Scribbles and Bits

Very great timing for you to mention this since I just wrote an article defending bisexual lesbians for my gay sociology class. While writing it I realized that the arguments against bi lesbians are similar to the transmedicalist arguments, as well as the plural slapfight, but the latter would be going too off topic and take too much space to explain. We already realized in the past that transmedicalism and sysmedicalism (the word we use for the plural slap-fight) are very similar in their motivations, arguments, and counter-arguments.

I quote the relevant part of my essay at length if you're interested:

Perhaps these people [those against bi lesbians] do feel insecure about their own identities, which is sadly not at all uncommon in the LGBT community. As a trans man, I know that the trans community is notorious for this. Many trans people feel deeply insecure about their own identities and doubt whether or not they are really trans, and unfortunately some of them deal with their insecurity by projecting it outward and scapegoating other people—they accuse trans people without dysphoria, or who present in an unusual way of not being really trans and of causing harm to the trans community by diluting the trans label and causing cis people to not take trans people seriously. The reality is that transphobes already do not take trans people seriously regardless of what the so-called “transtrenders” do, and it’s unreasonable to blame the behavior of transphobes on them, after all that is something they have no control over.

A similar counter-argument to the one against transmedicalists applies to the anti-bi lesbian brigade. These people accuse bi lesbians of distorting the meaning of the lesbian label, and of enabling misogynistic straight men to harass lesbians under the presumption that they might be attracted to men. First of all this argument presumes that bi lesbians are never given unwanted attention by misogynistic straight men, which implicitly victim-blames those bi lesbians for their own harassment, second of all it is unreasonable to blame women (and feminine-aligned people) for the behavior of misogynistic men that they cannot control.

EDIT: Maybe I should share this after I turn in my essay. Oh well