Happy Multi-Gender Attracted Humans Exist Week!

Image by Shiri Eisner at bidyke.tumblr.com

More commonly called Bisexuality Visibility Day or Celebrate Bisexuality Day, September 23 and the week of September 20-26th is a time to recognize and affirm multi-gender attracted identities- bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual, polysexual, pan/biromantic asexual & demisexual, queer, fluid and so forth, and issues facing multi-gender attracted people.

Often-times our identities are erased and ignored, and people make assumptions about us based on who our current partner(s) happen to be. Misunderstanding in both broader heteronormative society and the gay and lesbian communities can lead to more isolation for bisexuals.

Statistics about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people (or sometimes just GLB) have typically been lumped together, making it difficult to understand differences among these distinct groups. Wait, hold on. Statistics? Demographics? That’s boring, that’s not sexy, Mariah! Post a bi flag with a sparkly unicorn and talk about how awesome it is to be bi! Yes, I know statistics may seem boring and irrelevant to you personally, but here’s why they matter. They give us information about what bisexuals are experiencing, and the data we are starting to gather is showing us many serious health and economic disparities, even in comparison with gays and lesbians. (Trans people, who come in all orientations have it even worse) And in spite of this, bisexuals make up more than half of the GLB demographic, but specifically bisexual organizations and programs receive very little funding, and gay and lesbian led organizations that may include a “B” in their acronym, still may not understand how to serve and truly include the B.

Bisexuals this, bisexuals that. What about pansexuals? Yes, pansexuals and people who identify with other labels (or none at all) and attracted to more than one gender are included in these numbers. Or maybe they aren’t, it depends on how the questions in surveys are worded.

I have to say, that it still surprises me when I look at polls and see how many people don’t understand bisexuality. I came out when I was 16, 17 years ago, and have been fortunate enough to usually be around people to whom, I could at least educate about bisexuality, and at best reply to me “Well of course that’s a thing! I’m bi too, or my partner/friend/co-worker is bi”. I think we really need to expand awareness in broader heteronormative society- by heteronormative I mean, places and contexts in which people will generally assume everyone is heterosexual until proven otherwise. I feel that’s a much more accurate description than “straight community”.

Why are you so hung up on labels? Why can’t we just be people? I really wish the world was as open-minded as you, or as you believe it to be! Yes, ultimately we would like to live in a world in which we only really need orientation labels/identities when trying to indicate what sort of partner we are interested in. I think that is already happening with the younger generation, many of them just date or have sex with people, without being concerned about how the gender of their partners reflects on their identity! Many of them feel very accepted and affirmed in this, but some of them don’t- and that’s the problem. Bi/Pan/Queer youth suicide is a big issue, one we can’t tackle alone in GLBT communities- most  parents are outside of our communities, and we need to communicate with parents, their schools, educators and bi/pan friendly therapists and make sure all these supports are in place everywhere- not just in big cities, and even in big cities we still lose our youth.

More to read!

Bisexual community has unique needs, starting with more and better data– commentary by BOP’s very own Camille Holhaus!

Advertisement

Blog Changes and To-Do Lists

A coupla blogs I follow have changed web addresses

Just thought I’d make note so even if you haven’t been following blogs, it’s little chance to signal boost them.

Nature is Sacred can now be found at NaturalPantheist.com– Matt is a naturalistic pantheist member of ADF who follows an Anglo-Saxon hearth culture. If you’re wondering “what’s that mean, and how does that work?” well then, go check out his blog!

Maple Tree Druidry also has moved to its own domain (or should I say her domain?) Carol Whitehead is a professional tarot & tea leaf reader in the London, Ontario, Canada area so if you’re in her neck of the woods, look her up.

As for my own blog-and Real Life… I keep trying to steer myself away from just being the obsessive information collector & hoarder and actually do spiritual practice…even the ADF dedicant path (imagine, me finishing a project!) Well tomorrow I am going up to Onamia, MN to attend ritual with others from my As Yet Unnamed Druid grove, to our friends at Dancing Waters Protogrove, ADF. So there ya go, actual ADF High Day ritual.

Aside from that, I have a bunch of book reviews I need to do for Moon Books, as well as ones I’ve simply read on my own.

Personal care spirituality in practice for Way of the Sacred Fool

I also have promised bloggy goodness to the Bisexual Organizing Project folks and this would be a good time, as this next week..hell I’ll just say month is Bisexual Awareness/Celebrate Bisexuality Day/Week/Month etc.

Waiting to Breathe- Am I Bisexual?

Where we last left our bumbling heroine, she was living in Dubuque, Iowa with her brother and parents. In junior high, I found my elementary school friends growing apart from me. They had discovered the fascinating trio of Clothes, Boys and Makeup, oh my! These failed to impress me (junior high boys, really?), so I focused on my studies- particularly enjoying art class and social studies and immersing myself in fantasy novels and mythology. I also had a few years earlier, failed to see how wonderful puberty was supposed to be– it mostly just seemed messy and smelly and annoying. Kinda like junior high boys. I enjoyed being a girl with free mix of tea parties with dolls and dress up as well as playing with mud and collecting bugs with my brother. Becoming a “woman” seemed like a joke when “gifted” with just with the physical features and none of the social perks. It just seemed like a longer to-do list- shave your legs and arm-pits, dealing with acne, wearing a bra, wearing make-up and “the right” clothes.

In elementary school we heard this on the playground:

I Love You, You Love Me! HO-MO-SEX-U-AL-IT-Y! People Think That We’re Just Friends, But We’re Really Lesbians! Ha-ha  and that is SOOO GAY! (That’s the Barney Dinosaur theme song, in case you are from a different time or place and are blissfully unaware) Things were also “retarded” about as often as they were “gay”. That was about it, as far as my awareness of other sexualities were concerned. They were just slurs, playground taunts.

In junior high we graduated to rumor-mongering!

I bet that art teacher is gay! He wears an earring, and has long hair! Whoa…he must be a (gasp!) hippie!

At this point I realized that this was actually A Real Thing, that some people were attracted to the same sex. Cross-dressing was also A Thing that apparently some people had a big problem with, though I thought their objections were pretty silly, considering how I was coming to view gender roles and expectations!

Then after junior high we moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota. Instead of Central in our neighborhood, we chose Arlington Senior High School. It was brand new, with lots of computers and was organized into “houses” so you would take your basic classes together with the same group of students, and had block scheduling so there were only 4 classes a day instead of 7, which made things easier for me to handle.  There’s far more I could say, but I’m focusing on identity development.

At some point I went to a movie with a friend, a re-make of The Haunting of Hill House. One of the characters in it was played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, and I realized while watching it that I felt about the actress the way I felt about, for example Brad Pitt. It’s possible I’d felt that before with other women, but the character she was playing in the film was a rather embarrassingly stereotypical bisexual- promiscuous, trying to seduce people of both genders and so forth. My friend was vocally grossed out by this, so I naturally did not confide my new found feelings.

There was, according to a bulletin board, a gay and lesbian (not sure if B & T were featured) student support group at our school. It wasn’t a Gay Straight Alliance, it was a Top Secret Support Group. To get into it, you need to go talk to the nurse. This was well-meaning of the Powers That Be, perhaps to protect the privacy and safety of the students. But I had already been dragged to enough doctors and therapists, I didn’t like the idea of having to go to the nurse to discuss my sexuality. That seemed to imply that I had a “problem” that I needed help with.

My parents while this was going, had switched some of their church-y social justice gears to getting Hamline United Methodist to be a Reconciling congregation, with a statement that gays and lesbians were accepted. The topic had never been broached from the pulpit, from what I was aware of as a kid, nor had anything been mentioned in the church-sponsored sex ed class I had taken in junior high. So as I realized my own sexuality, I knew my parents would be accepting. It was just a matter of accepting and understanding it myself!

This is part 2 of a series of posts on my personal identity development – previous one here.

What “Queer” Actually Means

Yes This, Exactly- from Nornoriel: “And, while I strongly support same-sex marriage rights, I’m also of the opinion that we really as a society need to rethink the marriedfolk picket fence 2.5 kids monogamous vanilla whitebread neurotypical gender-binary-conforming gender-expression-conforming middle-class-office-careers SUV-driving casserole-and cookout-with-suburban-neighbors-having “just like everyone” thing, wherein GLBTQ+ people who fall outside of that modality of “normal”, who aren’t the Ultrabrite-smiling couple next door buying into the above scenario tend to get shoved under the bus in the name of “equal rights”, or even will get policed by others in our own community..”

Much as I too, try not to play identity police the definition of “queer” is getting watered down (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy did not involve dressing the straight guys up in steampunk outfits and teaching them non-violent resistance or something…) 

Among Millennials (my generation) this above couple would be very much a statistical rarity, whether a same-sex or different-sexed couple. Millennials, while they often don’t understand what “feminism” really is or identify as such, tend to be fairly egalitarian, and don’t worry much about gender roles. We also typically move in together long-term and don’t necessarily see marriage as a destination. We are very multicultural, sometimes we are called “Mosaics”. 

Bisexual here- being someone who is sometimes excluded from gay/lesbian spaces I’m pretty sympathetic to asexuals/gray-aces/demi-sexuals. What I think is a little silly is that people are framing things as if a ton of asexuals are trying to take over movements/organizations/gay bars (or what?) when asexuals are a relatively small minority, and *out, politically organized aces* are an even smaller minority. Once again, I think people’s perspective are being distorted by the internet.

If you experience sexuality in such a way that is ignored/erased/stigmatized by society, and you’re proud of your identity and don’t want to compromise it for other people’s comfort levels, to me that qualifies as “queer”. Better to band together than exclude people if they need support and want community.