Never has she felt it so keenly until today
Oh gee, a new piece on Orlando that rivals Mariella Mosthof’s for terribleness.
When I read about Orlando, I was surrounded by straight people. Well meaning straight people, yes, allies, yes, but straight people all the same.
I was surrounded by straight people because I was at my house with my husband and my daughter. I spend a lot of time around straight people (thats what I get for marrying a cishet man), but I noticed it more today than I have any other morning. When I heard the news, I started counting down the time until I could be around queer people.
No doubt the apparent distaste for and disapproval of her own husband and daughter are meant partly facetiously, and yet…she’s basically serious.
Being a bi woman means occupying a lot of weird liminal space. In that way we are very queer….we don’t fit well into boxes. Too gay to be straight, too straight to be gay, we are often locked out of the resources and support meant for the queer community due to biphobia and erasure while being pornified and objectified by the patriarchal male gaze of heteronormative culture. It’s no wonder that bi women are suffering from such a serious mental health crisis.
Blah blah blah, me me me, aren’t I fascinating. Ima get to Orlando any minute now but first, note how fascinating I am.
Being bi comes with the double edged sword of “passing.” Because I’m married to a man, and because of my high femme gender presentation, most people will assume I am straight.
Oh no, she struggles under the crippling burden of…Assumed Straight. That must be awful.
But the horrible thing about “passing privilege” is the closeting, the erasure. And never have I felt that so keenly as I feel it today while I mourn Orlando.
Ah. Never has she felt the horror of “erasure” so keenly as now, because of the slaughter of 49 people in Orlando. Never has her sense of narcissistic injury bitten so deep as it has today when she makes Orlando somehow about her.
“Passing privilege combined” with bi erasure and femme invisibility means that unless I tell someone “I’m queer” they will probably assume I’m straight. It means that when I come out to people, they don’t get it, I don’t fit the narrative they are used to hearing. It means straight people make jokes about “Spring Break” or “Katie Perry”. It means straight men ask if they can watch. It means that people, both gay and straight, DON’T BELIEVE ME when I say I’m gay. It means coming out over and over and over and over again…sometimes to the same person. It means I get dragged back into the closet every damn day. It hurts every time, but today in light of this already bleeding wound, biphobia and erasure is excruciating.
It’s all.about.her.
I’ve used this elsewhere but that sure as hell ain’t low-cal dressing on that word salad. Biphobia/erasure is a problem, no question, but this isn’t fucking about you…
Now if it’s on her personal blog, whatever, that’s where you post all these kinds of self-centered feels, but I take it that’s not the case…
Even on a personal blog – even in a god damn personal ink and paper notebook that no one else ever sees, I still think self-censorship could rush to the aid of anyone who starts to say Orlando reminds her of how tragic SHE is.
I don’t normally feel like I have to post a comment like this…but that is fucking disgraceful. No1curr how queer you are.
Maybe I’m marginally more empathetic because of my own selfish tendencies/crippling self-loathing. Either way, it’s still pretty bloody awful.
There is no such thing as “femme invisibility.” That’s not real. That is not a thing.
The place of bisexuals in the larger gay community is fraught, and does come with its own problems to be worked out. But this is nothing to do with that. This is no more to do with genuine need than the transing of everyone, and the demands to shut the fuck up about women and gynecology when we’re talking about. . . women and gynecology.
When I hear that 50 lives have been snuffed out in a vicious attack on a gay club in Orlando, the very last thing I think about is the “erasure” of living, breathing human beings who are so fucking enamored by their own wondrous uniqueness that they can’t help but to call attention to themselves after a brutal tragedy like this. Simply pathetic.
And that comment section. Holy hell but do those snowflakes believe they are each so very special. Look at me! Look at me! (And just ignore the fact that I used the deaths of 50 people as an excuse to make you look at me.) Please, please, please, will you just please look at me!
Well 49 people, and one human exemplar of why humans are terrible.
I sympathize with her worries over her perceived and felt queerness.
But this is exactly wrong:
“You get to be 100% sad, Elle. Because you are 100% queer. And because I am 100% sure that there were bi people in that club, too.”
What?!
She should have said: you get to be 100% sad because 50 people are dead and it doesn’t fucking matter how queer you are.
…Yes? And? She’s actually complaining about not being categorised at a glance. As in, she actually wants to be visibly
unique snowflakebi. And there I was, thinking being placed in a behavioural box based solely on appearances was a bad thing.Equivalently, what she wants is for people with different sexual proclivities to look like people apart, which strikes me as a completely damaging thing to teach.
Bwaaaaaaaaa! Icky straight husband and daughter could never understand how she feels being all left out of things.
Funny, but it’s them her writing makes me feel sorry for. Maybe because I have too many friends with an NPD parent.
Isn’t “Passing Privilege” a self inflicted injury? I mean, any time you want to give that privilege up it’s as simple as making people aware of your otherness. Sure, that is going to be uncomfortable. Possibly very uncomfortable. But isn’t that one of the defining emotional states of lacking privilege?
The narcissism is strong in some people. I think Maureen said it best the other day so I’ll leave it at that.
I found it works best to read the article in a Derek Zoolander voice.
@9: I’m waiting for one of these people to suggest wearing an easily recognised symbol. Maybe a pink star.
EVERY reaction, it seems, has been a reflexive assertion of the personal hobby-horse of the reactor.
Gun nuts, anti-immigrant racists, Islamo-apologists, and now homophobes….each has spewed out their prefabricated ‘reaction.’ Usually long before any inconvenient facts have surfaced.
…What? (Was this supposed to be in reply to something else?)
Someone thinks that they are missing out on the cookies that they seem to think are rightfully theirs for being a part of the new, cool gang.
“Look at meeeeeee! I’m sitting here, all privileged – and it isn’t faaaaair! How dare you not recognise that I’m suffering such existential angst that is at least as terrible as not passing, getting beaten up and killed?! Those people who just treat me as a part of normal society are so meeeeean!”
Who cares if someone makes assumptions? Unless they are acting upon those assumptions in a way that does physical or mental harm to other people, what someone is thinking is simply no-one else’s business.