Fashioned with New Language: A Conversation on Bisexual & Trans Shared Experience & Solidarity

It’s been a few years of a lot of cultural progress in some ways around queer & trans people; in a lot of ways it’s also been one of intense and concerning backlash, with a rising right-wing white supremacist movement and a very active companion TERF community, both of whom have a deep investment in a very regressive and dangerous ideology of gender & sexuality. In discussion about the sometimes-overlapping experiences we’ve had as bi and trans folks with these kinds of ideologies, we realized we wanted to take that conversation about what shared experiences & insights we have to a more public forum so we could hear from others too! This conversation features the following people:

KaeLyn: I’m a Korean-American cis bi woman and writer at Autostraddle slash nonprofit leader slash a few other hats/gigs/projects. I’m thrilled to connect with other bi folks to talk about the “B” and the “T.”

Heron: I’m the Senior Research Analyst for LGBTQI Justice at Political Research Associates where I monitor and write about anti-LGBTQI rhetoric, advocacy, communities, and leadership. That means I spend a LOT of time thinking about the whys and hows of anti-trans advocacy specifically.

Rachel: I’m managing editor at Autostraddle and a bi cis woman.

Xoai: Xin chào! I’m Xoài. I grew up on land that was cared for by the Tongva people before Spanish invaders arrived. I grew up knowing this land to be called Orange County, California. As waves of Vietnamese refugees made their way to the United States due to the war in Vietnam, so came my parents. My neighborhood was called Little Saigon, where the largest concentration of Vietnamese American people currently live. My upbringing in what I call “the brown part of OC” was vastly different from what people see on TV about white families in beachside mansions.  I was involved in narrative strategy, community organizing, and digital storytelling since 2014. I have worked on a national scale to lift up the voices of trans people of color and sex workers. I’ve facilitated workshops and given keynotes around interpersonal violence, imperialism, and even dating.

Rachel: I think we’re all interested in talking about overlaps and points of connection or solidarity between bisexual and trans experience (especially by and as observed by bi trans folks), and related, points of overlap between how bi and trans people are similarly targeted, stigmatized, fetishized or experience unique impacts of othering, whether at the hands of the state, mainstream cultural values, TERFs and more.

I’m really honored & empowered by the overlap between bi & trans communities; I’ve also historically felt really aware of the ways that non-bi folks’ anxieties or baggage with me as a bi person is often linked to their transphobia, or anxiety about gender that gets mapped onto trans folks, and I feel a lot of kinship with the experiences my trans friends have had dating cis queers and called to be in solidarity with trans folks in specific ways around that. It feels to me like there’s a lot of power and connection in talking about how all of us disrupt a lot of fixed narratives about sexuality or gender, and that the way both cis bi folks and trans folks (and especially bi trans folks) are subject to marginalization from a lot of the same groups really speaks to how much potential there is!

KaeLyn: There are a lot of shared experiences in terms of invisibility/hypervisibility, questions about the authenticity of self-defined identity, and exclusionary politics. There’s also a lot of joy and badassery implicit in approaching all binaries as fully optional and disrupting gendered norms. I’m especially interested to articulate the ways cis bi folks could be better building power with trans bi folks and just trans folks in general for our collective liberation.

Heron: Personally, I am an agender bisexual person with a LOT of bi+ friends and family. I guess I’m part of the bi+ advocacy community that blossomed in the early 2010s, and I went to the White House three times to talk with federal agency officials about how they can remedy the discrimination that bi+ communites face through administrative advocacy. I’m also the author of the Invisible Majority report that came out of that work, and the companion report on the lives of bi+ trans people. Since bi+ people face such start disparities in specific areas compared to our gay and lesbian peers, I was sure that bi+ trans people would as well, compared to gay, lesbian, and straight trans people. Though there’s little data, we were able to look at some of the data from the US Trans Survey to find that yes indeed, bi+ trans people face very distinct disparities in the areas of economic security, health, and violence.

In my current work, I think and write a lot about how the Left’s silence on sexual and gender fluidity allows the Right to dominate the conversation, particularly around conversion therapy. For example, the Right’s use of “detransitioned” people to illustrate that the trans medical establishment is somehow providing “too much care” for trans people. Instead of inviting people on every step of their gender journey to help us illustrate the incredible depth and breadth of the queer experiene. Imagine if gender fluid and sexually fluid people were invited by their community, their loved ones, and their health providers to just be THEMSELVES at any / every moment, instead of feeling like they had to perform a specific version of themselves or be kicked out of queer community.

As someone who is constantly in doubt over whether I’m bi ENOUGH or agender ENOUGH, I can’t imagine how it feels for someone whose gender journey evolves that significantly to be “kicked out” of queer community and then embraced by the anti-LGBT Right as a token of the failure of queerness.

KaeLyn: I really enjoyed reading the LGBT MAP report on bi+ trans people, Heron! Thanks for sharing it with us. I used to be a sexuality educator and I think in that space we too often talk about “B” and “T” as separate groups of people, or at least get really focused on helping people understand that sexual orientation and gender are very different things. We don’t talk about the actual people who are both trans and bi+, though, just that their existence is possible. I wasn’t surprised to learn that many trans people identify as bi or pan and I’m assuming some queer trans folks would also identify as non-monosexual. It’s also not surprising that bi+ trans people are experiencing the very same issues that cis bi people are in terms of sexual violence, poverty, and racist disparate impact. It’s disappointing, but not surprising and I think it’s something that’s not talked about much at all.

At the cultural level, in the US at least, when you say someone is bisexual, the image that automatically generates is of a cis bisexual person. The double erasure of bi+ trans people is something that really hurts and also makes a lot of sense.

How do you think we could shift the collective consciousness around cisnormativity within bisexual dialogue?

Rachel: That’s such a good question, KaeLyn, thank you for bringing it up! I think from my experience and instinct, a lot of that cultural imagination of a cis bi person is compounded by the fact that they’re often imagined to be a cis bi person who dates cis men and cis women, often in some perfect 50/50 ratio – I think about that cover image from the controversial NYT story “The Scientific Quest to Prove Bisexuality Exists,” a cis person perfectly centered between two other cis people of different genders. I guess what I’m saying is that it feels like the way bisexuality has been culturally made legible is as a sort of cipher for fixed, binary gender essentialism — these are people who date Men with a capital M and Women with a capital W, and we can take bisexual folks’ attraction to those genders as confirmation of what those genders categorically Are. Which obviously is wrong, both in the sense of being incorrect and being objectionable!

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think there’s a lot of potential for bi folks (especially cis bi folks taking advantage of the power of our positionality in that respect) to disrupt narratives of gender a bit. I think there’s obviously a responsibility to reject gender essentialism and the cissexism of assuming bisexuality exists in reference only to cis men and women, but to also specifically name and push back on the baggage about gender that a lot of cis people are externalizing when they bring up these questions, which is an engine of transphobia also. I’d love to push cis bi folks (myself v much included) to work on recognizing the transphobia often inherent when someone is biphobic toward me; when someone expresses, for instance, concern about “men in queer spaces” with the pretext of bi women’s partners, this can impact transfeminine and nonbinary people and people impacted by transmisogyny in ways that are more violent than the way they impact me, making them unwelcome or unsafe in queer spaces. I think it’s important that as cis bisexuals we see that and name when it happens – not because it provides a bolster to our own issues or we can bring up transmisogyny as a disingenuous gotcha, but because gender essentialism hurts us all, and trans people uniquely.

I think that doesn’t totally address your question, KaeLyn, and I’d love to hear more about it from others – what would it look like for bi+ trans people to be more successfully & meaningfully centered in bi community?

Heron: KaeLyn and Rachel, your questions intersect for me. I have two major groups of bi+ friends/family: one which is comprised mostly of cis bi-identified women who are looking for community outside of their core friend and family groups, and the other of which is comprised of SUPER QUEER BEYOND-GENDER friends who truly don’t see gender when it comes to their relationships. The former group was so important to me when I was first coming out as bi+, when I didn’t have anyone to turn to. And the second group has become so important to me now, as I come into my own BEYOND-GENDER-NESS.

What I’m trying to say is, I think that bi+ trans people and bi+ agender people like me, and bi+ gender queer people ARE out there and they are providing such an important space for people figuring out their shit, but they’re just not getting put in front of mainstream advocacy movements, like Rachel said.

There’s the added invisibility of bi+ people of color of all gender identities and gender presentations. Like, that Time cover is two white people. But in fact people of color are more likely to identify as bi+ (and are more likely to identify as LGBT in general), probably related to white, religious settler colonialism that erased complex indigenous understandings of gender and sexual orientation in order to promote white supremacy. There’s some analysis of the 2018 General Social Survey that really blew my mind. It found that the group of people *leading* the increase in LGBT identification in the US was young, bisexual, Black, less-than-high school educated girls. These young Black bisexual girls led the increase in identification for the ENTIRE COMMUNITY.

Rachel: Ah Heron that’s so amazing to hear about the youth! I’m really interested in that especially in light of how many other major global movements right now are youth-led, like the incredible energy around climate change, or the youth organizing against gun violence and the Sunrise Movement. I feel like from the overall discourse and coverage of those movements it’s always been kind of a given that a lot of those youth are queer (as there are always queer folks leading social movements!). I’m interested in the idea that youth are IDing intentionally as bisexual, as I guess I always wonder where Gen Z lands on that specific label; as a millennial, it sometimes feels like Gen Z both embraces labels more than my generation did and is less interested in policing them. This is also the generation that I think we’re seeing have a really different experience of trans identity in some ways than ours did; obviously it’s not uniformly great or even mostly okay, but thinking about the Atlantic story that was bringing up ideas of ‘trans teens’ in 2018 and is now only two years later a public example of journalistic malpractice for trans teens, it feels very much like this microgeneration is being made the lightning rod for a lot of America’s anxieties about what trans identity and living life as a trans person means. I’m curious to hear from everyone who feels like they have any insight into it — what feels like it might be possible for this generation around these intersecting identities? Are there horizons or kinds of experience or community they might be able to build beyond what we had or have?

Xoai: What immediately comes to mind when we talk about sexuality is that it’s flawed — it’s flawed because it operates at least in the US as an offshoot of one’s gender. As in, who are you and who do you like? It’s the relationship between one person’s gender and the gender of the object of their attraction.

A less clinical understanding of gender and sexuality feels most prevalent among both bi folks and trans folks, more so than cis gay and lesbian peers. I think bi and trans folks are leading the way in terms of our sexuality operating more expansively — we see attraction as less anchored in the gender-to-gender relationship. I myself find that it feels easiest to just say I’m attracted to masculine energy, because that energy can show up in all kinds of people with all kinds of bodies. And yet, masculinity is gendered because people only perceive of masculine and feminine energy as it’s contained within the gender binary of male versus female. I think it we named masc and femme as blue and green, it’s easier to see that this energy doesn’t have to exist as two opposites. Gender and the energy/aesthetics/experiences we associate with it can be fashioned with new language. It’s not a coincidence that so much new language on gender that has entered the mainstream has been created by trans people.

I think the American project to pinkwash its imperialism and pretend that it’s the leading voice on trans issues erases the Indigenous knowledge that rests in our bodies and our instincts. American clinical understandings of sex, sexuality, and gender overshadow the knowledge that we as humans have always thought about gender and sexuality more expansively — our souls are capable of so much more than boring cis, heterosexuality! It makes sense that young Black girls who haven’t been indoctrinated by American education are the ones who are returning to the roots of that knowledge.

KaeLyn: I love the imagery of masc and femme energies as blue and green, Xoai. That’s such a clear visual example of how limited and irrelevant a binary, opposite view of gender is and I’m definitely going to quote you in the future.

As we wrap up this conversation, I’d love to hear your final thoughts on how we move forward together, or if that feels too squishy and undefined, what your vision is for a world where bi and trans people and especially bi trans people are fully liberated. How do we get there? What do you think are the most important next steps?

Heron: My gratitude for spaces like this makes me think of the folks who DON’T have spaces like this–folks who live at other intersections of marginalized identities, like asexual bi folks, asexual trans folks. And as a white well-educated person, I think of the privilege I have that *didn’t* put up barriers to my accessing this space here today.

So as an agender bisexual person, I commit to being loud and proud and using my loud pride to lift the voices of those who aren’t here today. I really recommend you check out AS’s ace* resources like this list of books and Jessica Vazquez’s piece about coming out as ace.

KaeLyn: I am so grateful for all that y’all contributed to this conversation. I’m absolutely awed by how dang smart and generous and badass you all are. I’m just happy to be here! I commit as a cis bi person to be a better ally to trans people (regardless of sexual orientation) and to make sure any bi space I’m welcomed into is also welcoming to trans and nonbinary bi folks. Bi and trans folks and bi trans folks are what make the LGBTQ movement strong and we’re the ones pushing our own LGBTQ communities to expand, grow, make space, be better. And that’s exhausting work. My wish for y’all is that you have the time and resources to take care of yourself, that you have community with folks who love and embrace you, and that you give yourself grace and space to experience joy more often than you experience rage.

Rachel: Thank you all for letting me be part of this; I’ve learned so much! I’m rereading what we’ve talked about and am thinking about what Xoai’s observation about bi & trans communities as examples of places where sexuality & gender are both spaces of possibility, and also Heron’s observation that the far right is clearly fixated on questions of fluidity and change in both gender & sexuality. One of the reasons I was so interested in this conversation was because I wanted to think about why both trans & bi folks (but especially and very violently trans people) are being so pointedly targeted by the Right right now – obviously transphobia is hardwired into conservatism in general, but I think there’s something key about how necessary colonial ideas of gender essentialism are to right-wing ideology and the state violence associated with it. In what ways can the ideology of the colonial state be destabilized by embracing the expansive experiences and values of bi & trans communities? And most critically in building material ways forward based on trans leadership? The most powerful vision I think I can imagine around bi & trans liberation (which is of course linked to everyone’s liberation) is one where we continue to support each other in advocating for the needs of our communities and talking honestly about our lived experiences, even and especially when these run counter to established narratives about gender and suffer backlash; I feel strongly that there wouldn’t be so much right-wing fear and anxiety around us talking openly about these complex experiences, and enormous amounts of resources trying to block our communities from getting the resources we need, if it didn’t hold a lot of potential and constitute a major threat to the institutions of power when we’re able to do so.

Xoai: What I want to emphasize: FUN! I think one myth about politics and movement work is that it has to be dreary, that changing lives can’t be pleasurable. Surely, there are moments where I want to unsubscribe from everybody, but I take so much pleasure in conversations that excavate our culture and us as individual.

I also am very pleased thinking about the idea tomorrow, everything we just said could change! We are a part of nature. We evolve like the trees, the whales, the hummingbirds. If anything, trans people have shown us just that. That we don’t have to have it figured out, and changing our minds doesn’t mean our prior states of being aren’t true.

When I listen to my pleasure as a compass, it feels so much easier to exist as an expansive divine force, in connection with my people and natural surroundings. I want us to be guided by that natural instinct in our bodies. That compass was taken away from us as young people. It’s time to return to that.

Where Do We Go From Here? Our Questions on Bi Community and Identity

As we mentioned in yesterday’s roundtable, it can seem like other people (especially the ones on the internet) have ~all the answers~ when that is generally and in specific here DECIDEDLY not the case. In talking about what felt special or vulnerable to share and discuss during this bi+ week, we talked about how scary and challenging it can feel to talk about what we’re still unsure about or questioning when it comes to bisexuality and bi community — especially because as bi folks we often feel a specific and intense pressure to be “sure” or that we won’t change our mind. Here was what came up for us – what about you?

Oh Cool, Me Too: What It’s Like for Bisexual People to Date Each Other

We all know about the stereotypes and assumptions attached to bisexuality”: “greedy bisexuals,” all bi women are faking it, all bi men are just gay, bi nonbinary people are … Nonexistent? (Proud to be bi and nonbinary and nonexistent!) As Bitch Magazine’s Rachel Charlene Lewis wrote about the dictionary definition of bisexuality finally getting updated in 2020, “We’re in a time when bisexuality is on the rise and is still simultaneously erased and questioned on a constant loop.”

Given that on Twitter so much discourse is spent on bi people in relationships with partners who aren’t bisexual and perpetuating problematic and sexist myths about bi people, looking at relationships between bisexual people can be an opportunity to look at more expansive perspectives on bisexuality. This isn’t to place higher value on them, but to point out their existence. Relationships between bi people are usually forgotten in these intra-community conflicts. For Autostraddle, I spoke to several bi people across the gender and sexuality spectrum about their experiences with bi partners.

At the very least, there was significant agreement among many of those interviewed that having a partner with a shared identity saved them from having to legitimize that identity. “Many people will hear [that I’m LGBTQ] and assume that means I am a lesbian, which is a great thing to be, but it is not a thing that I am,” said Morgan, 26, of Victoria, Canada. “I’d prefer people assumed I was a lesbian rather than straight, because then at least I’ve been clocked as queer, but it’s still not right, because I’m bi. I have to insist on that identity not just to other people but also to myself.”

“I didn’t really come out to myself until last year even though I had recognized my attraction to women and non-binary people for years prior. But because I had never been in a same-sex relationship, I didn’t feel like I was valid in my queerness,” said Daysia, 21, from New York City.

“Now, being in a relationship with my partner who’s also bisexual and understands this same feeling of queer imposter syndrome, I feel seen and supported in my own experience navigating my sexuality.” In a polyamorous relationship, both Daysia and her partner are navigating online same-sex dating for the first time, and she says that being able to share that experience with him has made them closer.

Emily, 34, in Chicago, was married to a straight man before entering into a relationship with her current partner, who is bi. “My bisexuality was a big secret when in hetero-presenting relationships,” she recalled. “None of our mutual friends knew, his family never knew, and my family pretended they’d never known.” With her current partner, Emily said the biggest problem is with those “external to [their] bubble.” “There is often an assumption that we are “just gay” and the realization that I’m bi only enters the conversation when I mention I was married to a cis man previously. There is also an assumption that I “switched teams” instead of holding this attraction regardless of gender all along.” But within their relationship and social group, she said, “We can talk openly about things that impact our lives and learn from each other without becoming defensive immediately. Our friends are learning to frame sexuality in a different way as well.”

For some sources, the awareness that their sexuality was untethered from gender made it easier while exploring their own. For Fin, 26, in Wisconsin, their partner’s bisexuality helped them during their transition. “As a genderqueer person, I’d struggle to date anyone who felt like they could only date men or women,” they said. “Having a bisexual partner was reassuring as I came out, started changing my presentation and went on HRT – I knew my gender wasn’t going to be a barrier for him.”

While of course regardless of identified sexuality or gender, people across the sexuality spectrum face gender transitions with grade and love, the knowledge that their partner’s sexuality wasn’t defined by one gender or another was freeing.

Charity, 23, in New England, echoed similar sentiments. “Being with another bisexual person has made me appreciate the complexity of people’s gender (or lack of gender),” they said. “It also made me appreciate myself as a whole person, and helped me realize that I’m trans, and I don’t have to cut parts of myself off because they don’t match others’ expectations.”

More than one couple referenced that a mutual awareness of each other’s bisexuality actually enabled them to play with gender together. “The fact that we shared a common sexual identity and understanding of gender, and talked about these things regularly, made the relationship a safe place for exploration,” shared AJ, 24, Charity’s partner.

“My partner is fluid in a way I don’t always have the confidence to explore myself, but he’s made it safe to try new things and be bad at them or decide they don’t work for me,” said Liz, 37, in Sacramento, CA.

And some suspect that the openness in their relationships otherwise coded as “straight” (between a cis woman and cis man) empowered their partners to begin sharing their queerness outside of the relationship for the first time.

Lynn, 26, in Queens, New York, has been with her partner for several years, but they came out to each other as bisexual at different stages. “I have always found validity in my bisexuality, even before my partner came out to me, and I didn’t feel that my bisexuality was more “worthy” or “acceptable” just because I had a bisexual partner,” she said. “When he came out to me, I felt very proud of the space and community we created together. It meant that he felt comfortable enough to let me know what he discovered about himself.”

For those in polyamorous situations, their bisexuality was an integral part of their relationships. “The more I think about this, the more I believe that being bisexual and dating a bisexual has opened up my perspective on how I understand relationships, different levels of intimacy, and my own capacity for being with others – and caring about myself!” shared Lynn from Queens. “The combination of being bisexuals, and being non-monogamous gave me an opportunity to rewrite how I think about relationships and community and who I chose to give my love to and how I do it.”

“Being non-monogamous, I feel like I’ve been able to reclaim the “greedy bisexual” stereotype for myself by letting myself experience love more expansively, with multiple people of multiple genders,” said Angie, 26, in Tacoma, WA. “I’m not greedy, and if I am, is it such a bad thing to be greedy for love?”

But of course, for some relationships, being bi never really came up between them. “Neither [I or my husband] think that this kind of shared identity-configuration automatically or universally provides some kind of heightened understanding or compatibility,” said Julian, 31. “At the same time, I do think you see less discussion about bisexual men, and particularly bisexual men in relationships with each other, and there are probably a number of reasons for that. So it’s not nothing, either, or else it wouldn’t be so absent.”

Relationships between bi people aren’t inherently better or worse than between bi people and people of other sexual alignments — they exist, and can be a perspective-broadening experience for those in them. “Even in the time we’ve been together, I’ve gone through phases of feeling more gay or more straight despite being in a same-sex relationship throughout,” said Kiera, 25, in New York City. “Since we do both hold this identity and are open to this fluidity, I think we are able to have candid conversations about it. Being with another bi person makes it easier to hold those nuances and feel confident in that identity regardless of the social pressures of appearing “just gay.””

Kiera’s partner, Paola, 26, agreed. “I think my relationship with Kiera has further strengthened me to not hide and to allow myself to be bisexual. I don’t have to prove anything to anyone else, and that’s is luckily something that has been super affirming about being with someone who also identifies as bisexual,” she shared. “It gives us space to just relate on our journey of accepting our queerness and then also allowed us to be great supporters for one another.”

How Did We Get Here? 6 Bi People on Coming to Their Identity for Bi+ Week 2020

It can feel like people on the internet ~have it all figured out~, and like the stuff that’s amorphous and opaque from your end of the screen is neatly categorized and easy breezy on the other. As is so often the case, however, that is merely an illusion created by the funhouse mirror of our digital universe! As an example, here’s some bi+ members of our team sharing their journey of how they arrived at their current place of bisexual identity, such as it is.

8 Books Featuring Bi+ People in Longterm Relationships

In honor of Bi+ Week 2020, in this month at Ask Your Friendly Neighborhood Lesbrarian we are focusing on a topic we know our bi+ readers would like to see more content about: bi+ people in longterm relationships!

Given that identities are often assumed based on the gender of a person’s current partner(s), how do bi+ folks navigate longterm relationships? What effect does being in a longterm relationship have on a bi+ person’s understanding of self? How does their bi+ identity interact with intersecting identities and those of their partner(s)? How do poly and monogamous relationships differ for bi+ people? All those questions and more are explored in these fiction and non-fiction books about bi+ people!

Wow No Thank You by Samantha Irby

Irby’s latest collection of very funny personal essays dives deep into her longterm relationship. Her life has in fact changed significantly as a result of this relationship: she’s a Black, bisexual woman now married to a white woman, living with step-children in white, small-town America. Adjusting to all these changes makes up the better part of the book. Irby describes going from being a lifelong renter to the perplexities of having to fix things yourself in your home when they break, learning to make food that kids will eat, living with your partner’s oddities (her wife is the type of person who charges her crystals monthly under the full moon), new friend dates, and lesbian bed death, in a hilarious take on “sure, sex is fun, but have you ever…” She tries to reminisce fondly about her young days partying — including a hilarious misunderstanding with a dude she was dancing with at a club — but she can’t quite muster it.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Okay, I know that the title of this sweeping historical faux memoir might suggest it focuses on anything other than lasting longterm relationships, but it’s a trick! Old Hollywood starlet Evelyn Hugo does in fact have seven husbands over the course of her fascinating lifetime, but the person who held her heart the longest was a woman she eventually called her wife. As she climbs with ruthless ambition from her life as a poor New York Cuban girl to a glamorous white-passing Hollywood actress, one of the only constancies in her life is her relationship with a fellow actress. There is a wonderful bi-affirming moment when Evelyn reject the monosexist assumption of the journalist to whom she is telling her story, asserting the consistency of her bisexual identity with her lifelong love of a woman. Make sure to have tissues handy, as this is an, albeit heartwarming, tear-jerker.

The Change Room by Karen Connelly

Eliza Keenan is living the white upper-middle class dream in Toronto: happily married to Andrew, a math professor; running her high-end floral boutique; doting on her two young sons; on the move literally every day from dawn to falling into bed exhausted. The only time she takes for herself is her twice weekly swim at the community pool, where the light coming in through the windows onto the blue water reminds her of youthful travels in Greece where she had a whirlwind affair with a woman. Enter Shar, a mysterious woman Eliza meets in the pool change room. Shar and Eliza share an instant mutual attraction. Their ensuing relationship makes Eliza question how much monogamy actually suits her and ask why sexual pleasure has fallen to the wayside in her life. The Change Room is a rare literary novel that lingers often in sex scenes like erotica.

An Accident of Stars by Foz Meadows

Bi+ people in longterm relationships exist in fantasy novels too, did you know!? In this epic fantasy set in the magical world of Kena, bi+, poly, and/or aromantic characters are front and center. Gwen, in particular, is a delight. She’s an older bi aromantic woman in a poly triad with different genders. Attention is paid particularly to how her relationships are respectful of her aromanticism. Saffron, the young woman who arrives in Kena via portal, is just figuring out she is bisexual too! Here’s the plot: Kena is on the brink of civil war, and Saffron with her new friends Gwen, Zech, and Viya are forced to flee the evil King Leoden by hiding out in a neighboring matriarchal society. Can Kena be saved? If you love this book, don’t miss the sequel A Tyranny of Queens.

Something New: Tales from a Makeshift Bride by Lucy Knisley

Bisexual cartoonist Knisley’s graphic memoir about planning her wedding and getting married is as charming and intellectually curious as her work always is. Her personal story is interspersed with fun facts about wedding traditions around the world. She gives helpful tips about creating your own crafty wedding decorations, talks about fighting with her mom trying to stop her from inviting the whole neighborhood to the party, and tells the background story of how she and husband-to-be John got together. My personal favorite part and the most relevant to our purposes here is Knisley’s discussion of reconciling her bisexual feminist identity with the hetero/sexism built into the institution of marriage and marrying a cis, straight man.

For Sizakele by by Yvonne Fly Onakeme Etaghene

Taylor is a femme bisexual Nigerian American college student and activist in a relationship with Lee, a masculine of center African American basketball player. Lee and Taylor’s partnership, however, is full of conflict and far from healthy: Lee is recovering from familial abuse and this trauma emerges in the form of intimate partner violence. Another issue is Lee’s jealousy and insecurity about Taylor’s bisexuality. Bi+ readers who have dealt with biphobia from a partner can find solace in Taylor’s passionate defense and validation of her identity. Into this thorny situation comes Sy, a photographer from Cameroon and Taylor’s new friend. As the nature of Taylor and Sy’s friendship begins to turn romantic, Taylor is put in a tight spot in between the two most important relationships in her life.

Naamah by Sarah Blake

In this queer feminist retelling of the Biblical story of the Great Flood, Blake focuses on Naamah, the matriarch of the Ark and wife of Noah. The story takes place very much in Naamah’s mind, as she lives in a kind of dreamscape. She relives moments with her former lover Bethel and mourns her death in the Flood, converses and makes love with an angel who has built an underwater home for the children who died, has visions of a talking bird named Jael, and meets her future descendants. She is also busy feeding and caring for the animals on the Ark and having sex with her husband (they have to repopulate the Earth after all). This novel has dreamy lyrical writing as well as plenty of steamy sex scenes, between two women and between a man and a woman.

Sing the Four Quarters by Tanya Huff

Sing the Four Quarters is old school elemental magic fantasy at its best. And because it’s by Tanya Huff, queer characters abound and the world, while typical Western fantasy otherwise, is free of homophobia and sexism! Not only that, Huff has created a unique plot that revolves around the heroine’s pregnancy and a fantastical world where bards’ skills are seen as, rightfully so, just as bad-ass as a warriors’. Annice and Pjerin are our two main characters, bantering and bickering friends who made a mistake and had a one-night stand. Hence Annice’s pregnancy, although her longterm poly partner is a cis woman and fellow bard Stasya. But while Annice’s close relationships are intact, the pregnancy presents other problems. Namely, Annice is disowned royalty and by keeping this baby as she decides she wants to, she would be committing treason by endangering the royal line of inheritance. Uh-oh!

Do you have any books about bi+ characters in longterm relationships to recommend? Let us know in the comments! And don’t forget I am here to answer your lesbrarian questions. Drop a question in the comments below or send me an email to stepaniukcasey[at]gmail.com.

Interview With My Ex-Boyfriend (!!): Christopher

Welcome to this spin-off edition of Interviews With My Ex-Girlfriend in which Autostraddle writers get back in touch with their ex-girlfriends to ask them Five Simple Questions. In honor of Bi+ Week, we are mixing things up!

Christopher and I met our senior year of high school and were a mess at each other for a few months. We were precious repressed 17-year-olds in Dallas-adjacent suburbs (ish) who both grew up to be queer. We made each other mix CDs with The Strokes and The Format on them. We’ve managed to stay friends across time, states, and countries, and I think of our brief, never-official relationship with great fondness. I have always believed that Christopher and I were longing for something we couldn’t name and we found it in each other, in a way.  Christopher shares my penchant for nostalgia and introspection and graciously agreed to speak with me for this series. We talked about being repressed teens who made out in several parks and grew up to be super queer.

Between the untimely demise of my family’s desktop and the fact that it was 2008 and we didn’t have smartphones, I don’t actually have any pictures from when we were dating. This, from the following spring, is a fairly accurate representation. P.S. yes that IS a rainbow striped dress why do you ask?

Adrian: Ok so we met at The Max, right? Which no longer exists RIP

Christopher: We were there for a local show, I was there with Zach to see a band we had gotten to know because we were also in a band, and I guess you were there for the same band?

Adrian: Criminal Shift! Was the band.

Christopher: Yes! And I was helping Doug with the merch table and we were playing a Steel Train song on a ukelele and you came up and started singing with us.

Adrian: Wow that’s precious. Yes, and I knew Douglas through Marisa who was in your band, so basically the world was shrinking in on itself. Ok so we met and then did we talk on AIM?

Christopher: No, I think we texted, I had a cell phone at that point.

[Reader, I did some follow up research and in fact we mostly talked through Facebook messenger because I had a prepaid cell phone without text messages because it was 2008!]

Adrian: Right, so we just kept talking. And then we hung out!

Christopher: You came over after church and we went to the grocery store on Lover’s Lane and bought a $1 loaf of bread and took it to Curtis Park to feed the ducks.

Adrian: Right, and it was my first date ever! I was a late bloomer in all sorts of ways. Also wow you have an extremely good memory??

Christopher: I remember stuff that’s important to me!

Adrian: Omg wow um ok that’s sweet!!! Anyway so we hung out a few times but we were never like official. Like we watched Eternal Sunshine at your parents one time. Your parents were really nice to me!

Christopher: They love you! Right and then we went and laid in the grass because there were randomly so many stars. Wow that was really romantic! And then there was the time we went to the haunted house with your friends and also we went to Chili’s. And then we went to the park by your house and kissed on a playground structure.

Adrian: They really should make a teen movie about us. Ok so like, this was fall of senior year. At that point, how did you understand yourself?

Christopher: The way I always defined myself from like 13 or 14 when I had an awareness of libido was like, straight but open. I had erotic experiences with guy friends at sleepovers. Which is like, normal for adolescent boys. I always contextualized them as like, discovery-based encounters that were fun and I never felt any shame about them. I did that throughout high school but I never really let myself imagine them romantically. I was like, straight with some bi-curious leanings at that time. All of my dreams were exclusively homosexual. My subconscious was telling me like, this is really what you’re wanting. I was really good at ignoring them or discrediting their validity to myself. When we were meeting I was a straight guy but with compassion for not-straightness.

Adrian: Wow, that resonates so much. In high school I was like very outgoing and had friends in a lot of different groups. I had the experience of wanting to be close to girls but I genuinely liked boys so I figured I was straight. There was no visibility or safety for queer kids at my high school, and it was just like, beyond what I could conceive. I like, wanted to be really good friends with certain girls, and it was not the same as regular friendship, there was longing there. But it was different than I felt about boys too, and I tried to date boys but it never really…worked.

Christopher: Haha yes! My whole high school experience I was desperately in love with and in denial about it with… Zach. And I thought I just really wanted to be really good friends with him and wouldn’t let myself play with the possibility that it could be more than that. It’s one of those open secrets that if I said he’d probably be like ‘obviously.’

Adrian: What made it so hard to come to terms with it? Was it like, your family, or the environment, or just that it’s hard to be a person?

Christopher: Those all probably relate. This is a rich question that I haven’t really processed so I’m glad we’re talking about this! There was nothing violently oppressive in the Park Cities, it’s not like guys who weren’t super macho were getting beat up or anything like that. I never felt like expressing a queer or gender non-conforming personality would make me a target of physical violence. But growing up in Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts, you would say gay or faggot in a derogatory way. I don’t think The people who used those words used it as a way to spew hate on gay people, but it still had the force of the underlying homophobia. There was this understanding that being queer or gay or bi is just not a preferred way of living. I was never very introspective, I was a social butterfly who was always wanting to be around other people as a way to disappear and not have to be my own self. Throughout high school I was a little bit incomplete, a black hole of a person, never doing that much internal examination. I was afraid of what I would uncover, that I would have to come to terms with the fact that I was not straight and queer. For like Zach in particular, I felt like disclosing my feelings would ruin the friendship! I think about the brave few souls who were more forthcoming and out and loud and more certain in themselves,  and like within our community, those kids didn’t have a tremendously hard time, but they weren’t seen as completely part of the rest of us.

Adrian: Well, and when you’re a teenager being part of the ‘us’ is the most important thing!

Christopher: Right. Well, what about you?

Adrian: I mean, Coppell was kind of a quintessential suburb. It was a horrible place to be different. Like it wasn’t safe and no one cared, that’s how it seemed. Not very many kids were out and those who were, and even those who were seriously suspected of being gay or queer, were bullied. Tons of my friends came out in college but not in high school. It was horrible. We weren’t allowed to have a Gay Straight Alliance or anything like that. I didn’t know anyone who identified as bisexual, it was just outside my frame of reference completely. I owned SO much rainbow shit and was like earnest about being an ally but that was as far as I could go. I wasn’t closeted, I was repressed as fuck, which I think is probably just as harmful in a different way. I wasn’t afraid to stand out or be weird, but that was about what I wore or what I did, not something central to who I was. That wasn’t really conceivable.

Christopher: I remember sitting at the “goth table” sometimes and they were like, outwardly gender non-conforming and some of the girls were bi. So like, the LGBT contingent also coincided with the fringe counterculture rule-breaking crowd. Which makes sense!

Adrian: Wow, I  think a lot of our goths were queer too, I’m thinking about whether that functioned as armor in a way, or marking themselves as different outwardly so no one was surprised.

Christopher: Yeah, or like a disguise.

Adrian: Ok, so, we ended things after a couple months because you were super flaky. You kept breaking plans and the last straw was when we were supposed to watch Rocky Horror Picture Show in my friend Bethanie’s front yard, and I think I was super embarrassed because you were supposed to meet my friends and you stood me up!

Christopher: I can’t remember specific things I missed or reasons I gave for flaking, and the reasons probably weren’t false but they also probably weren’t, like, necessary. They were excuses. I was not confronting the real truth which was that I liked you but I didn’t want to engage in a dating relationship like this. I think that’s probably what was happening. I’m sorry I was a flake 12 years ago!

Adrian: Finally, the apology I’ve been waiting for [a joke]. Ok so but then like, in college you came out pretty much right away, right?

Christopher: Within the first quarter of college I was pretty, pretty, pretty, yeah, pretty out. The summer after high school before college there was a meeting of Stanford students in Dallas, and Alok was there, who was actively out and proud at that point. We became friends and when we met on campus and continued hanging out and through them I met their other friends and started to meet more LGBTQ people and I guess I had more examples and role models, peers, that were braver than I was and more developed in their sense of who they were. That inspired me to confront my feelings and own them with more pride and joy. I think that happened at the same time that I let myself develop feelings for a guy and affirmed for myself that those were feelings I wanted to have. That unlocked something! It was a slow, amorphous development ever since. I remember coming out that winter to all my friends as bi. Now I just like to say I have predilections and tend to be with men. It’s in flux. I don’t like trying to pin myself down when I’m a moving target in a lot of ways.

Adrian: So, I am thinking about when I visited you at Stanford junior year, spring 2012, and I hung out with you at your co-op and we saw Modest Mouse with Alok and it was just like sunshiny and queer and good, and like, I think about that trip and the ways that something felt possible. I was still identifying as straight them but being in a new place with people who didn’t know me, I didn’t have to map myself onto who anyone thought I would be and it set something free

Christopher: Wait really?

Adrian: Yeah, that trip was really important for me. I had broken up with my kinda long-term boyfriend a couple months before and was about to embark on a spree of dating mediocre boys while being in love with a friend and like, I was getting ready to come out to myself! Just in the most chaotic way possible. But being around a bunch of queer people who didn’t know me was really powerful. And I guess I should say that obviously since I was visiting you in another state we had managed to stay friends.

Christopher: Yeah, we started hanging out fairly soon as friends! We would argue about trying not to spend too much on lunch and then go to Half Price Books and drop $40. I think you turned me onto D.H. Lawrence…

Adrian: That’s the gayest thing that’s ever happened

Christopher: …so I bought The Rainbow. Oh that’s too much.

Adrian: There’s nothing subtle about that.

We spent a lot of time in the poetry section, and I once posted this on his Facebook wall because I missed him, back when people wrote on Facebook walls.

Christopher: It was hidden in plain sight! But yeah the the pressure was off once we weren’t trying to make it work romantically.

Adrian: I couldn’t really stay mad at you. I felt like I needed to know you, there was something very deeply held that drew me to you, it felt like we were supposed to be in each other’s lives. Is that too deep?

Christopher: No, I felt the same! I was eager to know you. There was an inexplicable, ineffable magnetism. What you said resonates.

Adrian: You always really mattered to me! So we’ve managed to see each other every couple years.

Christopher: Right, and I came to visit you in Nicaragua. That trip was really intense and important to me. And we talked there about how we don’t keep in touch frequently but when we do talk, I always feel very grateful. Picking up where we left off seems like a cliché but it’s true.

Adrian: You know, I was never annoyed that you were gay! I was just glad to know you. If it were the 1940s maybe we would have had a lavender marriage. Instead we’ve gotten to have this weird, beautiful long distance friendship for over a decade. It really feels like we grew up together even though we’ve only ever lived in the same place for a year.

Christopher: And in Nicaragua when I was there you were also like at the very beginning of naming your gender and your queer politics were evolving. So like, what happened between the Modest Mouse concert and that trip?

Adrian: So like, 2012 was a mess like I said and I made some questionable decisions. I remember when this girl started dating a girl after we had both been closetedly in love all summer, I was so jealous. I guess the jealousy was a big enough feeling to make me interrogate it. That was also the Halloween I dressed as Bob Dylan and people thought I was a guy and that was thrilling, but I didn’t think about that very hard for several years. But yeah so I dated a bunch of guys and then I came out as queer and bi at a poetry show — of course haha — and then I fell for a girl and then I moved away. In 2015, which was the last year I was living in Managua, two big things happened. I went to A-Camp and was around a ton of trans people for the first time and saw just like ALL these ways to be. And then I went to an LGBTI conference in Costa Rica and was around a ton of trans people again, and people started using -x ending pronouns and terms for me without me asking for that, they just like made the assumption which in this case turned out to be a huge gift. And then a few weeks after that, you visited with Rob and Dana and we went on that completely ridiculous hike up a mountainside that like wasn’t fully cleared? And we talked about being queer adults and all the things we were still figuring out. And it was perfect.

Am I Bisexual? Is That The Word?

Hello. It’s been a while.

It’s been a while because I’m not a woman anymore && I’m not sure I ever was && of course I was because if I didn’t have a roadmap for elsewhere, how could I have possibly understood myself to be there? && I could’ve been a woman because the category of woman is really large && I used to call myself gay && sometimes I even said lesbian even though I couldn’t figure out why the word made me uncomfortable like a too-tight shirt && one time, I did try out those they-them pronouns way before I understood myself to be not-woman.

It was on a mountain, surrounded by other queer people, plenty of whom were not-women too. In fact, it was at A-Camp (five days of activities for queer adults that this very website used to run), the first year we had pronoun stickers. We, the writers, always arrived before the Campers, to set up and gossip and be in community with each other. The lodge was still sparse and we, in matching tee-shirts, looked bright like candy against the brown carpet, each and every one so distinct from each other and yet perfect as a group. I have always wondered what our collective noun would be: a gleeful of queer writers, a panoply of queer writers, a coven, a murder, a spate, a loudness, a bravery, a swarm. Why choose only one? The tables were the tables everyone imagines at any large event—hard, textured plastic in a dirty off-white or else wood with water rings and vague hints of craft paints past inexpertly mopped up before they began to harden, to become permanent. The stickers were laid out in the registration line—fill out your form, choose this thing so unimportant && so fundamental. I looked down at my options—printed on tiny paper circles and colorful like M&Ms against the drab plastic-wood-paint-marks. Palatable. Friendly. I picked up two: she && they. Added them to my name tag. Went about my business; people used both. Mostly they used “she.”

It was easy to forget limits at Camp for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was the size of the trees. Hulking firs that reach into the sky like hairy fingers, bounded only by their own strength to continue growing upward and the environment in which they’re rooted. It was easy to forget that I am only one person, that I begin and end at the edge of my skin as it meets the chill air, when faced with the sides of mountains crowded with hundreds, thousands, of the same tall tree under which I was sitting. Expanse is the word. If you have never been to a place like that, I will tell you: it is self-melting && self-atomizing; you flow to cover everything, boundless, and it tucks you in to its vastness and you begin to understand that the world is so much bigger than you ever imagined before. So much possibility. I even forgot about the stickers on my name tag. I was busy sublimating.

On the last day a Camper walked up to me, said, “I see you have they-them pronouns on your name tag. I’m really sorry. I’ve been calling you she-her this entire time.”

My whole body squirmed && I was keenly aware of it && it’s limits && my personhood && that my body isn’t really separate from me all at once. I felt like I was a glowing beacon, that everyone was Witnessing me && I felt invisible to everyone && I felt hyper-visible-invisible to myself, as though I had time traveled and understood something from my future, just the barest touch of it, that I could not yet comprehend.

“It’s okay,” I replied. “I put those on there mostly because other people use those pronouns for me, not because I feel any particular way about it.” It was honest && it wasn’t true.

I did not understand that I was filtering my identity through the expectations of others. I do not know how much of it I still do && does it matter if gender is social? Doesn’t some part of it live in the way other people relate to me? && I am using the perception of others to justify the things I want && cannot possibly admit to wanting && are so fundamental that I do not understand I am even experiencing a longing.

A partner, after I came out as trans, doubled down on the word “lesbian” to describe herself. We are not together anymore.

That is the short answer, not the whole answer.

A partner said to me that testosterone would be a deal-breaker. I put off starting testosterone for a year until I couldn’t. We are not together anymore.

That is one answer, but not all the answers.

A partner said to me “is this for real this time?” when I talked about trying those he-him pronouns. We are not together anymore.

I pressed my gender flat with my own hands to suit other people’s sexuality, to replicate the idea of who I was when I arrived in this community with open, pleading hands. That is the story. But not the full story.

I will never again cultivate a romantic relationship with a cis person on purpose, not in this life. I have been hurt too badly, too often, by too many people. T4T only. Inscrutable genders from outer space to the front, those that can be best described as “smell of campfire” && “a great pink shape.” && those best described as “a single chandelier earring dragging across your chest while we fuck.” && those who describe themselves as “common grackle sounds” && “the sensation, but not the taste, of warm tea.” && “James Dean, but with tiddies.” && all the people with all the genders I haven’t thought of yet, that no one has thought of yet, least of all themselves.

So far, only one of those genders is mine and I’ll not say which, not unless I trust you enough that you have a fist inside me, but the point is this: can I really be called gay anymore, if I am interested in so many people with genders that have little in common with mine, with each others’, save for an illegibility in the eyes of cis people? Is gay the word?

I started testosterone in January of this year. I was really scared to do it; so scared that I worked to take everything scary out of it. Scared to find the doctor; friend found the doctor. Scared of doctors; saw a trans woman. Scared of needles; got topical. Scared of quickness; low dose. All the fear in the world didn’t mean I didn’t desperately want it. I could tell because I thought about it all the time.

Two things had been stopping me: my singing voice, a partner who didn’t want me to do it. I knew the second reason wasn’t a good one, deep down, so I hung everything on how my voice felt in my body when I belted. I used to be an actor; I was a very good actor. I sang well enough to snag speaking-only roles in musicals. I was never good but it didn’t matter; I loved it. I loved ringing my own body like a bell. Loved singing the powerful songs I’d grown up singing. The day I thought the phrase, you know, do you really think you won’t feel at home in your voice? You’ll find different songs and you’ll love them just as much, I sobbed with my mouth open in my therapist’s office. Because I knew then that I would start testosterone no matter what; it was terrifying, wanting something so bad as to leap into the dark.

I somehow got through that January day with the box of hormones siren-singing to me in my backpack. Drafting an essay. A dinner with my editor and my agent. The long subway ride home. I sat on my bed and stared at the carpet and cried. “I’m so nervous,” I said, “I’m so scared.” A partner sat next to me, the same one who had called it a deal-breaker. She rubbed my back and pressed her lips into a thin line as I squinted into the tiny-print pamphlet, folded so many times it was a small square the thickness of a novel. It warned of how easy it was to accidentally dose a cis woman in bold. A danger to women and children if they touched it when wet, or anytime before the afflicted area was washed with soap and water. I became obsessed. “Don’t touch me. Did you touch me? Wash your hands.” I never slept shirtless on the nights we were in the same bed.

“Are you afraid your transition might negatively impact that partner? Because she doesn’t want you to do it?” my therapist asked me. I have an excellent therapist; she is trans, an art therapist and when I asked her once, based on her décor choices, if she was a witch, she said “I don’t self-identify as one.” My therapist’s office had a big window that opened out onto Koreatown; the façade of the building was under construction and there was scaffolding outside the window for months. Occasionally while I was crying into the plants and crystals and sets of markers, a construction worker would walk by and pretend not to see me. My therapist would close the blinds.

“Of course I am,” I said, because it was obvious. To me. To me && to her && to the construction worker, even. The one scary thing I couldn’t mitigate at all; it had nothing to do with me && my choices.

“You know,” she said, “it might.”

I am not really into computers anymore && there’s a part of me that really still is. Because time is meaningless && my past interest deeply impacts me, even though I no longer watch every Apple event with bated breath, no longer write a technology column. I find technology to be an apt descriptor && a source of magic language && a locus of stress && a way to understand a man-made world. It is in this miasma of future-present that I came across the “and” operator. &&. The logical conjunction that commands action if and only if all of its operands are true.

Every year, I teach my undergraduates a little binary on the first day of class. I make them answer questions about their lives using only true or false. I ask them to reflect on what was lost. Sometimes they tell me about a sense of frustration. I tell them that the work of my class is to wrest nuance from a machine reliant on binary, 0-1, false-true; a machine that was made for violence, with exponential advancement powered by violence’s intersection with sex. I pretend that these statements are only true about computers and not true about everything.

I don’t explain myself to cis people anymore && sometimes I am required to. In the past, I have turned to the incredibly flawed (but so simple) Genderbread Person. Even as it tries to disrupt the binary, it relies on it. But that isn’t even the main problem. In its attempt to problematize two-option thinking, it divides everything into an “or.” It separates presentation from gender from attraction. For a person who has never thought about these things before, it helps to break interdependent ideas into discrete parts && we lose something when we do && it has never been true. My gender directly impacts how I conceptualize my sexuality, and as my gender shifts and changes, so too do the words that describe who I fuck. Sometimes I feel like I spend all my time prying something illogical and giant from the grasping, minimizing hands of logic.

Even so, the && operator connotes a power to me. The forcing of a binary machine to become expansive. To say this && this && this and only if everything is yes. The && is one of my magic spell words. Abundance. Sublimation.

“You know,” the doctor who dispenses my hormones said, “she would have to lay on you every single night while it was wet to really get dosed with testosterone. You can chill out a little bit.”

But I couldn’t.

I was in pain (I am often in pain; I am chronically in pain) and the pain gave me a panic attack so I called a friend. It was one in the morning for me, but ten in the morning for him. I told him what I was writing. I barely had an idea of my argument, just that I was having a crisis of vocabulary and that generally, when I do, I write toward something messy until I make it make sense.

“For me,” he said, “I always think: why not the word ‘bisexual?’” && I thought about it too.

I would have been younger than fourteen, because fourteen is when I stopped playing the violin, and we were on the way to my violin lesson, which was truly wasted money for I was extremely terrible at the violin. I was sitting in the front seat; the interior of the car was beige or grey because I am not sure which car it was, which era of my childhood, but whichever it was, it was marked by the stale-french-fry smell of driving children to one million kinds of practice. I do not remember what I mentioned that made my mother say it—my mother, hands on the wheel and speaking casually, looking at the cul-de-sac before us. The sky was blue. It was Spring. “If you were gay, that would be one thing. But bisexuality is fence-sitting. You’ve gotta pick one.”

Maybe that is why. And if that is why, it’s not a very good reason.

Is bisexual the word for falling into the arms of trans people? Is bisexual the word for wresting nuance from binary? I am not sure. I am not sure about the accuracy of any language at all.

I painted my nails for the first time in years the other week. Black, with the middle fingers pink (fuck you, fuck everything). I used to be quite good at it back when I was a child && back when I was a girl. My friends would ask me to paint theirs, which I did. I was remarkable at never hitting skin, at always coloring inside the lines, no matter how late the sleepover, how sandy my tired eyes. It is harder on yourself, of course, and after the skills have spent a decade or more on the shelf. In the middle of a Saturday with the sunlight shining in, I got plenty of nail polish on my cuticles. But I loved the way I moved my hands—curled my fingers gracefully and held them close to my face as I gently stroked color this way and that. How I held them out and flapped them while I listened to a podcast and waited for them to dry, how I was forced to simply sit and gesture. I loved the way I talked with my hands after: dainty, fruity, limp-wristed && strong, sharp, powerful with my fingers held wide and taking up space. I loved how they looked against my yoga mat—I looked lovingly down at them while doing pushups only testosterone has allowed me to do.

Testosterone has allowed for a lot of &&. I want a caftan printed with flowers so I can walk around with my chest out and feel the silk on my scars && I am growing my hair out so I can wear a loose braid, easy, even though the hormones have made my straight hair curly && I want my shoulders to take up big space && I want to wrap my legs around someone nothing like me && when they fuck me I never want them to think of themself as a lesbian because if they are, well then, what on earth are they doing on top of me? && yes I suppose I am bisexual, if what we are talking about is kissing people who share your gender and people who do not && their desire has to be large enough to hold me, all of me: the gender && the presentation && the sexuality. The whole cookie; all of me is vast. I have never been good at picking just one && why should I be when the world is big and I am big in it?

This thing I am, my personal thesaurus of identities, cannot fit on the bright tiny stickers with letters printed on them && so much bigger than single, simple words or even a string of them && I got a taste of it when I expanded to cover the silhouette of a triangle tree against the twilight purple of a queer sky. That is part of the story. It is not the whole story. It is round and textured, not flat at all && it’s flat and smooth and goes for infinity in one direction until one direction is meaningless. It is like diving into a well I swear has a bottom && continually discovering there is deeper to go. It is continuing to find sentences that come after &&.

Pushing Daddy Harder: What Being a Bisexual Sugar Baby Has Taught Me

On my first date with William, I told him I was bisexual. We were talking about our dating history over an upscale steak dinner, and, after coming out of the closet almost four years ago, my sexuality is something I refuse to hide. In response, he slowly lifted his eyes off his dinner plate and looked at me, smiling devilishly, his chin hovering over a bloody filet mignon. “Alright, that’s it,” he said. “I’m sold.”

I am a sugar baby, which means I am essentially paid to be my clients’ ideal girlfriend. In fact, I often call myself a “serial sugar baby,” because I have been dating men like William back-to-back since I was a sophomore in college (almost four years). Though I don’t have to, I often brush off strange comments about my sexuality — my job is to boost his ego, and distract him from the stress of everyday life — not second-guess him.

William and I do many of the same things I would do with a partner my own age: a typical date includes dinner, sex, and a long night of watching movies and laughing at a hotel, because we have the same taste in dumb, early-2000s comedies. I laugh and call him handsome and dress exactly how he likes, and don’t cause any problems. I get to act like a wealthy socialite, dancing around his apartment with a bottle of Dom Perignon in hand, admiring the Banksys hung on his walls. Honestly, it’s a lot of fun.

It wasn’t until he helped me move that I learned he was utterly terrified of lesbians. As we unloaded the Uhaul, he looked at my new roommates, a sweet, unassuming lesbian couple named Hope and Angela, like a pair of monsters. He wasn’t offended, but frightened, avoiding eye contact, shuffling awkwardly around them while he carried the boxes in, and letting me answer the light, conversational questions they threw his way. Luckily, they weren’t offended. But I was.

He had never asked for a threesome, or otherwise requested some sexual act that required me to be attracted to multiple genders, which had confused me for the past three months I’d known him. Instead, he nervously asked me questions about the intricacies of lesbian sex and courtship, twiddling his thumbs and avoiding eye contact, as if my liking women was a thrilling and dangerous secret. Now, I realized these were less expressions of thrill, and more the body language of fear.

When I asked him later why he acted so weird, he answered frankly. “Oh, you don’t understand, babe,” he said. “Lesbians hate straight men.”

It’s one of many comments he’s made about my queerness that have made me pause — not reconsider my decision to take up this kind of work, nor question my sexuality or sense of self-worth, but make me wonder whether I should have found a way to use them as an opportunity to educate him. Ultimately, I think his behavior originates from a fear of the unknown, but to me, it meant more. It’s at times like this where I feel a need to speak up for my queer siblings and sisters; a deep-seated anxiety gnawing away at my hard-earned sense of self worth, formed of a mantra I’ve repeated in my head for years: “educating straight, cis men about my existence is not my job.”

I represent, for William, his most intimate experience with queerness. Because of this I often put the pressure on myself to represent our whole community well, though I know queerness describes a much broader experience than just my own. According to him, none of his friends, family members, or coworkers identify as such, so he asks me the questions he feels he can’t ask anyone else.

I am his gateway to understanding this community, and yet, when I am with him, I am merely playing a part: in my day-to-day life, I wear dickies and doc martens, speak in a low, raspy tone, and date women and nonbinary people much more than I date men; with him, I wear minidresses and heels, obsess over fine jewelry, and only comment on other women’s attractiveness when he asks for my opinion. I can be ‘out’ as a bisexual woman, but have to shed the queer part, and make my behavior and appearance palatable for a straight, cis, man. Correcting him, much less getting angry about his ignorance, is not on the menu.

Unfortunately, the current dialogue we have in America about sex work makes it so I can rarely express these complicated feelings. On one hand, admitting I do sex work at all, much more that I don’t love every second of it, puts me at risk of some Nicholas Kristof-minded “rescue” mission. A concerned family member or friend could stage an intervention, or worse, let a nonprofit that claims to fight “sex trafficking” know about the hotels and Airbnbs in which I work. More common, however, is the silencing I experience in feminist and queer spaces. Admitting sex work isn’t always fun contradicts the misled narrative, mostly written by non-sex worker feminists, that sex work is always “empowering.” Unlike the waitress who loves her restaurant but hates the table she served last night, I am not allowed to vocalize any discontent with my clients. In fact, admitting that I would tolerate the ignorance of a client for money often earns me the label of “gold digger,” or “whore,” — the very same whorephobia (that some prefer to call “slut shaming,” writing out role of sex workers all together) so many modern women pretend to fight so hard against.

In reality, negotiating my sexuality in this setting is tricky, tiresome, and oftentimes, a little annoying, and I don’t think it makes me anti-feminist or anti-sex work to admit it. Yes, getting asked questions like, “do girls really scissor?” and “who’s the man in the relationship?” is infuriating, and makes me feel like I’m in the 10th grade. If I didn’t know William and he asked me just one of these questions, I would slap him across the face. I am a woman who gets angry when people insult the LGBTQ community, and it goes against every ounce of my being to resist telling him to just Google the answers to his dumb, inconsiderate questions.

But William isn’t a paypig, he’s a sugar daddy — and none of that is part of the arrangement. Instead, I find small ways to push him towards a greater understanding of our community (after I’ve secured my bag).

In the time since William made that comment about my roommates, he’s made some progress towards a less fearful perspective. He’s met them twice since, once to take them shopping for new bikes so they could avoid taking the bus to work while COVID-19 spreads — a gesture that was very well received. Though he was nervous, we have had enough difficult conversations by now for him to have a better understanding of their relationship, and act a little more normal. He’ll read short, printed passages of Gender Trouble if I give them to him doused in my own perfume, and despite his reluctance, I think some of it has gotten through.

“When you’re not with me, how do you move through the world?” he asked me one month ago, twirling a long lock from my scrunchy-fastened ponytail.

“Not like this,” I said, looking down at the bright red heels he’d just bought. He smiled bashfully back at me, and wrapped his sweater around my shoulder. I answered truthfully, from my experience, refusing to represent anyone else. He accepted that.

This time, he had to.

Dungeons & Dragons: A Great Place to Be Queer

Last Friday, I clicked open one of my favorite Zoom invites to find a stunningly gorgeous group of humans, each in various stages of applying their bold lip of choice or replenishing their beverage of choice. After the requisite period of catching up, which for us mostly means talking about food, we started playing Dungeons & Dragons.

On this occasion, that meant reminding my friends that their ragtag crew was standing in an enchanted wood with a gnome druid, a man who looked like a cow, his boyfriend, and some talking mushrooms. They told me what they wanted to do (it was to ask for the meet-cute between the cow-man and his boyfriend), and just like that we were off. Conversation may have veered to vibrators, bisexual lighting, Cosmo quizzes and what Muppet each of us is (I’m Rolf with Scooter rising, if you’re curious), but the ostensible reason for the Zoom was to do fantasy roleplay with an astonishingly sex-positive, queer-centric, intense chemistry-having group of people.

When this group got started in early May, each of us was meeting at least one person for the very first time. Now, we group-text with what Anna Drezen helpfully termed “the unsustainably horny rush of making a new friend.” We would probably love each other no matter what, but the reason we play D&D and not Jackbox, the reason we are so deeply into one another’s deals right now, is that together we’ve created a magical story in a magical world that doesn’t exist without us. In these messy Zoom nights, we’re a goth teenager with healing spells, a socially inept wizard whose hair is fire, a try-hard folk hero who just really wants to do a good job, a bear-worshipping half-orc tank, a cagey forger with some demon blood, and the gay mythical creatures they meet along the way. I love them with the passion of a thousand fiery suns.

Most of the rest of the time, I’m a bisexual mom who is married to a man and does regular adult things like work at a job, make out with my husband and read my daughter bedtime stories. I love all of these things fiercely, but having an established straight-presenting home life means it takes a little extra effort to be, essentially, out. Running this game gives me the opportunity to let my bi side play consistently, openly, and in community, and D&D’s roleplaying and worldbuilding aspects offer unlimited ways to lean into my queer identity. Not only has queer D&D been valuable and healing for me, other DMs and players have similar experiences!

Backing things up slightly, let’s quickly define some terms. Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) is one of the first table-top role playing games (TTRPGs) ever, and was first developed by Gary Gygax in 1974. In the years since then, it’s enjoyed a spot in popular culture as a thing nerds and weirdos like to do, being featured in episodes of Community, Buffy, The Simpsons, and most recently and especially, Stranger Things. In D&D, players create characters based on a variety of races (think everyone in the Lord of the Rings) and classes (wizard, fighter, ranger, etc.), and then play out an adventure (commonly known as a campaign) as those characters. This can take anywhere from a single night to literal years, and usually consists of the players fighting monsters, getting treasure, solving puzzles, catching bad guys, and getting progressively more fond and protective of each other. The adventure is laid out by a Dungeon Master (DM), a person who narrates the story for the players and fills in as every non-playing character (NPC) and monster they meet. At its best, D&D gameplay is tender, stressful, silly, triumphant, and very fun. Also there are dice, and dice are very beautiful and satisfying to roll.

Photo credit Meg Jones Wall

I started playing D&D about six years ago at the invitation of a board gaming friend, who asked my husband and I to join a campaign using the game’s then-new Fifth Edition. With him as DM, we’d be adventuring in a party with two other board gaming buddies, both also dudes. At the time, my total understanding of the game was that there would be elves and fighting, and that I desperately did not want to look like a noob in front of my friends.

To remedy this, I chose to enter the campaign as a Dragonborn Barbarian. Dragonborns are literal dragon-people with weaponized breath and tough skin who are not really known for emoting. Barbarians are usually kind of dumb, very strong, and they don’t do a lot of magic (which has more in-game rules). I loved my gruff, beefy dragon guy—still do, actually—but despite my efforts to come into the game as well-armored as possible, roleplay still felt extremely vulnerable. The first time I tried to speak in character and my scary barbarian used my speaking voice, I wanted to crawl right under that rickety kitchen table. Pretty much the whole time, I remained mildly terrified of what I was revealing about myself, because there were a lot of things about myself that I was scared to see. I did have a whole bunch of fun swinging my greataxe, though.

It probably doesn’t need saying, but at the time of this early D&D experience I was not out as bisexual, even to myself. Finding my queerness came later, thanks to lots of gay fantasy books, the “San Junipero” episode of Black Mirror, and realizing that noncommittally muttering “I probably would’ve been bi” just means “internalized homophobia made me to scared to process my feelings for years, and while I’ve worked that stuff out now I’m also happily monogamous with a man so I guess case closed?” In the short time since I’ve enrolled in the Bisexual Academy*, I’ve learned that this experience is extremely common for bi folks.

The lesson in bi identity that I keep having to relearn is that it’s not who you’re with, but who you are. Coming out at the age of 33, I had already defined myself in all kinds of other ways, and done so through actions such as “work at a job, “get married,” “have a child.” While it felt truly wonderful to publicly identify as bi, it also meant that my opportunities to lovingly walk the bisexual walk** would forever be fewer. I had no interest in trying to get involved with someone of the same gender or finding out how this would affect my marriage, which I happen to like a great deal. I just was bi now, and the relief of living that truth would have to be enough.

So I can hardly describe what a revelation it’s been to show up on D&D nights and pretend to be a lesbian half-elf messenger and a pansexual cat-person sex worker, and have both of them flirt with my players. And then a couple sessions later, to be both halves of a gay couple who go on adventures together, and one of them looks kind of like a cow, and everyone is thoroughly smitten by them. Not only smitten, but also fully overcome with curiosity about which one of them is the bottom, to the point where one of them asked if she could roll a “bottom check” to learn the answer (she rolled very well, and the answer is that it’s a little complicated). It’s a fucking blast, is the best I can describe this.

As it turns out, using roleplay as a vehicle for queer exploration is not a rare or brand-new thing. Earlier this year, Linda H. Codega wrote a beautiful article for Tor.com titled, “The Power of Queer Play in Dungeons & Dragons.” They described D&D’s transformative powers from their own experiences:

I began experimenting in earnest with my own gender expression through roleplaying games; first by playing as a boy, then a girl, and then playing as a nonbinary character. The way that I found myself becoming more comfortable with blurring these binary lines of identity was because I had space to experiment in a consequence free container, where I could take on and take off genders in order to find the one that fit me […] When I allowed myself a space to play with the rules of my identity, I was able to come out with confidence, knowing that I had been able to “come out” through playing Dungeons & Dragons.

I also reached out to the members of a LGBTQIA+ D&D Facebook group (which exists!) about their favorite parts of playing queer-centered D&D, and found that a lot of us find pleasure in similar things.

“It’s really comforting to play in an LGBT group,” says Maddy, a bisexual woman who’s been playing D&D for a year and has just started DMing. “I never really got to be super open about my sexuality in my teen years and while I was more open about it in college, I was definitely still closeted in certain parts of my life. Now I’m definitely the most out I’ve been and really getting to goof/play around with my sexuality more in game.”

Holly is a bisexual player whose DM husband roleplays as women love interests for her in-game. She got so invested in the characters’ relationship that she started making art of the two of them together. “Being so inspired to draw, and wanting to post and talk about my art, lead me to coming out as bi to my family,” Holly said. “It’s such a relief to not be hiding anymore, and a big part is my D&D characters.”

Holly’s tiefling Elian and the NPC Reya Mantlemorn from Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus. @tarotvixen on Instagram

Getting to periodically exist in a world that welcomes you just as you are is a pretty special thing. In particular, being a queer DM is hugely gratifying, because I get to shape every inch of that world, giving it a culture where being queer is so supremely regular it’s boring. The moment I realized one of my NPCs could be married to a woman and having a fling with a man and that everyone was chill about this arrangement BECAUSE I DECIDED IT was honestly mind blowing. Who owns that tavern? Two gay half-dwarves. Who’s the most powerful person in this town? A polyamorous lesbian dwarf. Who’s the captain of the guard? An enby ace half dwarf (this campaign setting happens to have a lot of dwarves). Who gets to roleplay as all of them? Me. I do. I get to. And the best part is, I don’t feel mortified about what I might be revealing each time I step into a new skin, because I’m comfortable with all of it.

Another of my esteemed Facebook colleagues, who identifies as queer/ace/aro, enjoys the chance to live in a space that leaves romance out of the equation completely. “It’s nice because [the campaign is] more story focused than romance and that kinda drama focused which I really like. That being said our characters are often pretty close friends […] Basically sexuality is just no big deal which is really nice.”

For others, worldbuilding has become an opportunity for friends who aren’t queer to broaden their own horizons. Longtime DM, writer and player Stephanie is bi and trans, and her D&D group consists of mostly cis het guys. “My favorite part,” she says, “is through me and [my friend] these cishet white boys are starting to include more gay, more trans, more queer NPCs in the games they run and in their PCs as well! … I love watching them grow.”

When we’re open to it, giving ourselves honest space to roleplay can be pretty powerful stuff. And also, I cannot stress enough how fun it is to pretend-attack something with a greataxe.

*The Bisexual Academy is real. It is. Ask any bisexual.
**The bisexual walk is also real, I believe. Accounts differ.

I Couldn’t Find the BIPOC Queer Comedy Series I Wanted, So I Made It Myself

For years I’ve longed to see myself on television, but I quickly realized there’s a lack of BIPOC queer comedy series being greenlit in Hollywood. I realized if I wanted to see a funny, adorably awkward bisexual woman stumbling up the corporate ladder while still living her best messy queer life with her friends. I would have to create the show I desired. As an Upright Citizens Brigade alumni, I had just graduated from the improv program and decided to begin my writing journey. I wrote a three minute sketch (which would eventually become Episode 4 of #TMI) about Aaliyah Jones, a bisexual woman who tries to mend her broken heart (after her girlfriend Simone broke up with her) by jumping back into the dating pool. As Aaliyah prepares to go on a date with a guy she considers to be her next boyfriend, chaos ensues once she discovers a grey pubic hair. Aaliyah scrabbles to resolve this problem and seeks the guidance of her gay roommate Pharrell Hall, played by Donzell Lewis.

Donzell and I had so much fun shooting this sketch that I turned to him and said, “I want to write a series of bizarre and inappropriate situations that our characters are faced with and have to overcome.” I created #TMI: A series that’s like the beautiful queer love child of a throuple including Noah’s Arc, Insecure and Sex in the City. Transforming a three minute sketch to a web series was fun and challenging. As the showrunner & executive producer I had the freedom to hire my talented friends. The challenges were not having a filmmaking background. The only experience I had was directing a one-minute short that premiered at Outfest Fusion in 2019. My desire to create a funny and diverse show outweighed fear and merit.

I began to network across my inner circles, and through networking I was able to build a team. I reached out to my community and my friends were kind enough to lend me their boyfriends, girlfriends and partners. I sat down and flushed out ideas and storylines. As a writer and activist, I felt a huge responsibility to highlight how intersectionality and the complexities surrounding race, gender, sexuality, and religion play an immense role in the way BIPOC people think and operate in the world. Capturing these aspects of my life and transitioning them into a comedic setting was challenging because you’re pulling from painful and personal experiences. For example, the office scene in Episode 1 is not only my favorite scene but our fan’s favorite scene as well. For BIPOC individuals, the workplace can be a toxic & triggering work environment. This is the third time Aaliyah has been up for a promotion at the production company she works for. With over 5 years invested in the company. plus fulfilling all of the qualifications, she’s ready to transition from staffed writer to story editor. Everything is riding on this promotion. Her older sister has cut her off financially, and the love of her life Simone has moved to Berlin for a job. Never in my wildest dream did I ever think I’d be writing about code switching and generational trauma. I was terrified to write this scene, but I used my sketch background to take you into the mind of Aaliyah, who’s battling with her three distinctive personalities. Slave Aaliyah (played by Dashia Magee) symbolizes Aaliyah’s depression and generational trauma. Public school Aaliyah (played by Jacquelyn Joyce Revere) represents the warrior side of Aaliyah who’s ready to defend herself and Code Switch Aaliyah (played by David Brandyn) represents the professional side of Aaliyah. This side of her personality is ready to adapt to any situation you place her in. I’m so thankful that when Aaliyah’s three different personalities debate on whether she should stay or leave her current job, Aaliyah’s oppressed side musters up the strength to speak up and decides what’s best. Our fans love this moment, because as people of color we’ve been in these situations time and time again.

It’s surreal to revise a script several times and then see your words come to life when you call “action.” There’s nothing I can compare it to besides pure bliss. As #TMI continues to travel digitally to film festivals due to COVID-19 restrictions, I’m currently reliving that surreal experience through new fans of #TMI sliding into by DMs begging for episodes 3 & 4. Episode 2 ends on a cliffhanger that has a lot of you in y’all feelings. Trust Aaliyah is definitely in hers! I have read all of your beautiful DM’s and we will be releasing more episodes soon!

For my Bi/Pan/Fluid/Queer siblings, #TMI is my love letter to us! It showcases the beauty of Black and Brown love, queer BIPOC’s, people with disabilities, body positivity, and our beloved transgender and non-binary siblings. I believe all audiences will be able to relate to the stories that are being told. For the queer people of color who are often underrepresented, please know that I see you. I write and create for you. As long as I’m here, you’ll always be seen.

To watch #TMI, check out Bi Visibility in Film on Friday, September 18th 2:30pm PST Tickets $5.00 Buy tickets here!
#TMI will be available to watch online from Friday, Sept. 25 at 7 PM EST – Monday, Sept. 28. Tickets are $2.

Remaking Myself and My Desires on the Comics Page

Bisexuality is still very new to me. The colors are still bright and shiny, untarnished by the repeated washings that a cherished garment inevitably suffers so, forgive me if my optimistic and cuddly viewpoint of bisexuality comes across as naive. That could be true, and I’m okay with it, because the initial idealism of a new identity can contain values worth clinging to even if the world turns out to disappoint you.

My initial decision to take the leap and claim bisexuality for myself started out as my appetites expanded, but my journey into it so far has been about receptivity and empathy. When I first saw bisexuality defined as “attraction to your own and other genders,” it captured my sexuality exactly where it was: a trans woman whose dating history included other women and nonbinary partners.

The idea that I could assert myself as bisexual without being into cis men felt revolutionary, but I was held back by the knowledge that no matter what I said my bisexuality meant, it would be interpreted to mean that I was sexually available to cis men, a kind of being seen that I very much did not want to experience. Until I met the right guy: impossibly pretty, extremely queer, incredibly soft, and absolutely fictional.

His name is Indigo Hanover and he’s the warm cup of cocoa at the center of Tini Howard and Nick Robles’ wildly surreal end of life horror comic Euthanauts. The magic of fiction, and art in general, is that we can see things and try them on without the risks that go with them in real life and sexual attraction to cis men is precisely the kind of thing you want to try out in art before you do it for real, if you can. The problem, of course, is that is it takes queer creators like Howard and Robles to produce the kind of enchanting femme of center guys who entice me, and the opportunities for creators like us to bring characters like Indigo fully to life are exceedingly rare.

It’s a reality that’s been at the front of my mind as I dive deeper into making erotic journal comics about my medical transition and the ways that it’s reshaping my relationship to my body and sexuality. A blank page is a space of unlimited possibility for me to project whatever shape my desires take, which feels harder to take for granted than ever thanks to the raging COVID-19 pandemic and, as I write this, choking smoke from west coast wildfires.

When I’m drawing, I can fill in the kind of gaps in the culture that Howard and Robles did for me with Indigo, and it’s a particularly electric feeling as a trans woman cartoonist given that trans women’s sexuality is still bound up in stigma, exploitation, and extreme violence in the mainstream. In the age of bathroom bills, it frequently feels like the only time we’re granted any kind of sexual agency in the wider culture is to be framed as predators or infiltrators.

So there’s a kind of bittersweet privilege to knowing that articulating my personal sexuality in any way possesses far more revolutionary potential and the frisson of taboo than the equivalent work from any cis man could, even if he’s expressing desire for trans women. But that also comes with the weight of being seen, and making my sexuality so nakedly visible to the public brings back the same problems of inviting cis male attention that initially held me back from asserting myself as bisexual. The social dynamics and economics of hosting erotic comics about myself on OnlyFans and using them as a vehicle to open myself up to making porn means that navigating cis male attention and the dreaded male gaze, whatever that means, is going to be a prominent aspect of my professional life for the foreseeable future.

For a lot of women in the arts, cis or trans, straight or queer, the male gaze is an invisible enemy to be grappled with, to be counterprogrammed. There’s voluminous discussion about how women creators in particular strategize about how to misdirect or baffle said male gaze as a condition of expressing their sexuality in their work, and while I recognize the validity of those approaches, I find them exhausting and stifling.

After a decade of anguish and self sabotage between my initial gender epiphany and starting HRT, I resent the idea of diminishing myself or my flowering sexuality for anyone or anything irrespective of the risks attached. I don’t want to adopt an oppositional or harm reduction stance towards any aspect of my audience, it feels like a violation of my agency as both a trans woman and an artist.

Instead, I want to open up my work to everyone and anyone while keeping hold of the specificity of my queerness and desires. To me, conquering the stigmas and suppression of trans women’s sexuality means granting access to a self directed, unapologetic vision of trans sexuality. It’s a position that requires an incredible amount of vulnerability and comes with all kinds of dangers and pitfalls, but it’s one that I’m finding myself thriving in and rewarded by.

The emphasis of my personal sexuality right now is embracing being a woman with a penis attracted to other women with penises, a territory that creates all kinds of opportunities for the conventional cis het male gaze to see itself and its desires reflected in. Again, it’s a fact that comes with all kinds of potential anxieties, but I’d rather accept it and exploit it to my own ends than pull back one inch from my own desires because they have the potential to overlap with the demographic that has the most prolific history of violence against women like me.

Because when I’m drawing, I’m in control. In the same way that consuming art can be a safe way to try things on, creating it can be a safe way to reassert control. There’s always a push and pull, the commercial success or failure of my work depends on how I navigate the space between my desires and that of my audience, but I can dictate the terms in which my sexuality and the artistic depiction of my body are seen and consumed with far more confidence than under any other set of circumstances.

If I’m drawing one woman sucking another woman’s cock, I’m depicting women’s pleasure no matter who’s getting off to it, but I also get to decide what perspective I’m showing it from, which is one of the reasons why I love referencing the cinematography of porn in my work and why I’m increasingly eager to turn the camera on myself.

One of the most explicit ways that cis het ablebodied white men are centered in the visual arts is POV porn because it’s shot to simulate the world from their eyes, their penises are centered in the frame, and the assumptions about the market held by those who control the major studios mean that it’s rare to the point of extreme novelty to see anyone else shot from that perspective.

It’s easy enough for trans women with penises to transpose ourselves onto that kind of POV porn if the dynamics of the scene fit our desires, but why settle? The rising popularity of platforms like OnlyFans and current self isolation conditions means that some trans women performers can, and are shooting more from their own perspectives and it’s a key reference point for both my current comics and my future ambitions.

Drawing explicit porn from a trans woman with a penis’ perspective is a fascinating and incredible way for me to address very different segments of my audience in very different ways simultaneously. I can let trans women in my audience see themselves reflected in ways they never have before while challenging my cis male audience to see the overlap of our desires through my eyes instead of theirs, to experience the decentering of their own bodies in pursuit of pleasure not as a means of revenge, but as a means of extending an opportunity for empathy and understanding.

The spectre of cis male violence towards trans women is ever present psychologically even if I’m largely sheltered from it as a white trans woman exposing myself primarily through drawings. I can only let my guard down so far, but that’s increasingly matched in my mind by the reality that violence towards us isn’t a universal condition. That when we say that feminism aims to liberate men from patriarchy as well, one of the most acute examples of that is the pain, stigma, and violence that patriarchy metes out to cis men who are seen or thought to be attracted to trans women.

That stigma does nothing to exculpate violence or a cowardly unwillingness to be seen with us in public that cannot recognize how many orders of magnitude harder it is for us to exist in public on our own. That said, the closet is a hellish place for anyone and it costs nothing to recognize that transamorous cis men struggle with their own kind of closet. If my work provides a context and opportunity to weaken that closet, then I want to pursue it to the best of my ability. Not just for them, but for myself, my sisters, and our community. Loving trans women isn’t a painful or shameful experience. It’s ecstasy. It’s a privilege. It needs to be protected and celebrated.

It’s a perspective that I first started to come around to through trans women I was close to who were dating men at a time when it held no appeal for me. I initially had a lot of resentment about the level and kind of attention that cis men could get in the media for being transamorous, and some of that resentment was valid: transamorous cis men can certainly feed media fixations on trans women in very detrimental ways, but I was deeply skeptical that they had anything to add to the conversation even under ideal circumstances.

That changed with the experience of having the compulsion to remind a friend to text me when she got home after every time she went out to hook up with a guy she met on a dating site. She came home safe every time, but once I had someone to lose it became a lot easier to see how breaking down the stigmas that fuel transphobic violence as a community safety issue. Wanting to see my sisters safe, happy, and loved meant that I had to take the way that the men they date are talked about in the public sphere seriously, and it got a lot more personal once I asserted myself as bisexual.

It all came to a head when an artist I admire followed me on Twitter and, by visiting his profile, I noticed that he was mutuals with several of the trans porn performers that I follow. It should have been worth nothing more than a giggle, but it turned into a spiral of insecurities and anxieties instead because I’m at least as brain poisoned as anyone else into being skeptical about any interest that cis men have in trans women.

Even just trying on the idea of hooking up with a guy like that was too much because all it did was bring back the painful memories of another trans woman I knew being subjected to anonymous harassment over social media that her boyfriend was a “chaser.” What started out as an idle daydream reduced me to a sobbing wreck because, as I discovered in that moment, those stigmas cut both ways. All of the ways that cis men are targeted and demeaned for expressing interest in trans women create insecurities and anxieties in us about our worth, the nature of anyone’s attraction to us, and the potential consequences of publicly dating cis men.

It’s something that I’ve started thinking about a lot when I consider the audience for my comic and my choice to engage with and manipulate the perceived male gaze rather than work to evade it. I want to have idle thoughts about hooking up with a guy that don’t lead to catastrophizing. I want a creative space where I can work on pulling down the barriers inside myself in a context where people who are struggling with the same issues, whether from the same perspective as mine or a different one can see it. To see that they aren’t alone in struggling with the ways that trans sexuality has been violently stigmatized for both trans people and anyone who dares to love us.

Which is why I’ve come to view my bisexuality as a journey into receptivity and empathy. I want to reciprocate the sense of freedom that the validation of my work gives me, to invite desire, to dare to hope that desiring me through my work can be healing, freeing, or both. To me, embracing bisexuality as a fundamental part of my nature has meant opening up myself to new possibilities and find ways to dismantle the fear and insecurities that have kept me walled off from both myself and others for far too long.

Editor’s Notes: On Bi+ Week 2020

An inside look, just for A+ members, from Autostraddle’s editors on the process, struggles, and surprises of working on what you’re reading on the site. We learn so much from this work before it ever even makes it to your eyes; now you can, too!

I was already in the midst of planning the first outlines of this week of content when a spate of very silly and very tired bisexual takes rolled through the discourse — whether it was the ~validity~ of bisexual women (what does that even mean? I’ve always wondered!) or what we’re like to date, it felt like we were in an unforgiving spotlight just as I was trying to think about how to best celebrate us. It didn’t feel great, and specifically felt weirdly anachronistic; after a summer defined by new horizons I hadn’t dared to imagine possible, it was so bizarre to somehow be sitting through the same conversations I felt like we were having back in 2010.

Another way of looking at it, though, I guess is that another thing we were reminded of this summer is how progress always moves in cycles, and some of them aren’t even that long; we’re always working on the same things we were working on five, ten, 20, 50 years ago; they’ve just been shifted up and into a different place, but they don’t go away. Which I guess is also what I’ve been thinking about for bi week of this year; I know we don’t ever get to stop thinking entirely about the annoying issues we have to keep re-litigating over and over, but I do want us to get to move the conversation forward. And I want us to be able to have it on our terms – not as a reaction, not as a defense or a justification, but a conversation amongst ourselves about ourselves that lets us connect with and affirm each other.

Sometimes I feel insecure or unsure about the role of these discussions – what are the conversations we want or need to be having in this community? What does ~community~ actually even mean for us? Am I like the only person who still calls themselves bisexual, or has the next generation moved on to different ways to talk about themselves and their experiences, like how there are all these new drugs I don’t know anything about? What kind of vocabulary do we have as a community to talk about everything that’s urgently on the table right now for us all? I wasn’t sure! And I’m still not, which is fine; the point is the questions, not insisting on having answers. But the submissions that rolled in for this week have made me feel so grateful and excited about what we’re already thinking and doing as a community and what we’re capable of doing. We have pieces on trying to stay in touch with the huge possibilities of how sexuality can shift with new awareness of gender, the interplay of a sexuality people find tough to parse with a disability that people find illegible; the power of community and Dungeons & Dragons, what it’s like to be literally at the cutting edge of new representations of bi women by writing your own webseries, and complex, multilayered conversations I’m truly thrilled to get to share with you. Thank you for being here and for being part of them, and being part of this week!

Unlearning Stigma This Bi+ Week

Every couple of months the same conversation erupts among the queer section of social media about bisexuals. Sometimes it’s in-fighting and disagreement about whether or not bisexuals have a right to claim butch and femme as identities; other times, it becomes apparent that certain sections of the queer community haven’t yet tired of chewing on the same boring root about gold star lesbians this; unfaithful, greedy bisexuals that. Throughout my twenties, and now into my thirties – for a whole damn decade – the Internet has reminded me with stunning regularity that bisexual women are just fake gays waiting to break lesbians’ hearts, while bisexual men are in denial about how gay they actually are. And all bisexuals are transphobic, somehow, even the trans and non-binary ones.

These are all examples of stigma, and they’re particularly painful examples of stigma, since in these cases, they’re sometimes coming from within the queer community itself. This September, as we celebrate bisexuality, it’s important to also educate ourselves about how stigma hurts bisexual people, and learn the steps we can take as a community toward healing and solidarity.

Types of stigma

In my research on stigma and mental health as a social work graduate student, I focused on three main examples of stigma: Institutional stigma, cultural stigma, and interpersonal stigma. Institutional stigma is stigma that is enacted on a large scale – in our health care systems and our legal systems, on a grand, sweeping level. Stigma that is written into laws. Stigma that becomes policy. When being gay was a pathologized diagnosis in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders) as recently as the 1960s and 70s, this was an example of institutional stigma. The dearth of nation-wide comprehensive sex education for adolescents of queer identities, are also examples of institutional stigma that impact bisexual people today.

Cultural stigma, also known as socio-cultural exclusion or cultural exclusion, is another type of stigma that bisexual people face. The lack of understanding and cultural competence about bisexuality in mental and physical health care is an example of this. Consider, for example, the several awkward conversations I’ve had with gynecologists when disclosing to them I’m bisexual: One doctor, before hastily leaving the room, awkwardly blurted, “Well you can still get STDs from women,” but didn’t offer me any specific information for how to create safer sex practices, I suspect because she just didn’t know of them. Another example of cultural stigma might be the phenomenon of bisexual erasure: the assumption by others that a person is straight when they are in a relationship with someone presumably of the “opposite” sex (a problematic and cissexist concept to begin with), and gay if they are in a relationship with someone who is perceived to be of the “same” sex.

We experience interpersonal stigma in our smaller social circles and one-to-one relationships, and these are at times the most painful examples of stigma. They occur with our family members – the parents who tell us bisexuality is “just a phase” we’ll grow out of; the partners who assume that because we’re bi we’ll cheat; the straight friends who are suddenly too nervous to hug platonically now that we’ve come out. Interpersonal stigma objectifies and injures us in our most intimate relationships, forces us to embody caricatured misrepresentations of what it means to be bisexual, rather than allowing us to be seen and loved for the authentic beings that we are.

Mental health outcomes for bisexual people

As you might imagine, it’s not easy facing all these different types of stigma, both from mainstream cisheteropatriarchal culture, and within the community where we hope to be held safely, valued, and loved. Health outcomes for bisexual people reflect these challenges. According to the Human Rights Campaign, there are numerous health disparities among bisexual people, including higher rates of cancer and STIs, as well as poorer mental health outcomes. About a third of bisexual women, and nearly 40 percent of bisexual men, don’t disclose their sexuality to health care providers, as compared with thirteen percent of gay men and ten percent of lesbian women.

In terms of mental health, bisexual people are at higher risk of depression, suicidality, mood and anxiety disorders, and feelings of helplessness and exhaustion. Bisexual people are at increased risk of abuse and sexual violence, as well as substance abuse. These trends are even starker when you consider that bisexual people make up the largest swath of the LGBTQ+ community – nearly 50% of queer folks identify as bisexual – yet are deeply underrepresented when it comes to research. And bisexual people (many of whom are also trans and/or of color) are also “vulnerable to further disparities that occur at the intersections of biphobia, racism and transphobia,” according to HRC, listing several axes of minority stress. Our community is hurting, and it is heartbreaking that part of that pain comes from inside the house.

Unlearning and healing from stigma

This week is about celebrating bisexuality, though, and as such, it is important to emphasize that healing is possible. I wouldn’t be a therapist if didn’t believe, with every fiber of my being, that this is true.

While it can feel like there isn’t much we can do on an individual level about these larger forms of stigma – institutional, cultural, and interpersonal – there is one more type of stigma that is, to some degree, within our power to change, directly. Internalized stigma occurs when we absorb the negative messages about bisexuality and believe them about ourselves. It isn’t easy to overcome this. To a large extent, we still can’t do it alone: we are social creatures, and we depend on developing and maintaining relationships with each other in order to survive.

But it is possible.

For example, every time some biphobic foolishness starts kicking up again online, I also see, with a swiftness, hundreds of community members engaging with the vitriol in so many powerful ways: with righteous rage, with measured, compassionate efforts to educate those who are ignorant, and (my personal favorite) with humor. There are so many phenomenal bisexual sex educators out there, offering their expertise and doing the work to fill the gaps left out of mainstream sex education. In the creation of these narratives and lessons, people find each other: one of my favorite bicons, Gabrielle Noel has, over the past couple of years, curated a space online for bisexual people to feel seen, validated, and loved for who we are. In a recent TikTok, she joked grimly to the tune of Bulletproof, “You think you can hurt me? I came out as bisexual in a Grenadian-American family. Being gay is still illegal in my parents’ country” – an experience that resonated with many.

Therapists can at times be critical of humor as a coping mechanism, but in my opinion, it’s a coping mechanism that requires no small amount of resilience to access. And today, there are more therapists than ever who are dedicated to offering inclusive, affirming mental health care to members of the LGBTQ+ community – including bisexual people.

Stigma, in its various iterations, is heavy. The weight of it increased when your stigmatized identity can’t find solace even within your own community. But it’s important to remember – during Bisexuality Week, and every day – that you are valid in your sexuality. The way you love is real, beautiful, and sacred. No matter how isolated we can sometimes feel, remember: there are so many of us in the queer community, and the fluidity, vibrancy, and dynamic nature of our love will always make us powerful.