Arguing on the basis of roots is problematic because roots have a meaning derived from the history and politics of actual use. For example, we don’t interpret “transsexual” to mean “sexual attraction toward people sitting across from me” even though the root “trans” in Latin is used predominantly as a spacial adjective or adverb. The pairing of a spacial adjective with a linguistic noun to describe gender in ways that were quite binary until the last few decades is a social construction.
Similarly, the history and politics of “bisexual” starts with Krafft-Ebing borrowing the term from botany and zoology to describe people who were not exclusively heterosexual or homosexual. Arguably he and other early psychologists including Freud are responsible for constructing heterosexuality as well. Gender deviance and homosexuality were widely considered to go hand-in-hand under those theories, and still are outside of America. So there’s a fairly rich and complex history of trans people and nonbinary people within gay and lesbian communities until quite recently. If we’re going to discard bisexual as tainted by the theoretical assumptions of prior generations who imposed the term on us, we should reject the entire kit and kaboodle, including the Freudian relic of “pansexual.”
The 80s and 90s saw the emergence of a bisexual movement which considered autobiography and autoethnography to be more important than either the theoretical approaches of people like Kinsey and Klein or linguistic roots. And what we found is that people identified as bisexual were not necessarily binary either in gender or sexuality. Central to this conflict is what I consider to be a fundamental principle of queer theory, that abstract theory derivative of heterosexist science is less important than politics, history, and most importantly, the voices of diverse queer people. The entire point was to deconstruct the idea that human sexuality can be classified into sheep and goats based on largely theoretical dividing lines like the number of genders.
The idea that complex histories, attractions, and relationships should be reduced to single words for the sake of convenience has less to do with communicating those concepts than with constructing political shibboleths. If you want to understand my sexuality, gender, relationships, and politics you need to 1) buy me a cup of coffe, 2) ask, and 3) be prepared to listen for a good half-hour, because I don’t speak in label, I speak in complete paragraphs. I have a button that’s older than many people participating in this discussion that reads “don’t assume I’m attracted to you/don’t assume I’m not.”
Bisexuality is inclusive of nonbinary gender and sexuality because we as bisexual people said so in describing our own lives, ideals, and experiences. We have done so repeatedly, consistently, and firmly over the last 25 years. So the question needs to be asked as to why Victorian and Edwardian shrinks are more authoritative in defining bisexuality than bisexual people.
And on the other hand, I’m bisexual because I am identified as bisexual by a biphobic culture. Playing hokey pokey with language doesn’t change that, and until you erase anti-bisexual prejudice, I will insist on using “bisexual” as an adjective to describe my relationship with those forms of oppression.
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