Biphobia Discourse, or ‘Twitter is not the place for progressive discussion’
By: Fred Bruce
Tags: Queer, LGBTQ, Language, Twitter, Social Media

Despite what the trending tab may try and tell you, there are only about six possible Twitter discourse topics reappearing on a rota until the end of time. The nuance-destroying 280-character limit, coupled with the sheer number of users scattered across the site, has doomed us to hash and rehash the same cultural conflicts like a hivemind Sisyphus.

One particular topic that got its weekly time in the social spotlight is one I admittedly feel a lot of connection to — that being the existence/non-existence/importance/unimportance of biphobia. (Which in itself raises another problem with Twitter as a debate forum, that being the inevitable lack of one coherent discourse but thousands of individuals shouting into the void and arguing with their own echoes. But I digress.)

A significant part of the issue, I believe, is one of language. Biphobia as a word is deliberately patterned after the ‘homophobia’ portmanteau, creating a separate sphere of prejudices that nonetheless imply broad-strokes similarity to those directed towards the LGBT+ community as a whole. This is immediately a problem. Many of the issues represented in the term ‘biphobia’ are ones of prejudice or assumption, rather than the material hatred inferred from the phobia suffix. A homophobe is naturally blind to nuance: the countless disparities across the sexuality spectrum are non-existent in the eyes of one adherent to the gay-straight binary. But queer discourse should be looking beyond this. Society as a whole is only recently (if at all) understanding concepts of indirect homophobia: harmful stereotypes, media depictions, and embedded cultural attitudes that, while less visible than physical attacks and the like, are have rightfully gained traction as genuine issues. This mould of passive prejudice can unintentionally bleed into the community itself — in a heteronormative society, it is incredibly difficult to overhaul one’s perspective from the ‘dichotomy’ to the ‘spectrum’. ‘Biphobia’ is not, as the name implies, an extension of homophobia but a societal criticism in and of itself. But unfortunately, the phobia suffix carries with it decades of bloodshed, and the dialectal equation of the two is unhelpful.

Those who champion biphobia’s inclusion as a common term within queer discourse run into a variety of oppositions. The common argument that ‘biphobia is homophobia in a different coat’ is derived from the linguistic implications detailed above, as well as the broadness of ‘homophobia’ in general. And while many issues facing bisexuals are undeniably rooted in homophobia, merging the terms entirely creates unnecessary confusion and internal antagonism. There are problems dealt with by bisexuals that are distinct from other instances of homophobia — the conceptualisation of bisexuality as a temporal stepping-stone rather than a specific identity, for example, is prevalent in both queer spaces and society as a whole. Furthermore, take the maligning of bisexual individuals in straight-passing relationships still being proud of their queer identity; the accusations of indecisiveness or hypersexuality; or just the general erasure both in and out the community. All of the above are valid concerns that are distinct from homophobia. Many of them are endemic of the toxic gay-straight binary that perpetuates society, but insisting they are simply homophobic is equally one-dimensional. The spectrum of homophobia is, like all aspects of queer discourse, nuanced, and categorising these aspects is healthy for everyone. It’s healthy for the community, it’s healthy for the conversation, and it’s healthy for the suffering individuals.

Again, I believe it all cycles back to the drastic implications of phobia (which is hardly helped by Twitter’s incessant rewarding of soundbite-esque posts). Accusing a queer person of biphobia is often less of a black-and-white issue than the wording implies, but it remains a vital point for understanding and working on these problems. Unfortunately, “what you’re saying is accidently reinforcing a heteronormative world-view” is less succinct than “what you’re saying is biphobic”, despite them ultimately meaning the same. If there was a prejudice-free term for categorising bisexual issues than I believe a lot of problems would be solved — something more catch-all than ‘erasure’ but less linguistically loaded than ‘phobia’. Ironically, we seem to be looking for something in the middle.