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Trans Activists Are Erasing Bisexuals
The more I talk to my kiddo and gathered friends (in SoCal), the more I am getting called “old” and “old fashioned”. Imagine me, a young mother, not yet 50, being schooled by my 18-year-old about how the LGBTQIA+ community isn’t what it used to be.
I’ve been told time and again that my experiences are no longer valid. Whether or not they’d come out and say it exactly, that’s the gist. It would never be said explicitly, because everyone’s experiences are valid, etc, etc. But it has been said to me that everything I know is the old way.
The old way includes bisexuals. You know, the women or men that love women and men.
Since we know now that gender either doesn’t exist at all or is completely non-binary or on a scale of masc to femme (unless you’re indigenous and Two-Spirit), this means that bisexuality no longer exists. The Federalist called it back in 2017. Trans movements are erasing homosexuality. If there is no gender or it is how you feel or it is fluid, then there can be no protections based upon gender or sexual orientation since it can be changed at any moment.
According to my kid, this makes me a TERF.
Maybe it does. But I have always felt that rights for people with various disorders are individual and shouldn’t be lumped into a large, generalized group that does not take into account their various issues. Trans people are not a homogenous group. Some are relatively well adjusted. Many are not. Many have serious identity conflicts that are not just related to their ideas of being in the wrong body.
Regardless, by definition, this eliminates bisexuality. If there are no genders, then bisexuality is a lie. It is even to the point that biresource.org, the resource for bisexuals is now calling it “bi+” because there are trans people who consider themselves bisexual. They even go so far as to define it:
For example, bi+ activist Robyn Ochs defines bisexuality as “the potential for attraction to people with genders similar to and different from [your] own.”
I guess the bi, in bisexual refers to what, then? No one really has an answer for that. It is like lesbian or gay. It is out of fashion. Now it is all just queer.
There is, therefore, only pan-sexuality; the idea that one is attracted to a person, not a gender.
In 2017, 390 people out of 100,000 were estimated to be trans. Approximately 50% of respondents were younger and it was expected that more would identify in the future. According to the Williams Institute, over 1,397,000 people in the US identify as transgender. It is only expected to rise as younger people are identifying more and more as queer, trans, or non-binary.
I never needed particular visibility. I never felt the need to “come out” to anyone. Whoever I dated was my business and if I introduced my person to someone, that was what it was. If I felt like talking about the relationship, I did. If I didn’t, I didn’t. I didn’t need a flag or a pin or an undercut to show just how bisexual I was/wasn’t. I never felt the need to explain it to anyone (except maybe my parents when I was in college, but I got over that).
I still do not need “visibility” or special treatment. What I would like, however, is for my orientation to be respected and not turned into something it isn’t based upon this apparent fluidity of gender. I would like to not be judged as some sort of bigot because I love men and women.
And I want my men to be men and my women to be women.
Otherwise, what is even the point of bisexuality or the attraction to the two? The idea is that they are different. The idea is that it is okay to be attracted to that.
I understand that trans life is very hard and I have known a number of people who have transitioned partially or completely, had surgeries (or not). I am not discounting any of that. But what I do discount is changing the terminology to mean something completely other than what it is.
I am not bisexual+. I am not queer.
Also, I’m not old!
Fun side note: according to the Williams Institute, Texas is gayer than New York by more than 24,000 people.
Second side note: pictures searched through Shutterstock show more “trans” when searching “bisexual”. Can’t be escaped. I will provide no commentary about this.
Published in General
I dunno. Sometimes power differential is a component of sexuality. Sometimes sex is a component of power. So I am a little hesitant to sign onto what animals do for dominance as ‘sexuality’ per se.
I suppose once you have a gay flag it’s inevitable that someone will feel the need to rule all of gaydom.
Indeed. The sheer arrogance of claiming to be a woman when you are a man or vice versa, beggars belief.
Oh, you’re no fun anymore!
Puberty blockers were developed to delay early onset puberty (precocious puberty) – which is when puberty starts when a child is much younger than 10 or 12.
Yes. But on a case by case basis, why yes or why no? Meaning, it depends on why the treatment is prescribed.
I think the point is you can’t say something always happens or never happens when it’s a medical procedure. It is case by case, but at the same time what is typical is also informative about what usually happens or doesn’t happen.
‘Safe, legal, and rare’ is usually only 1.5 of the three.
Male and female mallards pair together long enough so that the female mallard can lay its eggs and then the male mallard leaves the female mallard. Mallards have a high rate of homosexual activity.
This isn’t me advocating that human beings behave like mallards. Just pointing out that we can’t blame the high rate of mallard homosexuality on woke education.
But… if a group of scientists started studying a large group of mallards, interacting substantially with them as they did so, and rate suddenly zoomed upwards, it might not be an entirely insane idea to wonder if said interaction had something to do with it.
Good point. Maybe there was a flaw in the study design.
Is this a new Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle? You can know where someone is, or whether they’re homosexual, but not both?
What’s needed is a study design that is double-blinded and with placebos. I haven’t figured out the details just yet.
And ten thousand sets of parents to volunteer their children to be experimented upon.
I am looking for ten thousand mallards, but no volunteers just yet.
Thank you for your response. Seems like we would need some stats, given the level and tone of advocacy and resistance?
So the problem was they wanted things they couldn’t have – and weren’t able to deal with this early on without ‘pathologising’ it as a medical issue?
Wrt transition/detransition, I don’t know how QA’d this study is, but:
This article had a different perspective, both in terms of numbers:
But also:
Which seems like it’s an important anecdotal point.
That actually was true for a lot of gay men’s coming out process. A lot of gay men carry that with them and universalise their own experience unfairly. There is a ‘lesbian till graduation’ aspect to how bi men are perceived.
But tell me again why bi men need gay men’s approval?
Coming out as gay doesn’t depend on getting straight people’s approval, that’s not the point.
How is coming out as bi different?
Gay men and lesbians didn’t create gay/lesbian culture(s) as some kind of elaborate hobby. We did it because we needed it (community), and we needed it because we couldn’t ‘pass as straight’ enough to get by without damaging ourselves.
Is that the case for bi people as well – or let’s be specific, for bi men as well? My suspicion is that if it was they’d create a culture and community to fill that need.
Ha! If they really like it I bet they still do it. (Or they definitely would if they were gay, wait, this is not the formulation I wanted….)
It’s the other side of married men who have sex with men (‘she’s my wife, he’s just sex’) but definitely don’t see themselves as gay.
I would also want more details about how long after surgery these people reported being “satisfied.” If the “regret” rate is so low, why still so many suicides?
I blame the woke. I’ve got my outrage flag flying, don’t rain on my parade!
How many suicides is a good question.
This…and it is much more than anecdotal. The current default gender-affirmation position to neglect biological, physiological and teleological evidence and leans toward elevating psychological self-perception. It is at best anti-intellectual, at worst is maliciously ideological.
Ruby expresses a perspective that is currently persona non grata among both professionals and the culture at large.
One of the dilemmas of talking about LG issues, let alone BT issues, is figuring out who to believe. Social conservatives flat-out don’t trust the so-called authorities in the psychiatric and medical fields. Of course, the experts then go out of their way to prove themselves blatantly biased. We’re left with our own anecdotes to go by, and let’s face it, that’s not good enough. So I’ll tell you the truth, and so will Annefy, and we’ll both be sincere, and our “truths” contradict each other.
Cue the youtube video where some Lefty schoolteacher is coaching mallards on sexuality, before second grade!
In fact transgenderism and SSM are close analogs. We have a biological reality so fundamental and important and impactful that we recognize it socially via formal institutions. Both SSM and trans turn that dynamic inside out, either prioritizing the preferred social recognition and forcing reality to fit or denying and destroying the underlying reality so that only the social is left. If there is no underlying reality then the recognition doesn’t make sense and can only lead to devaluation and/or compelled value. So here we are, gender identity is now supposedly individual yet the rest of us must accept and respect this self conception as if there were no underlying reality or alternate perceptions of our own.
I think one of the main reasons why same sex marriage became widely supported was that numerous people had sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles and friends who were homosexual. People who weren’t homosexual starting thinking that our society was treating homosexuals badly and wanted to correct this.
But a homosexual doesn’t need surgery or powerful medications in order to be homosexual whereas at least some subset of transgender people are supposedly like a fish out of water if they don’t have surgery to modify their body parts or take powerful drugs to prevent puberty.
The strange case of the homosexual necrophiliac duck pushed out the boundaries of knowledge in a rather improbable way when it was recorded by Dutch researcher Kees Moeliker.
Well said. There should be space for contradictory true anecdotes on Ricochet,
andas there should generally be in life.I know two gay men who have been together longer than my wife and I have been together. I have a hard time believing that either of them made a conscious choice to be homosexual rather than heterosexual. Also, I don’t think society would be better off if these two men had to keep their homosexuality “in the closet.”
Thufferin’ Thuckotash!
I think it became successful because civil marriage was already severely damaged and few could even conceive of what it once meant let alone actually make that argument in the face of opposition who once again manged to conflate opposition to SSM with opposition to homosexuality. That dynamic is afoot again, except that most of us don’t need a to be convinced that men and women are different and so it’s more difficult to broadly villainize the recalcitrants. So far. That, I fear, won’t last any more than the prior conception of civil marriage lasted. The precedent has been set in our society time and again: the whole must affirm the individual.
To be fair, opposition to SSM was often paired with religion based disapproval of homosexuality, so there was some overlap.
And the (grudging) ‘I don’t care what people do in the privacy of their own homes’ only really emerged as a voice on Right when people realised that ISIS was killing gay men by throwing them off buildings, and the antisodomy attitudes were suddenly off brand.
You should read the corrected article:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9049036/
It was corrected in 2022. The various charts included reasons for de-transition, many of which included things that I’ve already mentioned (dissatisfaction with their lives, not truly making them feel how they wanted, etc). But the numbers being looked at in each study were around…1 or 3. These numbers are so low, it’s so difficult to speak too broadly about it (in the scientific sense). Anecdotally, we can say whatever.
But really, this has completely derailed the original post. Perhaps we need to go somewhere else for that.