Hey y’all, if we weren’t still stuck with the god awful ace discourse, who do you think LGBT+ tumblr would be using as a scapegoat for everything that even slightly inconveniences them? My money is on bi and nb people; exclusionists fall back on nbphobia and biphobia way too quickly.
Yeah I’ve already started seeing the slide back into bi discourse?
And I know it’s unfashionable™ to talk about TERF infiltration (which is exactly as the TERFs would like it to be) but lately when exclusionists talk about attraction and “mlm/wlw” categories they seem to be more and more bent on sorting people by birth assignment, sooooo….
Unpopular opinion, but I feel like a lot of the time the terms “mlm,” “wlw,” “achillean,” and “sapphic” are pretty much just being used to avoid saying “queer”? There are times when those terms are useful, but a lot more times when it would make much more sense to say “queer men” or “queer women” or “queer people.” And nonbinary people are always left out, and I’ve seen a lot more exclusionists use the sapphic/achillean flags as icons than inclusionists. (Though it’s by no means as omnipresent as…some things.)
Saaaaaaaaame.
‘sapphic/achillean’ seems to me like another unhelpful gender binary and a laughable and very middle-class-dominated attempt to get even further away from anything that could possibly have ever been used as a slur (as if bigors can not just use any new word we create as a slur too). It also serves to further seperate people from older words like lesbian, dyke and queer that might help people access the more radical history of their movements.
& I definitely do not trust the use of wlw and mlm on Tumblr at all. Like, where do non-binary people even fit into that? And are bisexual people really supposed to embrace a label that only values one part of their sexuality? It once again seems to treat bisexuality as ‘half queer’.
There are more words and terms and definitions floating out there and 99% of them claim to ‘unite devided communities’ but upon closer inspection seem designed to put cisgender lesbians and cisgender gay men back at the centre of what the community is while alienating asexual people and people who do not fit into binaries.
I don’t mind the use of terms like “sapphic” if they are used as intended, which they often aren’t. I see “sapphic” and “wlw” being used as synonyms for “lesbian” (as “POC” ends up being used as a synonym for “black”), which further marginalizes bi people.
I am legit waiting for someone to exclude bi people from the community by saying something like, “you can’t come to the pride parade if you aren’t in a sapphic relationship” – which, like the term “lesbian relationship,” ignores both nonbinary people and bi people who are in relationships with each other, and furthers the biphobic idea that who you date determines your orientation.
I thought “sapphic” was ok for its intended purpose because Sappho’s being bi is certainly a possibility, though really it historically HAS meant lesbian (hasn’t it?), but I thought Achillean was weird (like, why? Sappho’s a real person, Achilles is mythological; if the idea is bi inclusion, why not Catullan, since we know Catullus was bisexual? And a real person? And a poet like Sappho, if we’re going for a meaningful parallel between the two?).
Thing is, real or not, Sappho as a poet and Achilles as a fictional character are both very obviously BI so to speak of ‘sapphic relationships’ as relationships between women makes no historic sense.
But even if the use of sapphic and achillean was totally inclusive of bi people, I would still be suspicious of all the classism, euro-centrism, glorification of antiquity aspect of the terms and the obvious anti-queerness of a lot of people who try to popularize the term.
QueerAnarchism 