Living Non #Bi nary

Anything in bold is a brief definition or explanation for anyone ignorant to some of the terms being used*

I want to preface all of this with the context of Neo-Colonial, Capitalist, Western society as the landscape. This is the lens through which I’m observing and speaking.

From the moment I was conceived, the world has told me that I was a boy. The moment people lay eyes on me I am considered and told I am a man. When I first realized I was Bisexual I was told everything from “that’s nasty” to “you need to pick one” — to this day I still here similar thoughts. Today is the first day of Bisexual Awareness Week, and as I reflect on the years of my identity, studies, and living I have further expanded what life is and means for myself, and what it can mean for others.

To Be Bisexual

I have always found Bisexuality to be the great liberator of gender and sexuality. You may think that’s a bit grandiose and ambitious, but hear me out:

When I first encountered my Bisexuality I was only thinking in the binary terms of (cis)man and (cis)woman — I was still 19 and knowledge had not yet afforded me the language that I now have of myself and others. *Cis is a latin root meaning “on the side of” and is the opposite of *Trans meaning “across from.” As I learned more and about myself and my attractions I began to interrogate what it meant for me to be Bisexual. Eventually I made my way to what my current relationship to Bisexuality is. I’ll get to that in a second; however, first I want to say that I think that Bisexuality is its own spectrum of identification ranging from strict, binary, cis attractions to boundless attractions.

So how do I define my own Bisexuality? Conceptually speaking — to me — there is no finite point for masculine and feminine expression and identities. I construct my relationship to Bisexuality as non-contingent to genitalia, sex, nor gender; the way in which I satiate the dualism that many folks often attribute to Bisexuals is by defining my attraction as “being attracted to that which presents itself as masculine and that which presents itself as feminine.” I don’t find my definition to be perfect in any way, but it is an inclusive perception that I hold to quite adamantly.

Why do I use this instead of “Pansexual?” *Pansexuality refers to someone who is attracted to people regardless of their sex or gender identity. Personally, I think that Pansexuality is very unique and meticulous in all of the best ways. I find its ambitions linguistically aligned with Bisexuality in attempts to be inclusive of all folks. Bisexuality, however, is how I’ve always identified — so partly out of preference — and at this point in my life gender is non-contingent to my attractions regardless of whether they are sexual, romantic, intellectual, or emotional in nature. Not to mention the conceptualization of one’s sex is entirely phallocentric. *Phallocentric means something focused on or concerned with the phallus or penis as a symbol of male dominance. Far too often gender and sexuality — as well as the many fields surrounding them — unconsciously insert the phallus/penis and/or traditional cis-gender male identity as the standard for establishing queer folks, women, and femmes as other. Far too often it penetrates (pun intended) how knowledge is conceived of and solidified as fact. The penis is imbued with so much sociological influence that to remove it from the epistemology (*Epistemology is the study and thereotical existence of knowledge and knowing) of social perceptions of gender and sexuality would disrupt the very fabric of our actual realities: no more gender reveals, no more gendered clothing, no more gendered marketing, no more gendered consumption; de-centering the phallus (in my opinion) liberates us all — and I think that, by extension, Bisexuality affords us that opportunity.

Non-Binary & Bi-Visibility

When I came into my non-binary identity it was a progression. Initially I realized that identifying as male has always been uncomfortable for me — it never sat well personally, intellectually, emotionally, nor ideologically. I have never felt particularly masculine nor male, but I have never felt to be woman either. So I abandoned the assigned gender of male for Demiboy. *Demiboy is a gender identity describing someone who partially, but not wholly, identifies as a man, boy or otherwise masculine. I expanded my pronouns to He/Him/His to include They/Them/Theirs. I was more comfortable, but I was still having difficulty accepting the male pronouns as an identifier.

Nothing about me feels male or masculine. Nothing about me is anything that I perceive or construct as masculine or male — honestly I exist internally as a much more feminine entity than anything else. I did not want to be male, and I did not want to be man because it is not, nor was it, what I lived or was happy being seen as. The dissonance of my surroundings, however, very much retained the perception of me as male/man. I resisted nonetheless.

Eventually I found my place as Demigender *Demigender refers to someone who feels a partial, but not a full, connection to a particular gender identity or just to the concept of gender. Demigender falls under the Non-Binary (NB)umbrella. *Non-binary identity is a spectrum of gender identities that are not exclusively masculine or exclusively feminine‍ — ‌identities that are outside the gender binary.

The next step for me was completely disregarding what it meant to see myself as male-bodied and male-identified. In conjunction with the already aesthetic body dysmorphia I experience on a day-to-day basis, I now feel uncomfortable in my Cis-considered masculine, male body. How do I overcome this? I have my methods: I workout to tailor my body to my personal comfort to continue to affirm myself; I purchase incentives for the body I wish to express when I reach the place I’m working to be at, etc. These are just my means of combating the dysmorphia I experience with my body on a (frankly) yearly basis.

Being NB, to me, means defending one’s self against the rest of the world on a daily basis. The truth is that not all queer folks respect and accept Non-Binary people. When you compound race onto that, then factor in the fact that I am an AMAB (Assigned Male At Birth) NB person, the resistance and the external dissonance become that much more difficult to navigate.

I cannot speak for all AMAB Non-Binary folks, or even Non-Binary folks in general, but Bisexuality is where being NB is most comfortably situated — of course, this is as I’ve explained it thus far. For me, Bi-Visibility and NB existence sustain one another; the open and unashamed presence of Bisexuality disrupts the monolith of monosexual privilege to the extent that it becomes epistemologically vilified from microagressive social norms, to the interpretation of data sets, further into macro-ideological frameworks. Non-Binary identities illicit similar reactions on all levels — the reality is that most of these layers of aversion to NB folks function as explicit exclusion and disregard. The fluidity of Bi and NB identity threaten and expose frailties in multiple facets of Western gender and sexuality and its relationship to the larger social formation that is our society, and interrogating that — whatever that process may look like for any individual, no matter how pleasant or visceral — is an pivotal part of social progress and equity.

The dissolution of many of the social, institutional, and ideological frameworks that ground the liberal and conservative paradigms of how we view Bisexuals and Non-Binary folks (intersections included), I think is what Bisexual Liberation looks like. I think that — at its best, and I could be thinking too small — that Bisexual Liberation breaks the wheel of repression and stagnation among individual acceptance and the society’s neo-liberal schism around what it means to exist outside of a Cis-gender Heterosexual framework.

Now…BLACK Bisexual Liberation? That’s another story altogether.