Until then...

Instead of the “if a man ever did that to me I wouldn’t put up with that” ask yourself “what if someone I trusted completely, who was struggling with something serious in their life, who I lived with, harmed me and then apologized profusely and cried and promised they’d never do it again?” If you can picture immediately walking away from— not a hypothetical person— someone you trust right now if that situation happened, then you’re in the minority.

And also- when, after abuse, survivors DO walk away from friendships and relationships the first time there’s even the hint of harm, then people shame us for “black-and-white thinking” or “self-sabotage” and imply we’re damaged, but then if we don’t do that and get abused again then it’s our fault cause we should know better

Folks really need to have more empathy for how emotionally complex abuse is. It’s not the same kind of trauma as a stranger assaulting you on the street. It’s someone who will cry after they hurt you and it will take months or years to realize that wasn’t about actual remorse but was so you felt selfish if you ever complained about their treatment of you and so you would comfort them and swallow your own pain.

It is not survivors’ fault for being compassionate or not compassionate enough or too forgiving or not forgiving enough— it’s abusers’ fault for abusing. There is no “you should have___” because I guarantee somewhere a survivor tried that exact thing and it didn’t save them. There is no way to win in a dynamic where someone has control over you.

“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.