{"id":152,"date":"2012-05-17T18:25:06","date_gmt":"2012-05-17T18:25:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bisexualwombat.wordpress.com\/?p=96"},"modified":"2012-05-17T18:25:06","modified_gmt":"2012-05-17T18:25:06","slug":"happy-what-happens-in-peoples-pants-is-no-concern-of-yours-whippincoy-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/2012\/05\/happy-what-happens-in-peoples-pants-is-no-concern-of-yours-whippincoy-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy What Happens In People\u2019s Pants Is No Concern Of Yours (WHIPPINCOY) Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yes, IDAHO is fun for a minute. But it was never going to be a good acronym.<\/p>\n

First of all, for something international, don’t name it after something geographical.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.”\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

And I can tell that if someone so much as mentions<\/em> “Biphobia” it’s probably someone I know.<\/p>\n

My issue, of course, isn’t that trans people should feel included, but that it shouldn’t stop there<\/em>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Ditto IDAHOBT.\u00a0 That’s not even an acronym any more; it’s just a bad hand in Scrabble.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But is this it? Are we done now?<\/p>\n

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?\u00a0 Whiners!<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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<\/em>, or straight really<\/em>, or not really queer any more if they’re in a mixed-gender relationship.\u00a0 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” …<\/p>\n

This is all distinct from homophobia and transphobia and it would be nice if that were as widely acknowledged.\u00a0 Right now I feel we’re like the\u00a0state<\/em> of Idaho: important to the people who live there, but what can anyone else tell you about it?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":1211,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[159,63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-just-semantics","category-lgbt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}