Sudden realization:

Every. Single. Round. Of LGBTQIPA+ "discourse" is an attempt to corral some kind of non-binary orientation, gender, or experience, and make it stop Being Like That.

I've suspected that before, tbh. But I was flipping through @revdrshane's "Playing With Fire: Queer Politics, Queer Theories", reading longtime bi activist Stacey Young's chapter on "Dichotomies and Displacement: Bisexuality in Queer Theory." And it just all crystallized:

"The question of what one calls oneself, how one identifies one's sexuality - and why it matters - is bound up in identity politics... [which relies on] the binary split between 'us' and 'them'".

The only concept we have is of one group benefitting from oppressing its opposite.

We give lip service to intersectionality, but we don't really want it in here.

Most of us are ok with it when it comes to nice neat binary opposites. Like, "I'm white, and Black Lives Matter!" or "I'm cis, and trans people definitely have it worse than me!"

As soon as shit gets complicated, we drop the entire idea of intersectionality and run.

Because we're stuck on an us/them binary.

And that means we've decided ahead of time: we either have to be the "us" that's getting oppressed, or the "them" that profits.

If a group is different ENOUGH, most of us will buy that we could be the "them." (Whether or not we actually do anything about it.)

But if we thought a group was basically, almost, "us," then the hell we're letting them say that we're their "them"!

For example: Bisexuals managed to be explicitly included in the "us" in the 90s, but it was a HARD SELL.

Despite decades of being IN the community, and at the forefront of its activism.

Because bi people, by definition, break the gay/straight dichotomy.

The only way to preserve the gay/straight binary, and still include bi people, was with ideas like "straight-passing privilege" and "homophobia affects bi people too."

Even today, bi/pan+ people are sort of an afterthought: half-gays who half-need the same rights.

(Research about the effects of our oppressions have only separated bi and gay people out for maybe 8-10 years. Before that, if you saw a paper about "LGBT" or "gay" stats, it was giving the "LB" and "GB" numbers combined. Even tho the "B" stats were generally MUCH worse.)

The bi and trans movements were working together for inclusion, for it to even BE an acronym. And trans people were different enough (and, again, already THERE enough) for people to accept that too. (But there sure were a lot of people whining that it meant including heteros.)

But like, "aces?! they're not gay OR straight!!!! that means they're Not Us! And THAT means they must be OUR OPPRESSSOOOOOORRRRRSSSSS!" like calm the fuck down, seriously, if you can punch people as hard as exclusionists do you need to realize you're punching DOWN

Please don't get me started on truscum, I mean honestly what a stellar and amazingly detailed painting of the struggle to conceive of anything outside of an extremely simple binary

"Bi lesbians can't EXIST those are LITERALLY OPPOSITES"

how the actual fuck are those opposites

what a great illustration of how everything has to be a binary and those who don't fit will always secretly be seen as Them

"Nonbinary means whatever I need it to in order for my preconceived group divisions around language to exist"

"Nonbinary means whatever I need it to in order for me to REALLY still think of gender as a binary"

"If you're nonbinary you can't be a lesbian, because you aren't a woman. so even if you're only attracted to one gender, you have to be bi!"

"no! lesbian includes nonbinary lesbians, nobody should say they're bi!"

(And no, I don't think that anybody INTENDS to imply that nobody should identify as bi.

I just think it takes an whole lot of either confusion, or accidental chutzpah, to argue that "bi lesbian erases lesbians," and then follow that up with a definition of bisexuality.)

(The key here, tbh, is that I shouldn't have quoted my hypothetical imaginary person there as saying "lesbian" includes "nonbinary lesbians." Nobody says that. They say it's always included attraction to enbies. Period. In a context that inaccurately implies it means ALL enbies.)