Will lesbians ever beat the biphobia accusations?

The most annoying fandoms in existence are obliging us to return to the op-ed trenches

FYI, it’s June - give trans people your money.

It’s Pride, but I don’t know anyone who feels like celebrating. Beyond the morally bankrupt state of global politics, at this point, it’s pretty obvious that the anti-gender agenda has won (at least for this round). We’ve seen figures across the right, centre, and an increasingly decaying left, viciously attack trans rights out of a mix of sadism and political profiteering, while regressing the cultural script around queerness, gender, and sexual liberation.

However, recent headlines concerning queer culture have taken us all back to an earlier age: for old time’s sake, sapphics online have been engaged in some community in-fighting! Basically, as the logical conclusion of over-investing in the queerbaiting discourse of the early 2020s, thinking that celebrities you have never met owe you something, and having no basic media literacy skills, lesbians have subjected a number of queer, female public figures to intense backlash for, seemingly, having boyfriends.

By now, you know who they are, but let’s rehash just in case. Billie Eilish (who was shown in paparazzi pictures kissing Nat Wolff…of the Nickelodeon show Naked Brothers Band), Fletcher (who released a single called ‘Boy’ in early June, a year after rumours began to circulate she was dating Jagwar Twin, a guy who was also rumoured to be involved with a quasi-spiritual cult) and JoJo Siwa (who went into the Big Brother UK house and ended up, somehow, dating 32-year-old Love Island alum Chris Hughes).

In response to these boyfriend reveals, the discourse has been not ideal! Beyond the obvious fact that these romantic choices feel, shall we say, ‘ill-advised’, the op-ed trenches are lined with tweet roundups about sapphics arguing that these artists have essentially developed a lesbian persona to gain profit from lesbians (a comical accusation in the pitifully remunerated streaming age) only to have a boyfriend in the shadows, tacitly discrediting their queerness. But why are these male partners such a surprise to these queer fanbases? It’s not like these artists have really claimed to be a paragon of lesbianism — they’ve talked a lot about loving women, but that doesn’t preclude them from loving/fucking other genders.

Okay, Billie Eilish’s obvious, ongoing appropriation of stud culture in her public image and aesthetic meant that the second she started opening up about queer identity, she could easily be pegged as a ‘hey mamas’ lesbian. But those were not the words she used and she never said she was exclusively interested in women! While I admit that the ‘boy’ merch line feels like a ragebait, Fletcher, equally, was not running around self-IDing as a dyke. She might have sung and tweeted a lot of gay shit, but she always said she was queer and not a lesbian. And, yes, JoJo Siwa did publicly claim a lesbian identity but, let’s be real, she was never claimed by the lesbian pop canon.

Something I find comical about the Fletcher discourse is the oft-repeated critique that she is “centring” a “heteronormative” relationship “during Pride Month”. It reminds me of that TikTok which talks about bisexuals only getting to celebrate half of June, an in-joke from a bisexual creator about the ways that bi identity is minimised in the queer community and belittled in the lesbian imagination. The reasoning for much of the anti-Fletcher discourse is that participating in a straight-passing relationship leaves you less vulnerable to homophobia, and that we live in a society that privileges romantic connections between men and women. However, this “I support sexual fluidity but…” angle is not the slam-dunk that people online seem to think it is.

This type of messaging make it clear that bisexual/queer/sexually fluid women (going forward, I will mostly be referring to this group as ‘multisexual women’ — while this term feels like a convoluted throwback to Tumblr era discourse, I feel like I have to use it to avoid erasing the diversity of sexual identities beyond the gay/straight binary) will only be supported by the lesbian community if they are in queer relationships. It does this by promoting a framework of lesbian marginalisation and victimisation as the framework of queer marginalisation and victimisation, suggesting that the only form of sexual discrimination against queer women stems from society’s reaction to those who forego relationships with men in order to pursue same-sex relationships with women.

This casts multisexual women as part-time lesbians, suggesting that the only source of violence they will encounter is from a cis-het world when they navigate the aggressions and systemic injustices of choosing same-sex relationships with women under patriarchy. But multisexual women do not navigate relationships with cis-het men in the same way that a cis-het woman would. Their history of same-sex sexual and romantic behaviour, experiences of discrimination, exposure to fluid gender roles, and the differing sexual mores in the queer community, all lead to a different identity, positionality and consciousness.

(Sidenote: I often think this is where the online stereotype that bi women have extremely specific preferences in ‘fruity’ male partners comes from — not just an attraction to men who subvert gender dogma, but also an awareness that bi women may face, at worst, heightened violence and, at best, a greater degree of censoring self-denial, when involved with a male partner who is more invested in normative relationship ideals under patriarchy.)

Beyond that, biphobia (what I am using here as an umbrella term for the discrimination faced by those who engage in romantic and sexual behaviour with multiple genders) is not just a half slice of homophobia. As a sexual minority, you are vulnerable to being abused and victimised specifically for your multisexual identity, not just when you announce your identity publicly, but in intimate dealings with straight people, as well as in similar relationships with gay or lesbian people. So, often, when you navigate a same-sex relationship as a multisexual person you receive specific forms of homophobia in addition to the biphobia you may experience in other areas of your life.

We know that negative mental health outcomes and domestic abuse rates for bisexual and sexually fluid women are often higher than for other sexual identity segments, and that they become more severe for bi women with other intersections, such as being a woman of colour and/or trans. To suggest that living a life as bi, or multisexual, is somehow less complicated or less difficult than being a lesbian is a huge over-simplification (please: pick-me bisexuals, save yourself from a future of defending biphobia in the comments section like your own biggest opp).

To conceptualise queer female identity only through a lens of lesbianism, and only via a framework of oppression, feels so reductive to me. Firstly, it’s a strategy out of the political lesbianism toolkit: suggesting that any proximity to men is a proximity to male privilege and that, by extension, multisexual women are scabs, walking over the picket line when they date or fuck men. This feels quite dangerous — not just a way of discursively controlling and curbing multisexual people’s sexual agency, but also a reminder of the lingering influence of a strain of thought which was infamously biphobic, transphobic and anti-sex worker, and which seems to be influencing young lesbian communities today.

Secondly, it does a huge disservice to the political potentials of multisexual identities. Sexual fluidity is not some kind of fashionable selling out, devoid from a political identity or history. Blurring the distinctions, pushing the boundaries and resisting easy categorisation can be powerful tools of resistance in a climate where queer identities are subject to a reductive, dehumanising gaze and efforts are being made to push gender and sexual minorities to the edges of society. Sexual fluidity is a permanent becoming: it’s active, it’s in transition, and it’s not some distant identity that will never touch the cis-het masses. Rather than encourage the dominance of an ethics of identity purity within queer culture, we have to promote acceptance of more complicated and expansive forms of sexuality and gender which disrupt assumptions and convention.

All of the above said, it’s probably a waste of time to think about all this stuff too much. I’ve never cared much for the music or careers of any of the figures at the centre of this month’s biphobia crusades. And I do find a lot of lesbian TikTok culture extremely puerile and cringe, a rotating buffet of stale plates of throwaway content and reactive comments that lack consideration or analysis. But in a world where political forces are seeking to reify gender roles and re-enshrine cis-heterosexuality as the golden standard, punishing anyone who steps outside of these boundaries, I am probably right to think that punching down on bisexuals is an embarrassing own-goal.