Mamihlapinatapai

 BiCon peeps - if I ran another Bi Carers meet, would people be interested? You can DM if you would prefer

Got some squeaks of interest - have emailed BiCon 😀

1. LJ has implemented FI style 'likes' in an unhelpful way.

I can't tell who has liked a post, my journal theme doesn't show them but I get a little email about it :-S

2. It is really nice to get comments so I shall add 'comment more' to my personal LJ revival plan :-D

Given the weirdness of the liking system - if you like one of my posts but don't have anything to say, please comment with a smiley face or something small like that!

ETA

3.  Have remembered I bought a small cheap laptop, specifically for the purpose of writing on t'internet from bed.  So lots of you have just got comments :D  Teenytinylaptop's battery doesn't last long which is actually good because it is keeping me focussed instead of browsing idly.

4.  I often enjoy reading posts but feel I have nothing to say so don't comment.  But when I tried, I found something to say for every post I looked at.  That's useful to know.

It is also interesting because in hanging around with quiet, introverted and/or socially anxious people, I have somehow absorbed the idea that I find talking people to people.  But that isn't actually true for me*.  It's a skill I want to keep developing for things like Bi Coffee and post-Biphoria when I want to make people feel welcome and included in the conversation.

*I have spent my life being told/assuming that I am similar to my dad in personality and he is one of those quiet people.  But my mum is really gregarious and chatty and it is interesting to start seeing what I have inherited from her as well.   I can remember talking to her about people we know and she had really interesting insights into how people ticked which would never have occured to teenaged me.  But mid-30s me has learned a lot about people since then.  And learning how to talk and how to listen, both in the relatively shallow social lubrication sense and in the deeper sense of 'holding space'* is an ongoing goal for me.

*Discussion of bereavement and grief at that link
Posted via m.livejournal.com.

With all this discussion of the LJ revival, I have been planning to write more here. I still post a lot across various media but Twitter and Facebook are horrendous for finding stuff beyond a few days/hours back and I would really like to have more of a record of who I am and what I am doing.

I realised a big stumbling block to posting here is that I post stuff-on-my-mind/rants to FB and the more personal thoughts posted to Twitter. And the stuff that’s left feels a bit too introspective/self-indulgent to put on here, especially when it is the only post on a page.

To combat this, I am going to try and pick up SFred’s format of posting diary entries about what I am doing each week and also to remember Frightened’s useful tag “Livejournal is self-obsession, honey” when I feel I am being to self-indulgent. After all, no-one is obliged to read this stuff ;)

I also plan to copy long posts I am proud of from Facebook as a personal archive.

I find 'passing privilege' really difficult to talk about. On one hand, it does give me access to privileges and acceptance that non-passing people do not get but on the other hand, those privileges are conditional on me keeping myself closeted.

There is a gulf between 'passing' and being accepted. Passing is explicitly being accepted on false pretences. I have a male partner, I look pretty heteronormative and people read me as straight. My alleged straightness is not a lie I am telling. it is their stupid assumptions that bisexuals don't exist, a woman partnered with a man must be straight and that there is a queer 'look' that can be easily identified. Either I am constantly outing myself or I am being constantly pushed back into the closet.

Am I to blame when people make false assumptions about me? Where is the line between accepting that people will mis-label me and taking advantage of that mis-labelling? How soon do I need to out myself to avoid being considered 'deceitful' and 'untrustworthy'? (It is no coincidence that these are negative stereotypes of bi people!) How much should I do to make myself look queer in straight people's eyes, even if it doesn't feel comfortable for me? It is really difficult to avoid blaming myself for people's homophobic & biphobic assumptions about me, my appearance, my relationship, my queer identity. It is difficult to avoid internalising the belief that I am not queer enough, not brave enough, not honest enough.

Passing as straight gives some conditional privileges in straight, mainstream society, (even if it is not true acceptance) but it can lead to rejection and harrassment in LG communities unless I choose to 'pass' as lesbian, closeting myself again. The assumption is that because I pass in straight communities, I do not need queer community and I am greedy for expecting the community to include me. But I am NOT fully, genuinely accepted in either community and two half-hearted welcomes do not add up to a community where I can feel safe and respected. 'Passing privilege' can be used to blame bisexual people for their own oppression, unless they meet a set of shifting, unstated requirements - looking queer enough, being out enough in straight spaces but not too out in LGBT ones, having an appropriate sexual CV to demonstrate our queerness.

And yet ... I took my time coming out to my family and it didn't get questioned because I had this convenient male boyfriend to bring home for the holidays. I can talk about my partner at work without playing the pronoun game. My appearance fits a norm and that gives me some protection against harrassment by randoms. Passing has brought me some privileges and I have been able to avoid internalising some of the negative effects because I have access to a bisexual community. This has helped me identify and fend off bi-erasing microaggressions from straight and LG(bt) communities.

Some people have a worse experience and are marginalised in both straight and LG(bt) spaces. I am pretty convinced that this experience of dual marginalisation is the underlying cause of the horrifying statistics about bisexual people's mental health problems, experience of violence and reluctance to be out. Being constantly isolated and undermined is destructive and that experience is emphatically not a privilege.

I approach the issue of passing privilege from a quite defensive posture in two different ways. I think that people mistake 'passing' for acceptance and therefore dismiss the way passing harms us. On the other hand, I have not experienced much direct oppression myself and I am wary of 'playing the victim' by claiming to be more oppressed than I am. I suspect being relatively privileged on other axes plays into that defensiveness - I don't want to ignore those factors.

I do think that there are actual benefits to passing and I think they make life easier for people who can pass. For example, I work with a homophobe and I am not out so it does not affect our working relationship. My friend is a non binary trans woman who does not pass as cis - she could not work with him in the same way because she does not pass as straight even for a minute. Feeling erased is NOT as bad as fearing for my job. Not outing myself to a homophobe is a choiceI can make. It is not a uniquely bisexual thing and it does not make me responsible for his homophobia (he is a twat) but it does benefit me.

However, it strikes me that I have viewed passing privilege as a specifically bisexual issue because I have seen it used to undermine and exclude bi people. However, the same criticism (of 'taking advantage' of passing) would apply to any queer person who is ever mis-identified and does not immediately correct that identification. Holding bisexuals *more* accoubtable for that than monosexuals is another way of saying we are only conditionally welcome.


(This post was previously published in Purple Prose, edited by Kate Harrad (http://thorntreepress.com/purple-prose/), which is a collection of interviews, essays, poems and commentary, written for and by bi people in the UK.

This epic rant was sparked by Gesa Mayer’s paper on XX at the Polyamory event at MMU on 21/02/16. I found the paper interesting but infuriating as you can see.

I am going to try and summarise Gesa’s paper based on my memory of the key points that jumped out at me. I want this summary to be fair so if you think I am off base, please let me know. I am going to use polyamory and non-monogamy interchangeably in this article.

Gesa’s paper proposed that one of the attractions of monogamy is that it makes romantic promises about relationships and she identified priority, exclusivity and complementarity as key romantic promises.

By comparison with these promises, polyamory is often explained as a lack. On one hand, polyamory is assumed to be caused by a lack (lack of good enough partners or a pathological need for more sex or affection etc than one partner can provide). On the other, it is accused of causing a lack, by splitting people’s time and attention or by damaging the primary relationship.

Gesa presented a mix of quotes from relationship counsellors espousing these views and from poly people challenging them. Her argument seemed to be that monogamy based on lack/scarcity and that in contrast polyamory abundance and sharing but she also noted that many of monogamy’s promises turned up in poly people’s description of their own lives.

I hope that’s a fair assessment of the paper and I can see it as being useful in challenging negative attitudes to non-monogamy. But I have three big problems with it.


( This got long! )

Last year's answers here

1. What did you do in 2015 that you'd never done before?
( Meme-age )

As you can tell by the last post, I am starting to work out my thoughts about carers and the caring relationship, especially how to care and ask for support as a carer in an ethical, non-oppressive way. I feel like I am on shaky ground – being a carer is hard but it is often easier than being disabled and it is easy and dangerous for carers to speak over the people they are caring for.

It occurs to me that there are parallels between being a carer and being a white person in a relationship with a person of colour or being a cis person in a relationship with a trans person.
• You may experience the oppression directly (disablism, racism, transphobia) but more frequently you experience it by association or witness it happening to the other person.
• Other people like you (white or cis or non-disabled) may include you in their disablism, racism and/or transphobia, assuming you agree.
• Mainstream society (in the West) is white, non-disabled and cis and has very low understanding of disablism, racism and transphobia. You are likely to need to educate yourself and then educate people around you.
• Support is desperately limited. Where support exists, it is generally focussed on the other person. Asking for support can feel like stealing resources from people who need it more.
• The support available can be disablist/racist/transphobic – for example when disabled people are treated as burdens, trans people are framed as deceiving/hurting their partners or inter-racial relationships are fetishised or tokenised.
• You are likely to have structural power in the relationship.
• You are likely to have internalised disablist, racist, transphobic ideas or beliefs and will mess up at some point.
• You have the opportunity to use power abusively. If you do, you can find people who will justify your behaviour.
• You are taken more seriously on the subject (of disablism, racism, transphobia) than the other person because of bullshit assumptions about objectivity.
• You can escape from the oppression more easily than the other person, for short periods or permanently by ending the relationship.
• You may find yourself permanently angry and horrified at how mainstream society equates ability with worth, enforces gender roles (sometimes violently) and works to maintain white privilege.
• Structural power is NOT the only issue and both sides of the relationship can be abusive (physically, emotionally, psychologically).
• Disablism, racism and/or transphobia make being abused by your partner or the person you provide care for even harder to talk about because of how neatly it fits disablist/racist/transphobic narratives.

I have written this as if these are simple binaries but they intersect and combine. Carers often have disabilities or need care themselves. Trans people and people of colour can be carers. Trans PoC exist. Other privileges and oppressions can affect what support you can access and how medical/social care providers treat you and the person you care for. I don’t want to overstate the parallels – these oppressions are different and work in different ways but I think I will look for good resources on inter-racial relationships and cis-trans relationships to see if there is any useful ideas there.

However, I think I have found a central theme – for someone who is not otherwise oppressed, these relationships force you to confront your own privilege and internalised -isms while discovering the oppression in mainstream society. (One of the key functions of privilege is to make your own privilege invisible to you). A key part of caring ethically and non-oppressively is learning to negotiate that within intensely personal relationships, with all the usual tides and undercurrents of love and jealousy and frustration you find there.