Author photos, gender identity, and Bomb Girls

Warning!

The following post contains profanity, navel-gazing, discussions of body image and gender identity, and SPOILERS for seasons 1 and 2 of Bomb Girls.

I recently read Mary Robinette Kowal’s Debut Author Lesson #13, The Author Photo. I read it and thought out loud in my own head, “I’m so glad I don’t need to do that.”

And then a book I co-edited was nominated for a Hugo Award.

And then a venue I wrote something for asked for an author photo.

Soooooo. Perhaps I need an author photo.

I do not spend a great deal of time pondering how I look. Or, rather, I spend a great deal of time deliberately and consciously setting aside the endlessly-sounding messages of my culture on gender performance, weight, size, sexual availability, and age. My general conscious thinking amounts to “well fuck you you fucking fuckers.”

I used to spend an enormous amount of time devoted to thinking about my appearance. I was younger and I had just figured out that I liked girls more the way Katchoo did and less the way Ilyana and Kitty were friends. Okay, maybe the way Rachel and Kitty were friends, and a pox on Mr. Clarement and Mr. Davis for the comic book Excalibur. (No, wait, a thank-you to them for that comic.) I wanted to let girls know I liked them. I wanted to let boys know I did NOT like them the way they liked my boobs. And I wanted to do all of this in a way that did not result in my being assaulted in any way.

I am watching the tv series Bomb Girls. It’s a Canadian series about women who work in a munitions factory in Canada during WWII. One of these women, Betty McRae, spends the first season very clearly telling everyone that she knows she is not like the rest of them. It was perfectly obvious to me that Betty was lesbian. And I started wondering — how were they doing it? On the show, I mean. How were the writers, directors, and the actress, Ali Liebert, portraying the covert queer identity appropriate for Betty McRae?

Part of it is her clothes — Betty wears pants. But so does Gladys, and Gladys is as straight as they come. Betty swaggers and slouches and cocks her hips. So does Vera, and when Vera does it she is attracting men. Betty doesn’t wear much makeup. Neither does Lorna, and Lorna is heterosexual and married. Betty is a cocky leader, telling others what to do. So are Gladys and Lorna. Betty is bad at flirting. So is Kate, who is unimpeachably straight. It’s almost impossible to point to the One Thing Betty Does that codes her as gay — and that, my friends, is the entire point.

Betty must maintain plausible deniability. She cannot be caught being gay. Her gay identity is spiderweb, it is fog, it is rumor and misapprehension.

In season two of Bomb Girls we see Betty flirt with and start a sexual relationship with a woman, Teresa. Their flirting is composed entirely of things that could be taken two ways. Until they are alone together, when the ultimate risk of physical contact is taken, and the truth must be told. Everything, absolutely everything in public is in code.

When I came out in 1992-1993, I was attending Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. This was probably one of the MOST forgiving environments to come out in, in the entire country at the time. Maybe, maybe there were a dozen equally openly queer communities in the U.S. at the time. Macalester was queer, St. Paul was liberal, and it was perfectly safe to hold your girlfriend’s hand as you walked across campus.

Until you got to the bus stop on the corner. Then you were back in the real world.

I recall a night when I was out with friends, walking either to a party or back from a party, I can’t recall which. Said friends and I were perfectly well drunk, progressing somewhat loudly down the sidewalk. A car drove up, full of men. One shouted a sexual invitation. One of my friends replied in obscene refusal. The phrase “fucking dykes” was lobbed back from the car. My friend picked up a beer bottle and threw it at the departing car. We then fled the scene, fearful of reprisal.

Fucking dyke.

No matter how welcoming and accepting Macalester was, it was four square blocks in the center of a city. When my date and I took the bus to the New Riv to see Gallowglass perform, we held hands at the bus stop with the largest, most aggressive FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCKERS force-field we could project. It may not have been our wisest course of action, but it was the course we took. We were in lust, and maybe in love, and we were angry and we were afraid.

The first time I kissed a lover, pressed against my car in a parking lot, I was shaking from the sheer audacious defiance of our actions.

I dressed for anger and visibility, in those days. I called myself butch, a statement of gender identity and sexual proclivity. I dressed butch, writing “I am not like you; I am like those other people over there” as loudly as I could — while trying to not actively offend. I relate to Betty McRae’s attempts to show the people like her that, well, she was like them, while not causing everyone else to want to punch her in the face.

Of course, this was the 90s in St. Paul, not a munitions factory in WWII. I shaved half my head and braided electronics parts into the rest because I wanted to live a Shadowrun 2050 life. I wanted to “be a hero, with the ax about to fall / fight for the love and for the glory / for it all” as Emma Bull sang for the band Cats Laughing. I wore combat boots that hurt my feet, and button-down shirts with the sleeves rolled just so, and I had the regulation black leather jacket that was nowhere near warm enough for a Minnesota winter. When I went to the bar for dancing I wore a tie, which my partner would minutely adjust to the perfect angle.

I thought about my appearance a lot in those days. I wanted to tell the world who I was interested in and who I was not, in the hopes that the desired minority would find me appealing.

I … I care a lot less about how I look these days. I understand, more, these days how butch identity can be unthinkingly intertwined with misogyny. I understand, more, these days how butch can be use as a defense against internalized body-hatred. I don’t have the time or attention for dating anyone, so I am far less invested in attracting the romantic attentions of smart, funny, angry, determined women. I spend a lot of time cooking, working out, and cleaning up after dogs and children. I wear sweatpants a lot.

I care far less these days about how I look to others. Or I thought I did, until I was asked to provide a photo that would represent me to hundreds of strangers.

The author photo, as Kowal and other smart, in-the-know people have mentioned, is one’s presentation of self to people who one will never have the chance to impress in person. You have your photo, and if you are LUCKY that stranger will actually read your work. And from that an opinion is formed.

What do I want to say to all of those people? What do I want to say to YOU?

When I was a kid and teenager (until I came out, honestly) my entire wardrobe concept was “please for the love of god please please do not notice me or look at me in any way.” That is not a sartorial aesthetic appropriate to the author photo. When I was a young adult, well, as discussed at length above, my clothes were a compelling contradiction of “please flirt with me if you fall into one of the following narrowly defined categories, the rest of you fuck off in the most polite and inoffensive way possible.” My wardrobe for the last five years has been jeans, a t-shirt, and hiking boots, with variations for weather. That is not really the look I want to promote for myself, though it is the TRUTH.

I’m thinking the slightly nicer version of the truth is applicable here. Something a little bit dressier, maybe. But … but my slightly-nicer clothes are 1) old and scruffy and 2) don’t really fit due to two years of eating healthy and working out. So they are not, in fact, slightly-nicer clothes.

What I want … what I want my author photo to say is what I want my appearance to say to everyone I meet for the first time at conventions and the like. I want to look calm, and cheerful, and vaguely butch-dyke-queer without being defensive about it. I want to look like I care, but not like I care too much. I want to look relaxed, but not diffident. I want to look engaged and happy but not desperate.

I strongly, strongly suspect that the result of all this wanting will result in a vaguely paralyzed, neurotic, rabbit-in-headlights sort of photo. I am actually resigned to this being my fate. But that still doesn’t answer the question which I am now worrying at with obsessive intensity:

What the ever-loving FUCK am I going to WEAR?

What does a forty-year-old, never-was-actually-punk-rock-though-I-did-see-Dead-Milkmen-in-concert, fat, geeky, butch-genderqueer-do-I-really-have-to-pick-a-label, too-busy-for-a-haircut, parent-air-traffic-controller-writer-editor wear in order to say “I’m really a perfectly nice person, I hope you enjoy this work”?

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Girl Legos

A lot of people were talking yesterday about Lego, and the announcement of a new line of Lego for girls. Most of the conversation I saw from people who were outraged.

The thing is …

Have you been Lego shopping recently?

The Legos of my youth were a building toy. You had a box or a bin or, in my home, a suitcase full of small plastic bricks. Mostly bricks, some plates, some minifigs. Mostly bricks. My brother and I built space bases and pirate ships and alien invasions with our Legos, and we didn’t much care or mind what the Legos were originally purposed to do.

My household these days is very Lego-centric. N is a member of TwinLUG, the Twin Cities Lego Users Group. He goes to Lego conventions. N and J have Legos on display here in the city. Our house has an enormous shelf devoted to Lego models. The children have huge bins. Most of the attic, that is not holding my comic book collection, holds bin after bin after tray after bin of Legos.

We know from Legos.

I’m a bit on the outside of this. I can’t tell you what parts are rare, I can’t tell you the minifig count of the Advent calendars, and I barely know what “blay” is. But I have observed Legos for the last few years. It is my observation as a Lego bystander that Lego sells toys to white boys and men.

They don’t think they do. I believe them when they say, with utter confusion, that only white males buy Lego, so they don’t sell minifigs of dark-skinned characters who are smiling. (Most non-yellow-hue minifig heads are scowling or grimacing or simply frowning. They are often the bad guys in the sets.) They don’t include girl-denoted minifigs in every kit. Why would they, when girls do not buy Legos?

Lego sells its kits these days in various lines that are united by plots and characters. The Indiana Jones sets. The Power Miners sets. The Atlantis sets, or whatever they were actually called. Forthcoming DC Superheroes sets, and newly-announced Lord of the Rings sets. Some sort of space-ranger-esque thing. Full of non-gendered (and therefore all male) and yellow-hued (therefore white) minifigs doing aggressive, assertive, technologically-oriented forms of combat while in shades of blue, green, yellow, black, and dark red. In modern American culture, these are male-gendered toys.

Girls are not stupid. We know a keep-out sign when we see it. More to the point, we know when we are not told to keep out, but we are not invited in, either. Lego does nothing to keep girls from playing with Legos, as the thousands of girls who play with Legos will cheerfully attest. But the company has made very few moves to encourage girls to play with this theoretically gender-neutral toy, then blames girls for not playing with said toy. The company sort of shrugs as says that any girl could pick up Legos anytime, it’s not the company’s fault if that doesn’t happen. This is exactly as moronically disingenuous as comic book companies that refuse to advertise comics in women’s and girls’ markets and then blames women for not buying comics.

If you do what you always do, you get what you always get.

So now Lego is marketing a girls’ line. Aggressively, too. I heard that something on the order of twenty of these sets will come out in 2012. That’s a big commitment from Lego. That’s a real stance. The kits are in girl-coded colors, they have minifigs that are clearly and obviously coded as female — not the “neutral” which culturally defaults to male. And those female minifigs come with sets that range from shopping centers to robotics labs, from pony stables to hair salons. Lego seems to be making some effort to include a variety of activities that girls might want to play at. There seems to be some effort to invite your typically-gendered culturally-female girl to come play with Legos.

I could wish that a building toy — a building toy, for pete’s sake! — was not a gender battleground. I could wish that my eight-year-olds have not internalized the color-codes of gender on a very basic level. I could wish that Lego’s corporate idea of multinational representation included anyone who was not white. There are a lot of things I could, and do, wish were different about this.

But I do not exist, nor do I parent, in a perfect world of gender parity and no sexism. And in this existent world, the one I am raising my kids in, I am glad to see Lego has a new girls’ line of toys.

My daughter looked at the sets online, and said they look interesting.

Girls to the Front

I got, started, and finished Sara Marcus’s Girls to the Front yesterday. Stayed up too late to do it. But … but I’ve never been standing that close to the history I read, before. Unless-and-until someone writes the history of my high school. Which is going to happen one of these days.

I mean, I remember sharing pizza with one of the women in this book. I went to GLBT parties which she also attended. I knew, though was not exactly friends with, some of the Black-and-Greens that hung out at the Emma Center, I picked up Minneapolis-St. Paul Riot Grrrl zines and flyers in the student union at Macalester. It is a decidedly odd feeling to think that the normal background of my life was art of someone else’s cultural movement. Part of a revolution.

I’ll simply quote the About the Book from the website, here:

Riot Grrrl roared into the spotlight in 1991: an uncompromising movement of pissed-off girls with no patience for sexism and no intention of keeping quiet. Young women everywhere were realizing that the equality they’d been promised was still elusive, and a newly resurgent right wing was turning feminism into the ultimate dirty word. In response, thousands of riot grrrls published zines, founded local groups, and organized national conventions, while fiercely prophetic punk bands such as Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, Huggy Bear, and Bikini Kill helped spread the word across the US and to Canada, Europe, and beyond.

Girls to the Front, the first-ever history of Riot Grrrl, is a lyrical, punk-infused narrative about a group of extraordinary young women coming of age angrily, collectively, and publicly. A dynamic chronicle not just of a movement but of an era, this is the story of a time when America thought young people were apathetic and feminism was dead, but a generation of noisy girls rose up to prove everybody wrong.

Yeah. That.

I remember sitting in the baseball field at Macalester on a beautiful spring day, watching Babes in Toyland play in front of the science building. It was just normal, you know? Not a part of anyone’s political agenda. This would have had to be in May of 1992, the year before Babes played Lollapalooza. I remember all the women, including some of the extremely attractive members of the women’s rugby team, getting up and pushing to the front near the stage and dancing their asses off to “He’s My Thing.” I sat with my friends on the hillside, contemplating our inside jokes, discussing the prospect of getting more beer from the truck even though we were underage (and was that guy over there really holding), and wondering to myself why that one really cute rugby player was dancing to this song even though Everyone Knew she was a lesbian.

Was I thinking about Riot Grrrls? Was I thinking about changing the world? Was I thinking about politics, or women’s rights, or feminism, or the upcoming elections? Nope. Not really.

Except, in another sense, I thought about those things all the time. Operation Rescue was going to come to Saint Paul that summer. I still own the poster I found inside one of the city’s free weekly newspapers. It had a photo of a hand holding a Molitov cocktail, in front of the spire of a church. The text read, “Operation Rescue come to our town We’ll lock you in a church and burn the fucker down”. There was a sense of low-grade warfare everywhere I spent my time that year. War of women against the bastards who would rather see us dead than give us power over our own bodies. War of queers against the fuckers who would rather see us dead than — than, well, any other option. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who had AIDS. Everyone knew someone who had had an abortion or been raped. The sense of a tangible, physical, constant threat was in everything.

I knew, in the way one knows things that may or may not be true, that this election would determine the fate of my physical safety in the world. That the elections this coming fall would decide whether I was going to be even less safe walking down the street. Whether I would be safe talking to my doctor. Whether I would take my life in my hands going to the gay bars I was then too young to go to but knew I needed to see.

Fear turns to rage, you know. Not every time, but a lot of the time.

I remember low-grade anger being … normal. Just a constant, seething, angry awareness that the world was essentially hostile. Feminist rage was not only normal, it was sane. It was the best response to a completely fucked-up situation. Yet I also remember being convinced that change was possible. That the world could be remade if one fought hard enough. I still believe that, more or less. That change is possible. That taking action is useful. That community brings strength.

The thing is, I was never a Riot Grrrl. I was never even particularly punk, or particularly grunge, or particularly anything. (Except geek. I have always been geek.) I never had either the strength of conviction or the insecure need to belong that drove some people into full membership in the big movements of the time. But reading Girls to the Front makes me realize how much I was affected by those things. Riot Grrrls were just an everyday part of my college experience. I saw their posters and flyers in the student union, saw them dancing at shows at First Ave, shared a pizza with one of them while discussing Jodi Foster with a big group of friends. I was never in Queer Nation, either, or ACT-UP. But these groups, collectively, formed a great deal of my political thinking at the time. That’s what feminism was, that’s what queer was — a refusal to be grateful to a hostile majority for every time they did not choose to harm me. An insistence on speaking up, living openly, and standing under the banner of the people who would take me in.

It’s twenty years later, now. And … And the more things change, the more they stay the same. I don’t have the current rates of domestic abuse, rape, child molestation by family members, or deaths from botched self-inflicted abortions sitting in front of me. And, coward that I am, I’m not going to go look them up. All those things still exist. Yet …. Yet things do change. In the industry I love, with all my heart, in spite of all its flaws — the comics industry — there are more women working on prominent titles, in bigger and better-paying positions, than there were in 1990. There are about four times as many women working in my building as there were ten years ago. Women find themselves more able to gain access to traditionally male things, and they find that sometimes they can speak up about the bullshit they find there — and then make change occur.

So, thank you, Sara Marcus. Thank you, Kathleen Hanna. Thank you, Susan Davies. Thank you, Kat Bjelland. Thank you to the Riot Grrrls of East Coast and West, the Riot Grrrls of Minneapolis and Saint Paul.

Girls to the fucking front, indeed.

Claiming Identity, Claiming Oppression

I ran across a great blog post earlier today, “Fake” Bisexuality and Slut Shaming, on Queer Subversion. I Twittered about the article with approval. The gist is the same old song — third verse, same as the first — about who is and is not “really” bisexual.

As the author of the blog post, Jack Nacht, says,

Bisexuality is treated as a phase or a way to raise your “cool factor” by what often feels like everyone. People throw around a myriad of reasons why certain people aren’t bi… they’re just doing it to make guys horny, they have no intention of really being in a relationship with the same sex, they’re just screwing around… and so on. Or, if “cool factor” isn’t what they’re after, a bisexual is just somebody who doesn’t want to be out of the real closet yet, or true yet misrepresented statements like “most bisexuals wind up with one or the other.” It’s very intense for people who are out as bisexual, whether we’re so-called ” real bisexuals” or not, because it seems like even our allies are intent on questioning our very existence.

I’ve been hearing this since 1990. I know folks who’ve been hearing it for longer than that. That there’s somehow One Right Way to be bisexual, that involves simultaneously not being promiscuous, not dating more of one sex or gender than another, not having long term relationships with the heteronormatively approved partners, not having a greater depth of emotional commitment with one or another sex, not dating people merely because they get you off . . . One wonders, truly, what the ideal bisexual is supposed to look like.

Jack Nacht’s essay goes on to point out the hidden core of slut-shaming that is embedded in this Olympic-level judgment of bisexuals. That, if you sleep around, you’re a slut, and if you don’t sleep around, you can’t prove you’re really bi. How fucking ridiculous.

However . . .

However.

I told my partner, Jennifer, of Jack Nacht’s essay this morning. We both agreed that it was high time to stop judging whether anyone is a “real” bisexual. But then she said something I’d never heard before. She said, “the identity of bisexuality does not automatically confer oppressed status.” A lightbulb went off in my head, inspiring this entire essay. She then directed me to read the article “Oppression,”‘ by Marilyn Frye. (The entire essay is located here, and I strongly suggest reading it before commenting to this blog entry.) Identity, especially an identity which is removable, does not automatically confer oppression.

No-one can judge a fellow human being’s identity claims from the outside, it’s just not possible. If you tell me you are a bisexual, Native American, Muslim, differently abled Nav’i Otherkin, I will merely nod at you and make a vaguely interested noise. Those things are all your decision, your right, and your call. But if you claim, as a result of this identity, to understand and participate in the oppressed status of your chosen minority group or groups, I will question you more closely. I can’t know the workings of your mind and heart and groin, and, frankly, as far as the latter is concerned, I largely don’t want to know. But if, in addition to that identity, you also want to claim status as an oppressed minority, you will have to cough up a little bit more in the way of proof. I think that this is the issue that lies at the core of much bi-bashing from the GLBT community.

There’s a book, Black Like Me, which describes the experience of a white man riding the buses in the American South in 1959 — while passing as a black man. The book is unflinching in its descriptions of the racism the author, John Howard Griffin, experienced. Yet I would argue that Griffin did not come to understand more than a fraction of what it meant to be black in this country at that time. He did not grow up black. He did not grow up knowing in his bones that he was never truly safe. He did not grow up with the seething resentment and muted, helpless anger of his elders around him. He did not grow up with the constant caution that comes with growing up a target minority. Griffin gave up his privilege for six traumatic weeks; but he had it to give in the first place.

In my own experience, I have spent some time in my life dressing and presenting genderqueer. Yet I do not claim to share the oppression of transsexuals or the transgender. I do claim to have a window onto that view, a window I built by three years living publicly and obviously butch. But it’s not the same thing as passing as a man on a daily basis, not the same thing as changing my name, not the same thing as tens of thousands of dollars spent on body-altering surgeries. Not the same thing at all.

I am not attempting to argue that genderqueers, bisexuals, or even Mr. Griffin, did not or do not experience loss of privilege or oppression. I do claim that there are matters of degree in oppression.

The person who makes out with same-sex partners only rarely is indisputably bisexual. But I would hesitate to accept any claims of their oppressed status based on that fact alone. I would like more evidence that the individual was out, was open, was struggling with their privilege and was willing to lose some of it in service of their identity. A man who makes out with men only rarely, but who is also a member of GLBT groups, who organizes for diversity in his workplace, who is out to his parents, and who tells all his girlfriends he’s bi — that’s someone who I personally would feel understood the oppression side of things.

I can’t judge people’s oppression just by knowing who they’ve slept with. I can’t judge a person’s experience of privilege by watching them squeal over a new object of lust. But I can, and do, asses people’s lives as they live them, and notice how much or little people display their group membership. Under what circumstances they are out and proud, or when they retreat to the silence of heteronormative presumptions. Here’s the thing. You don’t get oppressed group membership based just on what gets you off. You get oppression status by being oppressed. By risking something, by losing something. By seeing doors of opportunity shut to you. By experiencing the threat of the power elite.

I’ll never tell you you’re not bisexual. I will never deny you’ve experienced negative treatment for your bisexuality. And I will never deny your internal assessment of your fears and concerns, your desires and passions. But I may very well hold the opinion that you are bisexual when it is to your advantage, and reside in your heterosexual privilege when that serves you better. If you are open about this, if you admit it, then I have no quarrel with you. It’s a human thing, to be afraid of losing privilege. It’s completely human to play all your advantages as best you can. I, personally, am never happier to be white than I am when I talk to law enforcement officials. It’s a privilege of mine I doubt I would surrender if I could. (I might feel really bad about that, but I might not, either. I don’t know.)

In fact, let me be absolutely honest: I am not always as out about my sexuality and my polyamorous relationship structure as I would like to be. I’m out to my family, to the homeschool groups, to the internet, and to some of my coworkers. But I haven’t gotten the courage and will to be absolutely out in all areas of my life. And, human that I am, I’m not certain I ever will be totally out about polyamory. I don’t have an excuse. It’s just tiresome to surrender all that normalcy and privilege. So if you, dear bisexual reader, are just not willing to have all the endlessly tiresome conversations about who you date, the conversations with your parents and your rabbi and your boss and your great-grandmother and the neighbor’s nosy teenage kid and the host at that really nice restaurant and oh my god, does the stupid coming out never end??? Really, you have my sympathy. Stay partially out and partially closeted, and make the decisions that are right for you at this time and in this place. I do that. We all do that. We all make our own road. Just, do not then claim to participate in the total experience of GLBT oppression.

Yet, for all that, there’s still another side to the problem of bisexual identity. There’s a whole host of people who accidentally pass as straight, whether they want to or not. When I came out in college as bisexual, there was little mistaking me for straight. In appearance and manner, I looked queer. A dyke, a butch, possibly a lesbian, (and if you were in the GLBT community in the 1990s you will understand the distinctions) but not heterosexual. On the other hand, my partner Jennifer was castigated by dykes when she came out because she inevitably passed for straight. She was white, thin, feminine, of a certain social and educational class and standing. Unless she was holding hands with a woman in public, Jennifer was presumed straight. In the last five years Jennifer has been in a serious partnered relationship with a man, Nathan. When she and Nathan go out, Jennifer is presumed to be heterosexual. Our kids, mine and hers, are presumed to be hers and Nathan’s. People do not make this assumption when Nathan and I take the kids out; no-one mistakes me for straight.

It is absurd to blame Jennifer, or the thousands of women like her, for the assumptions made by our culture. Comic artist and writer Erika Moen has talked about this in her webcomic. Author Sara Ryan talks about it in her blog. Authors Nicola Griffith and Kelly Eskridge discuss their identity, oppression, and science fiction in the context of cultural assumptions. And that’s just from blogs I am currently reading. I’m not bothering to delve into past essays by noted queers, feminists, queer feminists, and/or cultural critics. The refusal of broader culture to even contemplate the possibility that you may not be what it assumes is maddening. A friend of mine, Victor Raymond, once made up cards that read “I am a card-carrying bisexual,” for the purpose of handing out to gas station attendants and bank clerks. It was an effort to make the invisible seen, an effort born of sheer jaw-grinding frustration.

In the same way that I cannot render judgment on the identity of another, how dare I judge their public stance, their level of out-ness, their commitment to minority membership, when the whole world may conspire to maintain that individual’s privilege?

My essay winds down now with no firm conclusion, no prescription for solving the Bisexual Identity and Oppression Problem. I no longer identify as bisexual, my raging lust for Vin Diesel notwithstanding. It seems fairer to the assumptions of the rest of the world if I say I’m a lesbian — though I still prefer queer as the identity that most describes me. Yet every woman I’ve ever dated has identified as bi. My emotional response whenever I hear someone judged as “not really bisexual” is to want to stab the speaker with a spork. How dare you judge, I rage. But I still find myself judging others — not for their identity, but for the pleasure some few seem to derive out of a safe, optional membership in a glamorous and sexy oppressed group. At the same time, I am happy every time I hear some attractive celebrity is bi — as if that somehow increases my chances of sleeping with them. (In what universe, I ask you, do I think this is going to happen?)

I rail against the misjudgments of others, while applying my own. I do not think identity confers oppression. But in practical terms, I don’t have a solid standard by which I think we all should be judged.