![]() Title page, “ The Bisexual Purge”: People use the word “bisexual” for different purposes and to mean different things-a form of self-identity, a way to describe attractions or behaviors, a place of community building and political organizing, and so on. Beth Loffreda and Claudia Rankine, supra, at page 20. While I have tried to write with this awareness intact, to question my motivations, to examine when my presence is unhelpful, and to write no further than my understanding warrants, the vectors of privilege are, as Loffreda and Rankine put it, limits on my imagination. For a foundational discussion of the law’s failure to address or even recognize intersectional discrimination, see Kimberlé Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, 1989 The University of Chicago Legal Forum 139. Just because the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals rise or fall together does not mean that our experiences are monolithic or that our oppression is comparable. ![]() I can’t talk about my rights as a bisexual without reference to the struggle of a broader political community.Īt the same time, I can’t possibly speak for that entire community. Also, one manifestation of bisexual erasure is that there are not many cases about bisexual discrimination specifically, so the scope of bisexual legal rights has to be inferred from these other cases. As a bisexual, both kinds of cases have the potential to extend or withdraw the protections that the law affords me. Lawyers in the movement have brought many cases in recent years about both forms of discrimination, and advances in the law have sometimes occurred in cases about gender identity discrimination, and sometimes in cases about sexual orientation discrimination. The hope within the LGBTQ+ legal movement has been that once courts recognize that gender identity discrimination is a form of prohibited gender stereotyping, they (hopefully) will find it easier to recognize the same for sexual orientation discrimination, and vice versa. As discussed in the work above and in the notes that follow, sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination are linked in the US legal system under the rubric of gender stereotyping as defined by Price Waterhouse v. As a lawyer, the legal front in this struggle was foremost on my mind, and on that legal front, the rights of everyone under the LGBTQ+ umbrella are bound up together. ![]() In writing this work I found myself wanting to document the situation of LGBTQ+ rights during the year 2017, a time when those rights were expanding, and yet the LGBTQ+ community was under siege from the federal government. ![]() Why am I writing about gender identity? What charisma do I feel estranged from? What authority am I claiming? Also, what happens when I connect my own experiences with those of Gavin Grimm, Chelsea Manning, Ash Whitaker, Mercedes Williamson, and Jane Doe? Aren’t I using these individual struggles-struggles different from anything I have experienced-to advance a legal and artistic agenda from which I realize all the benefits without paying any of the costs? How is this any different from the acquisitive impulses that have long guided systems of patriarchy and white supremacy? To ask what we think we know, and how we might undermine our own sense of authority.” Beth Loffreda and Claudia Rankine, Introduction, in The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Max King Cap, eds., at pages 17-18 (Fence Books 2015). I’ve therefore thought about the questions that Beth Loffreda and Claudia Rankine suggest that white writers ask themselves about their desire to write about race: “why and what for . . . ? What is the charisma of what I feel estranged from, and why might I wish to enter and inhabit it. . . . As a bisexual man, I have experienced mistreatment due to my sexual orientation, but I am not transgender and have not experienced gender identity discrimination. Throughout this work I discuss legal developments, cases, and arguments about both sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination. (The text of “The Bisexual Purge” appears in issue five of Oversound, published in 2019.)
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