leaders of bisexual organization hate pansexuals

those running bidotorg won’t outright say they hate pansexuals or pansexuality — despite consistent and unapologetic panphobia

image source: dids / pexels

created in 1996, bidotorg (bi.org) is a project of the american institute of bisexuality (also known as the bi foundation, founded by austrian american psychiatrist fritz klein) creating community and resources for bisexuals. only the leaders have posted pan/queerphobic things on bidotorg’s accounts, their personal accounts, and the accounts of other organizations they’re involved with (ambi and queer majority, the latter also an aib project).

breakdown of people of note:

• rio veradonir is bidotorg’s contributing editor/writer, aib’s assistant director, ambi’s lead organizer, and queer majority’s creator/publisher.
• talia squires, rio’s wife, is bidotorg’s director, ambi’s coordinator, and queer majority’s columnist.
• ian lawrence-tourinho: bidotorg’s founder, aib’s director, ambi’s founder/head, queer majority’s founder/writer, and ilga world’s chair of bisexual steering committee.
• a panphobic youtuber, who ian has praised and ambi has shared posts from, is a writer for queer majority.
• j. michael bailey, biphobe/transphobe/all around yuck, is a writer for queer majority, was funded by aib, and supported by bidotorg.
• peter tatchell, a pedophilia defender, is a writer for queer majority, supported by bidotorg and ambi, and defended by queer majority.
• ray blanchard, a known transphobe, recommended aib as “rational non-woke/progressive,” and ian liked the tweet.

breakdown of some of bidotorg & co’s queerphobia:

• advocates against pansexuality and other mspec identities
• perpetuates an “everyone is bisexual” narrative
• has a rule against “panjacking” (been deleted)
• consistently erases the mspec sexualities of characters and real people
• constantly appeals to scientific validation
• argues attraction is based on biological sex
• defines bisexuality as “both homo and hetero”
• prioritizes “traditional feminism” over “erasing biology” (been deleted)
• participates in the slander against the pansexual flag
• spreads “battleaxe bisexual” (panphobic bisexuals) panphobic lies
• spreads nonbinary exclusion and transphobia
• supports j.k. rowling, dave chappelle, and also other transphobes
• advocates for cops at pride

while the most egregious example is “pansexuality gave us conversion therapy” (which i’ll refute in a bit), the most consistent is identity policing/erasure.

bidotorg said david rose from schitt’s creek is one of their “favorite bi characters,” adding “red wine or white wine? why not both?” which is a binary reimagining of david’s wine metaphor. when people told them david is pansexual, bidotorg blocked people, hid replies, locked the thread, and blocked people from their personal and other organization accounts.

they then said, “there’s been a bit of much ado about nothing re pan vs bi. it’s fine to id as pan, but if you insist it’s mutually exclusive with bi, that’s biphobic. and yes we ban biphobes. no apologies.” classic panphobia to flip the situation and falsely accuse those calling out pansexual erasure of biphobia.

they added, “there is no way to describe pansexuality that doesn’t also apply bisexuality. any attempt to do so relies upon biphobic misconceptions.” claiming it’s biphobic to ever differentiate between pansexual and bisexual is saying they’re inherently the same (false), mislabeling a lot of pansexuals (bad), and erasing bisexuals who don’t fit/relate to the definition of pansexual (bad).

they went on, “we have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to blocking biphobes. we blocked people for implying that us saying he was bi is mutually exclusive with him being pan.” not every pansexual is also bisexual. when someone identifies or is described only as pansexual, they are only pansexual. advocating for respecting pansexual identification is not biphobic.

they said tweets can’t “capture every nuance,” it’s “sadly lame and reactionary” that people didn’t “bother” reading their article, and their “policy” is to ban “confrontational behavior” spreading “anti-scientific, biphobic misinformation.” they misrepresented/belittled those who called them on not mentioning david’s pansexuality when they could’ve, which the article does not justify.

they then said pansexual is a label “describing bisexuality” and it’s “anti-science” to say otherwise. the “anti-science” claim, appealing to scientific rationalization of queer people’s existence/expression, is dissected in this thread (archived, account is private as of writing this).

(bidotorg previously claimed it’s “both/and, not either/or” which is false. it’s and/or. some are bisexual and pansexual. some are bisexual or pansexual. rio chimed in to again argue for prioritizing science and used the inapplicable square/rectangle analogy.)

rio then went on a since-deleted rant. he started, “a mountain may not tell you it’s a mountain, but it is a mountain. self-identity is not the standard. reality is the standard. calling yourself something doesn’t make it so. i can say i’m a duck, but i just ain’t.” do i have to point out the transphobic talking point or bizarre and dehumanizing comparison of humans and mountains?

(reality didn’t determine the name of mountains, humans did. mountain doesn’t have a universal set criterion, it varies based on location, dictionary, geologist, etc. it’s a broad term and specific terms are also necessary/useful. kind of like…never mind. ultimately, mountains can’t decide what they’re called. pansexuals can. end of shitty analogy.)

disparaging self-identification (and our labels) is not queer liberation. the right to name ourselves and be recognized as such has been acknowledged as a basic facet of queerness throughout history, and queer terminology has always been ever-growing. the bisexual community has a long history of prioritizing self-identification and encouraging playing with language, and the bisexual umbrella historically was an open option, not a forced ideology.

he said he’s “triggered by pansplainers” who say someone is pansexual not bisexual because it’s “usually based on seriously biphobic misconceptions”. he painted pansexuals as clueless/overconfident biphobes, played the victim, and denigrated everyone further by claiming they’re toxic, hysterical, nasty trolls. a dedicated smear campaign if i ever saw one.

then ian tweeted, “his *dad* uses the word. david never does. the whole point of the show is that the rose family is eccentric & detached from reality. bisexuality has meant the same thing since 1892. pansexuality gave us conversion therapy.” he wrongly implied david is only pansexual if he says it and offensively claimed pansexuality reflects being “detached from reality.”

rio issued a statement about ian’s conversion therapy lie. he said bisexual had a scientific origin in 1892 and claimed austrian neurologist sigmund freud derailed “born that way” progress by creating the belief that gayness is an illness to be cured. only he contradicted this by stating conversion therapy existed prior and freud just spread it into “medical and academic settings.”

rio used pansexualism interchangeably with pansexual and pansexuality, most notably when he said, “pansexuality further pathologized non-heterosexuality and represented a major setback for lgbt human rights.” he ignorantly claimed pansexuals having preferences is “completely contrary” and they oppose biphobic “doctrines.” but people literally just wanted pansexual characters to be called pansexual. how dare us, i guess.

rio acknowledged pansexualism isn’t pansexuality and conversion therapy existed before freud, so why make excuses for ian’s inflammatory and erroneous claim, when Ian himself was too busy vacationing to give a fuck?

why is ian allowed to ignore any previous uses of bisexual while holding pansexual to previous uses? (again, pansexualism is not the same thing as or relevant to pansexuality and equating a queer sexuality to a theory part of treating mental disorders is homophobic.)

the 1892 coining of bisexual is by american psychiatrist charles gilbert chaddock when translating psychopathia sexualis by richard von krafft-ebing, a german psychiatrist who believed in curing gayness and influenced freud (as did australian physiologist eugen steinach, who tried to cure gayness with testicle transplantation experiments in the 1920s).

(rio contrasted pansexual being medically stigmatized “from its beginning” against other labels being “coined by lgbt pioneers,” but this is contradicted by the above. you can’t remove the context just because you want to cling to the definition, which isn’t even the definition widely used today.)

furthermore, german psychiatrist albert von schrenck-notzing is said to be the first to claim turning a gay man straight in 1899, over a decade before freud supposedly created the medical belief of curing gayness. conversion therapy can be traced back medically to the late nineteenth century and doctors were already realizing their methods weren’t working by 1913.

edmund bergler, an american psychoanalyst outspoken about curing gayness, was considered the “most important analytic theorist of homosexuality in the 1950s,” the same decade homosexuality was classified in the dsm-i as a “sociopathic personality disturbance,” often justified with a later study by irving bieber, who is considered one of the most influential and prominent american psychoanalysts who believed gayness could be cured.

in 1935 Freud said he didn’t view homosexuality as a curable illness; his theories were widely misappropriated after his death; and conversion therapy was most entrenched in the decades between his death and stonewall. by the 1970s, conversion therapy was broadly discredited in the medical community and homosexuality was removed from the dsm-i (which had greater repercussions), then “faith-based groups took over the practice.”

even if “pansexuality gave us conversion therapy” wasn’t just a desperate attempt at denigrating pansexuality by people who wish to enforce an outdated scientific approach to queerness, it doesn’t hold up to research. and really, namedropping freud to discredit pansexuality? try a little harder.

soon after, the president of the bisexual resource center made a statement. instead of addressing the conversion therapy claim in any meaningful way, the erasure of canon pansexuality, the blocking of everyone, the prevalence of panphobia among bisexuals, she subsumed the explicit panphobia into “bi+ antagonism and erasure” and babbled out platitudes about solidarity and both labels being valid.

i have the same problem with robyn och’s statement, which is less a statement and more just a conveniently timed tweet, “rather than debating which single label all of us with multi-gender attraction should use, let’s work together to hold space for all nonbinary sexualities.”

the pressing issue was the conversion therapy accusation, the treatment of everyone who challenged them, and the plethora of queerphobia people were calling out. work together? how about actually showing up for us in a meaningful way instead of vague tweeting conveniently timed platitudes?

this is a lot of panphobia (which is nothing new: popular accounts dedicated to panphobia, inclusive terms like “battleaxe bisexual” appropriated for panphobia, praised authors/activists perpetuate panphobia, researchers erase pansexual data by subsuming it into bisexual data), queerphobia in general, and manipulation.

if you’ve read all of this, congrats on one small step to being an ally to pansexuals. hopefully reading this made you as angry and tired as pansexuals are experiencing this day in and day out for years while most everyone looks away. i hope it makes you want to listen to and show up for us.

but panphobia is always ignored, so i won’t hold my breath.