!!), but that’s on me. It doesn’t reflect on you, if you’re a teen, or on any teens reading this.

I agree, precisely because of how both were seen as “deviant”. I see we’re in the same page then. Thanks for the level-headed reply, I understand what you mean, different ways of sexualizing straight and non-straight people definitely betray heteronormativity.

As an aromantic gay person I’m more invested in how heteronormativity is as much “hetero-romance-normativity” as “hetero-sexual-normativity” though, because I have experienced the latter a lot even as a teen myself. Like the way you worded it made it sound like it’s the normal thing to notice you’re gay because you have a crush, which was so not my case, I noticed I was gay because boys turned me on in the ways my friends were turned on by girls. And I’ve experienced the negative aspect of vilifying sexuality very intensely, not just for queerness but for kinkiness (though in this case the culprit ideology was Catholicism, not American Puritanism - they work similarly). I know a lot of queer ‘kids’ who are “early bloomers” and have had real early “awakenings”.

I don't think it's your fault for reading it this way and not psychically knowing what I meant. (Similarly I don't blame myself for not being able to predict how badly discourse would shift!) If anything I blame Tumblr because of how it thoroughly decontextualizes posts. I think if you'd seen this as it originally appeared on my blog many moons ago, you would have had a very different sense of what I meant by the words I was using, although some of it is also idiosyncratic, or still carries implications I didn't intend.

What I intended to say in the post is this:

"I object slightly to OP's phrasing, which (by describing the hypothetical 14-year-old as 'mature' and 'intelligent' and '_not_ a kid', and even by _using 14 as the age_ rather than 10 or younger) is -- probably unconsciously -- accepting the assertion by pericisheteronormativity that there is an age limit on queerness.

"That 'a child' _can't_ know they aren't cis, aren't straight. That they must be 'mature' before they can question, before they can be trusted to know they're different in any way."

This is what I meant. It's obviously _not_ what I said! And that's not your fault at all. It's on me in a lot of ways, and you can see the, for example, thoughtless cissexism that had me turning a post where the hypothetical girl knows she's 'queer' to be all about orientation. (I intended to be kind of a catchall metaphorical stand in... but as you've pointed out it was alienating!)

Like sure, heterosexuality is also a romantic default, but the sexuality element is there. If a pubescent kid stares a lot at boobs it’s also identified as a sorts of “precursor” to sexual desire and he’ll also be called a “player”. You can tell it’s always only a half-joke. So it’s definitely both sexual and romantic. 

This is because people acknowledge human beings are sexual. I get where you’re coming from, the issue of conflating queerness with promiscuity and shielding off predators and potential abusers. But you’re adding a lot of problems that Americans typically just absorb from their culture without question - the same culture which at times criminalizes sex between minors, pushes all sorts of misogynistic laws and ends up with skyrocketing teen pregnancy rates.

No sugarcoating it, you’re very ethnocentric. Look up any country’s mean age for first intercourse. Seeing stuff like 16 or even 15 is normal. What do you think teenagers are doing from puberty to 16. Not having sexual thoughts? Not having fantasies? Not exploring, most of all with people their own age? Not talking about masturbation, not looking at porn…? I’m not gonna spill my personal life here, but that’s where most non-penetrative sex that isn’t foreplay happens.

If a culture does not scrutinize its own puritanism and sex-negativity, it is the same culture that mystifies sexual stuff. It is the culture that treats it as taboo, as unnatural. Honestly, it skeeves me out you call a 14yo a child and then go on to say there’s a problem “sexualizing queer kids”, like sexualizing is a problem because a sexual teenager is inherently wrong or “overly mature” [???]. 

Do you know what the problem is in how culture conceptualizes queer sexuality? That queerness is conflated with “perversion” (eg kink, BDSM, paraphilia) and in turn “perversion” is conflated with criminal deviance (eg rape or abuse). A “goddamn qu**r” is seen as potentially deviant and his fundie parents will want to convert him because “gay people are promiscuous” and because anal sex is “antinatural”, a health hazard; because LGBT is “a bad, predatory influence on kids” that leads to a fundamentally bad “gay lifestyle”. 

So the blanket statement of “stop sexualizing queer kids!” rubs me off the wrong way in this context, especially because it’s not a child. Pay mind to the negative consequences. You’re 1) arbitrarily defining a sorts of ‘maturity’ to be allowed to be sexual that doesn’t match anything real, and only paying mind to your own culture 2) desexualizing any teenager who could naturally be exploring their sexuality safely at that age, 3) completely glossing over aromanticism and other queer identities, which obviously intersect with this subject (hi! gay aromantic!) 4) not criticizing sex-negativity, which in turn throws under the bus groups like people with hypersexuality (and queer/kinky/”deviant”/mentally ill minors are especially vulnerable to having sexuality be vilified or suppressed). 

The solution isn’t sticking our fingers in our ears and going “omg these are children, also sexuality is something you conveniently acquire at age 18, and which normal people don’t think about before!”, the solution is real sex ed, sex positivity, and not treating sexuality like it’s inherently evil and icky. 

I get the feeling that the recent spate of """discourse""" where people have been screaming that queer kids (arbitrarily deciding what kid means as whatever is most convenient to the poster) are precious cinnamon rolls has had a disastrous effect on the reading of this post?

But my original point was just that a girl having a crush on a girl is not _more_ sexual (specifically, more NSFW) than having a crush on a boy, and doesn't require _more_ maturity.

Not that fourteen year olds can't feel _whatever they feel, to whatever degree they feel it, including sexual thoughts and feelings._ Because it varies a lot from fourteen-year-old to fourteen-year-old, but yeah! I don't disagree with anything you've said really. I'm very firmly NOT against comprehensive sex ed for everyone, starting immediately in grade school so that we can keep everyone as safe as possible (including helping them protect themselves if and when they start engaging in sexual contact).

I was using "kid" (or in this case child) in the way that encompasses teenagers (and just means "!= an adult") because that's just kind of how I've used that word since I was a teen myself, and now I'm thirty+ and people younger than 23 look kind of like babies to me (in the same way that when you're a high school senior, freshman sometimes look like babies to you!!), but that's on me. It doesn't reflect on you, if you're a teen, or on any teens reading this.

what a good question. let me see if I can do this justice with a good answer.

First off: let’s define ‘shipping’ as ‘desiring two characters to have romantic and/or sexual interactions and using social media or fanworks to share this desire with others.’  So: specifically looking at shipping as a social activity here, because I hope we can all agree that ‘shipping it’ - simply wishing for two characters to have some kind of interaction in your head - is not activism because it’s thoughts, which on their own nobody else knows about and thus can’t have an impact.

Shipping as activism is mainly talked about in the context of being ‘queer/LGBT representation’, and everything else is treated as secondary.*  So I’ll be talking about this primarily from that POV.

Okay.

shipping is not activism because shipping doesn’t do two important things that activism does: 

shipping does not generate or act as mainstream representation

shipping does not increase awareness or change social values

and that’s okay. Shipping doesn’t need to do these things because shipping takes place in a microcosm. Fandom is but a tiny, tiny fraction of internet and social activity as a whole. No matter how ‘progressive’ we collectively are, only in the rarest cases will we make a meaningful impact on society as a whole.

Shipping serves a different, but no less important purpose, which I’ll get into below.

That’s the short version. the long version is below.

Shipping is not activism because: 

Shipping is a fandom-specific activity and fandom doesn’t make much of a social impact. We get talked about a lot by the creators because we’re the people most likely to have contact with them and provide feedback on their content; we have an impact on creators in that sense.  But apart from coming to cons and talking on social media, when we get mainstream attention it’s almost always to talk about how weird we are. Also, we don’t cause social change. We can fan over something that already exists, but we can’t cause a show with better representation to be created.

Because of this: 

Meaningful, mainstream representation of LGBT/queer relationships come from mainstream media, and fandom is not the main force acting on mainstream media productions.  Remember when korrasami became canon in the last few minutes of the last episode of Korra because the creators knew about the shippers? Congratulations: you’re looking at an outlier that took a lot of very specific circumstances and luck to have happen. And most importantly: it wasn’t done to please the shippers.  Shippers may have given them the idea, but it was done because canon korrasami would create visible bisexual/LGBT representation. It was possible because the show was only airing online, to a smaller audience, and because of the herculean efforts of LGBT/queer activists over the last century to get our collective visibility and acceptability as high as it is (and yes, we have a long way to go, but we’re miles past where we were even 10 years ago.)

Current fandom seems to carry the belief that if we just ship hard enough and loud enough, the creators of an ongoing mainstream media will reward us by making our favorite ship canon.** The reality is we rarely, if ever, make a meaningful impact on the direction that canon takes. We’re a small, small part of the consumer base - a loud one, but small!  We’re often not the aimed-at demographic, either, so pleasing us is the last thing the execs trying to make a buck are thinking about. The material we’re fanning over is already old news to producers; short canons are usually already finished by the time we receive it, and longer ones are at least a season ahead in production time. (If we do make an impact, we won’t see it for at least a year or more.)  Shows must meet decency standards, and LGBT/queer relationships are still seen as higher-rated than their cishet counterparts.  Executives care about what will sell ad space or toys more than what fandom wants.

The fact of the matter is we have the cause and effect backwards.

Ships being ‘good representation’ is a function of increased mainstream media representation of marginalized identities, not the other way around.  When media was entirely full of characters who were white cis men, we shipped white cis men. And as media slowly stops having nothing but white cis men, we’re … still shipping white cis men a lot, because there’s still a lot of them and there’s still a societal bias that tells us that white cis men are the most important/interesting people (and simultaneously, because they are unmarked, we can’t accidentally fall into stereotype pits while fanning them), but we’re shipping more and more non-white, non-cis, non-male characters too. 

Real social activism leads to increased media representation - like the reclaiming of the word ‘queer’ in the late 80′s/early 90′s leading to a TV show called ‘Queer as Folk’ and featuring gay characters. And increased media representation leads to more marginalized characters for fandom to ship.

While transformative fandom does, to an extent, change things from canon to represent ourselves more - or just to suit our fancy! - canon always reigns supreme and is the most widespread version of the characters.  Canon becoming more diverse will always have more of an effect on fandom than fandom being diverse/having diverse content will ever have on canon.

Besides:

The desire to see ships become canon is not primarily motivated by generating healthy representation of marginalized identities.  Fans have been wanting their favorite ships to become canon since the Stone Ages.  The Harry Potter fandom wars were all about what was most canon: Harry/Hermione, Hermione/Ron, or Harry/Ginny.  Notably: Draco/Harry is not one of the pairings I list, because nobody thought there was the remotest chance that Draco/Harry would ever become canon.  It’s only recently that LGBT/queer rep in particular has been making a meaningful appearance in mainstream media, and suddenly slash ships have entered the ‘will it be canon!?’ fray. And some mlm fans feel they have more ‘right’ to canon because mlm ships are LGBT/queer rep.

Here’s the thing: if this was really about representation, then we’d all be celebrating if any mlm pairing became canon. No matter which pairing is ‘more progressive’, any LGBT/queer canon representation is better than none. But (surprise!) it’s not; the ‘queer rep!’ battle cry is just an additional cannonball in the arsenal of ongoing ship wars.*** And I venture to say that most mlm shippers engaged in a ship war would rather see an unrelated het pairing become canon than their rival mlm ship.

And this is because: 

Shipping is not, and never has been, primarily about creating healthy marginalized representation.  Don’t get me wrong: transformative fandom is heavily LGBT/queer/mentally ill/disabled/otherwise underrepresented, and we often create transformative fanworks that bring our identities into the story. That’s awesome self-fulfillment, and it can really bless and excite fellow fans who see fandom content that makes them feel more welcomed and recognized.  However.

Generating marginalized representation isn’t the primary motive for shipping. We ship out of love. We see the dynamics between two characters and think ‘oh, that’s hot’ or ‘I’d like to see more of that’. We ship for fun. We ship because we think two characters would look good together. We ship because we imagine ourselves as one character and have a crush on the other. We ship things for many, many reasons, many I haven’t mentioned here, maybe as many reasons as there are people in fandom doing shippy things.  And to that end, I’m sure that some people do decide what to ship purely because they believe it represents minority groups that need representation - but it would be too much to say that’s the main reason people ship things.

Shipping doesn’t need to be about creating healthy marginalized representation because:

Fiction is not reality; a person can ship the ‘right’ ships and still be a bigot IRL. and visa versa. Because we interact with fiction and reality in different ways, there are people who really love mlm ships but still think gay marriage is icky. On the other hand, a person can be the loudest activist for LGBT/queer causes in real life and only ship het ships in fandom, just because the dynamics of het ships pings their fancy more.

Shipping as activism preaches to the choir. Shipping being a fandom-specific activity, and many of us being oppressed ourselves, shipping the ‘right’ ship to increase awareness in the microcosm of fandom isn’t really accomplishing anything. Most of us are ourselves LGBT/queer, or friends with people who are LGBT/queer. Most of us are aware of how much pain the lack of representation in mainstream media brings on.  And most of us are sensitive to the fact that we’re not the only oppressed person in fandom space and are willing to learn more about how we can help other oppressed people.

If I could sum up the problems of current fandom, it’s that we assume that nobody else is #woke (even though most of us are sufferers). In that sense, shipping the ‘right’ ship doesn’t bring more awareness; it acts as a signal to others that you have awareness, and hopefully protects you from being erased or harassed as an ignorant asshole (’cishet’).

Most importantly:

Shipping isn’t activism, but it does something else great: it lets marginalized fans express and indulge themselves in any way that pleases them.  - fandom is primarily made of underrepresented minorities, so shipping is a way that we express ourselves and relate to one another - whether those ships are ‘progressive’ or not. So, so many of us deal with social stigma or harassment or hate in our real lives; we consume media to get away from that, and we indulge in fandom to get away from that.  Most of us are, just by existing and demanding space in the world, activists for the rights of the marginalized and oppressed. Fandom is a space for us to play with each other and connect over something fun and pleasant, and those fun and pleasant things don’t have to be activist things. We’re allowed to take a break.

The importance of activism and representation is to benefit the marginalized and oppressed, letting us be recognized and less stigmatized, and deconstructing the social and political structures that work against us leading fulfilling lives.  When we use shipping the ‘right’ ship as a bludgeon to attack one another, we are literally defeating the purpose of our own causes. We’re stigmatizing each other for our fandom interests. And we’re certainly not deconstructing any social structures that harm us!

In conclusion: The way we can be most activist in transformative fandom is, no joke, to care more about the fact that almost everyone else here is marginalized too than that one another’s ships aren’t marginalized enough.

*In talking about ships as representation we generally start with ‘this ship is queer/LGBT’ and then use all other axes of oppression to prove which ship is ‘more progressive’, i.e. - F1nnPoe and Ky1ux are both mlm, but F1nnPoe is more pure because it’s a black man and a Latino man as opposed to two white men. (Occasionally race will also be talked of as the primary point of value, depending on the fandom.)

**On a side note, this whole paragraph is also why it’s unlikely that fandom being ugly will ever cause a show to be cancelled or a pairing will get changed in canon because some fans were nastier than others. We’re like bugs with stingers: scary and painful but ultimately not that impactful (unless you’re allergic, I guess, but forget that part of the metaphor). 

***This is part of where the ‘I have to prove my ship is wholesome/their ship is evil’ stuff comes from: ‘proving’ to creators that your ship is the ‘better’ queer representation because it either covers more marginalized bases or is ‘more pure’, making it less objectionable for mainstream representation. (the joke is that bigots don’t care how pure an LGBT/queer ship is: they’re gonna still think it’s awful because it’s LGBT/queer.)

I mean this sums it up very nicely, but they’re being increasingly infiltrated by open, unapologetic anti-SJWs, and I think the language is… disseminating.

(The other three problems: a marked tendency to accuse inclusionists of imagining things (I predicted that, when called out on the use of that phrase rendering it code for suicide-baiting, they would tell us it’s “not that deep”*); the extra-bad understanding of how oppressions other than homophobia can also exist (folks just plain not seeing or refusing to acknowledge how this phrase could be ableist); and how hard it is to take them seriously when they pull grade school stuff like this.)

All the exclusionist responses fell into three camps: “go outside”, “it’s not that deep” (* so yeah, I was super right), and of course the brilliantly topical “pee your pants”.

I understand the intent, I really do.

I think that even in the very best of cases, though, using this as a retort just kind of... okay, apparently I have some stuff to unpack here, please gimme a second. (ilurblog, btw)

So, here goes.

“Go outside”/”log off tumblr” comes from a place of assuming, whether we’re conscious of this assumption or not, that the person we’re talking to is a maximally privileged person; a person who doesn’t experience abuse in their home life; a person who is overreacting to whatever it is we think they’re overreacting to* because they have no context for what a “real” problem would look like.

I don’t think this assumption does any of us any favors.

In part because it is immediately invalidating and cruel. In part because it’s probably not true.

That person who makes a huge screaming deal out of the fact that they didn’t get their Starbucks coffee exactly the way they ordered it -- I think a lot of us, myself included, are tempted to assume that person is overreacting because this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to them.

But I think it is just as likely, if not more likely, to be someone for whom this is instead the last straw.

Someone who is screaming at a barista in a public place because at home they’re not allowed to so much as breathe loudly without catching twenty different kinds of shit. Who just had their welfare application rejected for the twentieth time and doesn’t know how they’re going to survive the month. Who is, in fact, all too familiar with worse things, but for whom this tiny petty inconvenience lands a glancing blow against their deeply-fractured ability to Cope With Any More Shit This Month, and they broke under the strain.

(IMPORTANT: This in no way excuses screaming at customer service people. It in no way excuses harassing and suicide-baiting people over ships. The point of this reblog is not to excuse shitty behavior.)

I reblogged a post a while back that talks about “trashing the bathrooms”, and that’s what I think most anti behavior really boils down to.

The problem is that by calling it passing privilege, we confuse it with what is usually meant by privilege.

You do not have to pay for privilege. You can’t pay for privilege.

I am white; I have white privilege no matter what I do.

There is a whole system in place that puts a ton of money and effort and privilege into giving me and other white people privilege by stealing from people of color.

I can choose to play into and support that system to perhaps, arguably, access a little more of that privilege, and to help keep the racist system going.

Or I can work to unlearn racism and learn the ways I have been feeding the system, and work to cut them off, and work to support and defend people of color.

But I don’t earn white privilege through some kind of points system. It’s just there.

If I have to pay for privilege by giving up who I am, lying about who and what I am, hiding my past and present, then it is not privilege. By definition. Because I am paying for it - paying a very high price.

If safety and danger are thrust upon me at random based on people’s perception of me – as they are also done with my gender, as a genderqueer, and as they are done to gays and lesbians all the time as well – then that, likewise, is not privilege. It is Russian roulette.

This does not only happen to bi/pan and trans people, of course. Asexuals get the same bullshit. Biracial people get it. All sorts of light-skinned people of color get it. Femme women of all types get it. Butch gay, bi, ace, and trans men get it. Intersex people get it. People with invisible disabilities get it. All us liminal people get it. Who am I leaving out?

Privilege is when you have access to safety and acceptance that others don’t, based on things you cannot control.

It especially becomes a problem when we accept it and use it and (no matter how obliviously or intentionally) support the harm of others.

Whether that’s active, like telling bi people that we should stop whining about erasure, or passive, like ignoring bi experience, politics, and culture in favor of the vicious cycle of bias confirmation.

(Like only hearing about bi history as bits of tiny scraps in the context of gay history, where it’s not mentioned when major figures were actually bi, or when something specific to the bi community happened. And then assuming that’s an accurate picture of community history instead of specifically of one piece of our community. And then assuming that bi people are in the minority, don’t do much of the work, and don’t have many problems. And then assuming that people who say differently are being divisive and self-centered, because they aren’t really oppressed, because you haven’t heard anything that says they are, so….)

Passing is not privilege. It is a form of blackmail, a threat.

“Pretend you are gay in this community, pretend you are straight in that one, and pass, and we’ll treat you as we treat each other. Admit you are bisexual, and we will take you down.”

That is not what privilege sounds like. That is what it looks like when people WITH privilege turn on you.

You can also tell it’s not privilege, because the same communities that shame and reject us when we DON’T pass, immediately turn around and use “passing privilege” to tell us we’re not oppressed – and certainly not oppressed by them!

Like: when the Association of American Universities did a study in 2015 on sexual assault and harassment, bi students consistently reported significantly higher rates of everything than their gay and lesbian counterparts, who reported significantly higher rates that their straight counterparts. 

(And most of the time, aces fell between bi students and gay/lesbian ones - and obviously, therefore, WAY above straight students. Which also counters the common perception that “nobody knows or cares if you’re ace.”)

Or like, 25% of bisexuals in the United States are on food stamps, compared to 14% of lesbians and gay men. 

Or like, while portrayals of gay and trans people have been rising and becoming more respectful – not perfect, the bury your gays trope is really fucking people up, but the characters are more consistently positive real people, not jokes or stereotypes – portrayals of bisexuals are actually getting WORSE. 

According to GLAAD’s “Where We Are In Tv” report for the 2015-16 season, “It appears that what the website TV Tropes calls ‘the Depraved Bisexual’ is only getting more common. Bisexuality in general on TV is on the rise; among television’s regular and recurring LGBT characters, 28 percent are bisexual. 

“But while gay and lesbian characters on TV increasingly are portrayed in a way that doesn’t make their sexuality into a large and dubious metaphor about their character, bisexuality often is portrayed as… untrustworthy, prone to infidelity, and/or lacking a sense of morality… [using] sex as a means of manipulation or lacking the ability to form genuine relationships; associations with self-destructive behavior; [or used as] a temporary plot device that is rarely addressed again.“

Or like the Canadian study that found that whereas 9.6% of straight women and 29.5% of lesbian women reported feeling suicidal, suicidality among bisexual women was found to be as high as 45.4%. As for men, whereas 7.4% of straights and 25.2% of gays reported suicidality, bisexuals who reported suicidality made up 34.8% of the respondents. 

Whereas in Britain, “young and middle-aged bisexual adults reported poorer mental health than any other sexual orientation group examined. The researchers even go as far as saying that ‘[p]revious studies may have overstated the risk of mental health problems for homosexuals by grouping them together with bisexuals.’” 

I would agree that the gay community doesn’t have systemic power in and of itself. But it’s done an admirable, amazing job of fighting for and gaining SOME systemic power – for society to take seriously hate crimes, and marriage equality, and “the pink dollar,” and see gay people as real people, and as an important political force. 

There are still tons and tons of barriers; there’s HB2, there’s the entire Republican party, there’s tons and tons of heterosexism. And all of this varies so widely from country to country. 

But there’s a consistent pattern where the money donated to LGBT nonprofits, which is where most of that SMALL amount of legislative and media power comes from, does not go to bi organizations or bi issues. 

“Funders for LGBTQ Issues” publishes an annual report showing where this money goes. From 2008 through 2010, $0 went to “bisexual-focused issues.” In the most recent report, which is for 2013, it had increased to “less than 1%” of the total grant money nationwide. Even though bisexuals make up about 50% of the community. (Even among trans people, about 50% of us are m-spec.) 

So while gay people can’t oppress us, they can deny us the resources we help fight for. They can certainly, on an individual level, make us feel like we do not qualify for those resources, like we’re not bi enough or not gay enough to access them, like we’ll be turned away and rejected if we try to access them. And we can’t really say that the stuff we experience there is homophobia. 

(Personally, I’ve seen a lot of straight people who are biased against both bi and gay people, for distinct reasons – my own in-laws aren’t comfortable with either group, but are definitely less happy with bi people and more judgmental of us. Because they see us as choosing to ignore God’s will, instead of just as pitiable souls who are allowed to be gay but celibate.) 

They can, individually and as organizations, erase and silence us without even meaning to, to the point where we don’t know that we’re experiencing more of the effects of oppression and need more help. It becomes this vicious cycle where we all think that bi people are sort of unoppressed semi-straights, and just generation after generation buys into this idea in both groups.

Which can then lead to the same organizations that we participate in not dedicating any resources to bi issues. Not even knowing what bi issues are, often. Not having any specific bi programming, not having bi people very high up on their staff, often not having us in their name, just kind of… passively continuing to accept that we’re not important in this battle. 

I totally agree that that kind of suspicion of “you must be suffering less, you look more like the oppressor to me” comes from the oppressive mainstream culture. It’s a divide and conquer tactic. 

And that bi erasure originates in that culture, as much as gay erasure and all our other queer erasures do. 

The root of our oppression is the same. All of it is rooted in cissexism and intersexism, tbh. All of it is this desperate ploy to protect the idea that everyone is supposed to be male or female in the “right” way – cis, and gender-conforming, and perisex, and sexually active with only the “opposite” sex (but definitely sexually and romantically active), and only within a monogamous relationship, and probably some other shit I forgot. 

Presumably it all goes back to capitalism trying to generate more workers or something like that. And to the kyriarchy, the drive to divide every group into “good” and “bad” so that you can force yourself onto the “good” side and get power over other people. 

Honestly I think SO much of it is probably intersectional, too. Like, I have a friend who would agree that she gets some kind of privilege from “passing” as straight. And also, she’s white and cis and gender-conforming and I think perisex and upper-middle-class. And I think that’s a big part of it. 

And I don’t actually know, if she were with a same-gender partner, how much would change for her personally; she’s been with the same guy for freaking ever and has kids with him. I think it’s very easy to say things like, “Well, I don’t have to deal with any oppression at my work, because I’m perceived as straight,” and never measure the psychological cost of being closeted at your work and (if applicable) having a straight partner who may not understand your experiences and culture. 

Seriously, the classic example is that a bi woman walking around with a guy will be read as straight, while a bi woman with another woman will be read as lesbian: the first one “passes” and the second doesn’t. But that’s ignoring two major, major things:

a bi person walking around single is also going to be read as straight, not because of some nefarious plan, but because heteronormativity means we assume all people are straight unless proven otherwise. that’s why coming out is even a thing.

the same is true of every other closeted person, regardless of orientation, because heteronormativity is a hell of a drug. even non-closeted people can “pass:” the entire “gals being pals” meme is predicated on f/f couples being read as platonic friends. are we going to accuse them of “passing privilege” because people assumed they were straight?

I mean this sums it up very nicely, but they’re being increasingly infiltrated by open, unapologetic anti-SJWs, and I think the language is… disseminating.

(The other three problems: a marked tendency to accuse inclusionists of imagining things (I predicted that, when called out on the use of that phrase rendering it code for suicide-baiting, they would tell us it's "not that deep"*); the extra-bad understanding of how oppressions other than homophobia can also exist (folks just plain not seeing or refusing to acknowledge how this phrase could be ableist); and how hard it is to take them seriously when they pull grade school stuff like this.)

All the exclusionist responses fell into three camps: "go outside", "it's not that deep" (* so yeah, I was super right), and of course the brilliantly topical "pee your pants".

Someone said, “We’re openly suicide-baiting too much, it makes us look bad. How can we fix this problem?”

And then, instead of actually addressing the behavior itself – instead of taking a long, hard look at themselves and asking why so many people on their side are doing something so obviously unacceptable, or even just disavowing the behavior going forward, the solution that side came up with was to latch onto a crummy meme and use that as a very, very slightly coded way of continuing to suicide-bait.

So, there’s the first way in which this phrase illustrates the problems their side has as a whole: seeing an actual, clear problem and then refusing to address it in any meaningful way. Just slap a thin veneer over that problem and call it done. (See: “it’s always been lgbt– I mean, lgbtpn”, “the S in SGA can also stand for ‘similar’ gender”, etc.)

Next, there’s the question of what they were planning to do, should anyone ever call them out on this thin veneer of acceptable discourse. My bet? Lie, feign innocence, and accuse the inclusionist of “reading too much into things”, which is itself one step removed from accusing us of imagining things, which is itself one step removed from… etc. Another of their favorite tactics: accusing opponents of hysteria, paranoia, and lies. (Mostly this last is aimed at ace rape victims. Because exclusionists are a classy group of people.)

(ETA: I feel so privileged to have been proven absolutely right, as there are now a small group of exclusionists on this very post, complaining that it “reads too much into” their cute phrase. The number of them that have so far expressed dismay at the ableism, now that it has been pointed out, hovers at “zero”, but there’s still time.)

Then there’s the fact that this particular veneer is itself wildly ableist. Like, obviously so, to the point where I am actually having a difficult time imagining a conversation between a bunch of people theoretically well-versed in social justice concepts where nobody thought to mention that, even taken at face value, their substitute retort was terrible.

It is, however, somewhat less surprising when you remember that all of this ultimately stems from tumblr radfems, who have always been exceptionally bad at intersectionality. I mean, oppression that doesn’t really affect them personally can’t possibly matter that much, right? (See: blatantly mocking community acronyms from outside the USA; loudly insisting that community spaces with no oppressors in them even exist, much less must be protected; so on and so forth…)

This never occurred to me. Not once. That Americans are against Health Care because they think it actually costs tens of thousands of dollars for a broken arm, hundreds of thousands for a complicated birth, millions for cancer treatment.

Also, each rate for each thing is negotiated between the provider of the thing (lab, hospital, etc.) with each individual insurer.

For instance.  A complete blood count, a common common lab test, cost the following at one of my clinics:

$40 if billed to the patient’s insurance (their insurer may pay less than that depending on the insurer’s contract with the lab.  Each insurer, again, contracts separately with the lab and may pay more or less depending on that contract.)

$25 if paying cash out of pocket (a rate we negotiated for our patients directly with the lab)

$175 if billed to a person who did not have insurance and was not paying cash.

Let that sink in.  If you are paying for yourself, you could be paying 5x that of what insurance will pay.