Yes, IDAHO is fun for a minute. But it was never going to be a good acronym.
First of all, for something international, don’t name it after something geographical. Every individual place, be it the Potato State or a Swiss canton or a Pacific island about to sink into the anthropogenic sea, pales in comparison to International.
Second of all, the International Day Against HOmophobia has in the few years since I heard about it morphed into the International Day of Trans People Snarking “It’s Pronounced in the French manner, IDAHOT with a silent T.” Now you can tell the clued-in people who get that language matters by the fact that they call it the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia.
And I can tell that if someone so much as mentions “Biphobia” it’s probably someone I know.
My issue, of course, isn’t that trans people should feel included, but that it shouldn’t stop there. This is a general trend of queer activism in the last several years: everything that had been “lesbian and gay” switched to “LGBT” without changing anything but the name at first. Trans folk have kicked up a massive fuss, very rightly so, and now there’s a lot of recognition that trans people should be explicitly included, listened to, represented, and respected.
But I think, if for no other reason than “it’s getting to be a mouthful to say the names of everything” (“End homophobic bullying in schools” is a snappy campaign; “End homophobic and transphobic bullying in schools” is even more worthy but starts to lose some people by the end; “End homophobic, transphobic and biphobic bullying in schools” is fairest, yes, but it’s also an unwieldy phrase that nobody likes, even if they like the sentiment behind it.
Ditto IDAHOBT. That’s not even an acronym any more; it’s just a bad hand in Scrabble.
I don’t want to disparage trans or gay activists for the hard work they’ve done in getting things as far as they have.
But is this it? Are we done now?
I think some people think that bi people are covered by “homophobia” — after all, when they’re not acting gay, they’re acting straight, right? Whiners!
Of course it’s true that bi people do experience homophobia — if someone shouts abuse at me for holding hands with a girl, I’m not going to stop and carefully tell them I’ve held hands with guys too, and even if I did, I don’t think that would impress them — but biphobia is not just “homophobia when it happens to bis.”
Biphobia is every time bis are called greedy, or indecisive, or cheaters, or the reason straight people can get STDs, or just going through a phase, or gay really, or straight really, or not really queer any more if they’re in a mixed-gender relationship. Biphobia is bi erasure and bi invisibility — every time you talk about “gay” marriage, or tell me all people currently married are straight, every “bi women might hot but there are no bi men” …
This is all distinct from homophobia and transphobia and it would be nice if that were as widely acknowledged. Right now I feel we’re like the state of Idaho: important to the people who live there, but what can anyone else tell you about it?
