#bi discourse

shit is dire.

do not let people pull you from the support of other queer people. right now, there's manufactured animosity between transfems and transmascs. ten years ago, it was manufactured animosity against aspecs, with people trying to create tension between asexuals and aromantics. before that, we were all supposed to hate bisexuals, for whatever stupid fucking reason people pulled out of their assholes. but i don't think it was other queers who tried to make us do that.

I do not believe it was started by anyone in the involved groups.

I think it was started by people who either wanted to watch us tear each other apart for fun, or people who have a vested interest in making sure we do not have solidarity with each other.

a system is what it does, and what does this "discourse" do? it keeps us sad and alone. it keeps us isolated from those who are different. it prevents us from organising.

I do not believe random anons who claim an identity only to express bigotry towards other identities. like, sure. there's assholes in every group. it doesn't serve us to believe that a random anon is who they claim to be, and it does not serve us to believe any random anon's words.

I do not believe a random tumblr sideblog who claims a marginalised identity, yet who spews little else but hatred towards other marginalised identities. like sure, there are assholes in every group, but it helps no one to listen to such blogs or to give their words any credence.

currectly, what do we have? we have an environment where many blogs are encouraging trans women to only trust other trans women, and we've got an environment where trans men and trans women are "supposed" to distrust and dislike each other as much as if not more than cis women and cis men distrust and dislike each other. that is not healthy for anyone, and I do not think that came about organically.

there was (as far as I could see) more transmasc/transfem solidarityposting than ever, until quite suddenly I saw a bunch of posts that said, like "I hate all men. especially trans men." and they followed the format of "joke" or "vent" posts, so when people tried to call them out it was met with "oh my god, can't you take a joke?" even though blatent transphobia isn't actually funny. but like. which blog orginiated that? and I didn't see the posts that started that went against trans women because I don't tend to follow people who post or reblog that, though I suspect that was more hidden in amongst all the "regular" terf posts that happen on this site.

and that should be a hint, I think. there are many people here who hate us. and we know that terfs make sideblogs and pretend to fit in.

we also know that 4chan used to "raid" tumblr back in the day, where a bunch of people would make a bunch of random blogs and post gore and other things in common tags.

I suspect that this "discourse" is a more advanced form of those raids and I think it would behoove us to reject it.

all that said, I want to address something of an elephant in the room: the blog transmascvoicesproject. it claims to (from the blog title) be about uplifting the voices of trans men/transmasc people. however, what the blog actually is, is a repository for anyone who is not a trans woman to talk about abuse done to them by trans women. it is a data collection blog, taking the voices of *everyone except trans women,* to talks *exclusively about trans women.*

i don't think that blog is run by a trans person, either. that seems like a terf ploy.

I did not research this. this may be a conspiracy brainrot thing.

but I don't see how taking any of the "discourse" seriously helps anyone at all.

my calls to action: do not trust or believe anonymous people in anyones askbox.

do not trust or believe random "discourse" blogs. (on the internet, nobody knows you're a horse. this means, you cannot know for sure that someone is who they say they are online).

"Id never date a bisexual man!"

"Men need to disclose that theyre bi before hand or else its assault!"

"Yeah im a bi woman but the idea of dating or marrying a woman makes me sick"

But at the same time seeing takes like

"Men are sexually attracted to women but romantically attracted to men and definitely arnt just misogynistic"

And lets not forget the classic

"I hate that Im straight sigh how I would love to be attracted to women cos men are so gross and women are so beautiful heterosexuality is a prison"

I know these mentalites dont seem related but they feel related

It is just hard to ignore the fact that when bi women are attacked in social media discourse, it is almost always just bi women who are defending themselves on their own.

It's kinda funny to me because the only reason these people do it is because they think bisexual men are gay. That's the whole stereotype, so that's what makes them worth defending. I promise a lot of these people are happy to tell bi men to fuck off and shut up once they get girlfriends, lol. While they're available to men that's when they become victims and not a moment sooner or later. Bi women are straight, on the other hand, and that's what makes us the enemy and the perfect scapegoat. We can pioneer queer rep in history, in the arts, in activism and they don't give a fuck because hello, hi, bi women are men-fuckers and also women so the only thing we can be is good queer allies and the only kind of allies we can be are people who let everyone else step on us. And, well, the LGBT coalition has a HUGE misogyny problem which is ironic because a lot of our human rights depend on the liberation of women as a class in society but lmao what can you do sometimes with people like this there's so much they've yet to learn and unlearn and social media makes it easy for them to feel like they've done work without doing it and that reward system just wins out over the slow and steady progress of self-betterment and learning.

Honestly, though, I don't blame bi men as much because those dudes rarely step up for themselves, lol. Like they're barely out to themselves half the time, but when they do show up for us, they show up BIG from what I've seen. That's why I'm so loud about bi4bi solidarity because our self-hatred and allegiance to everyone but each other and ourselves is nerfing us when we are literally each other's only hope.

the waves of hatred directed largely towards one or another subgroup of queer people are started on purpose by, essentially, 4chan raiders.

It used to be a thing back in the day, someone who was on both tumblr and 4chan would warn that 4channers were planning a "raid," where a bunch of them would make blogs to harass random people, especially queer people.

I think they (or kiwifarms, or whatever else) still do that, but they are more sophisticated bout it now.

They'll send anonymous messages to people's askboxes that say things like "as a member of [abc identity], I think that you and everyone from [def identity] are terrible no good very bad people!"

They'll make a blog or two pretending to be someone from a marginalised group, and post things that are similar to what other people say, and then drop in more and more extreme things, mostly targeted against other marginalised identities.

And those things get picked up by real people, who then start uncritically interacting with things like that.