I’m sorry for this invasive question. But are you LGBT? If you are, you should realize how irrelevant this conversation is. You can’t appropriate LGBT struggles. A heterosexual person has no impact on our oppression if they call themselves “demisexual”.
This is a useless conversation unless you believe that LGBT identity starts and ends at some flags and hashtags in social media.
The moment you can prove they are taking real resources away from LGBT people then you could start worrying about it.
All this to say: “Is it the same? No, but I can’t give less of a shit when I have to stay closeted to keep my job”
Well, depending on how you define it, i could be either heterosexual or bisexual. Im mostly attracted to women (im male) although i have felt attraction in the past towards specific men (not all of them were acquaintances). I have never had sex or a relationship with men tho, so i consider myself heterosexual but open to homosexual relationships (here in Spain we call this “bicurious”). Still, i wouldnt say i have ever faced oppression/discrimination for my sexual identity (although i have faced extreme discrimination due to me being a drug user/addict, on the level of being immediately evicted, threatened and beaten up by a landlord as soon as he found out that i used drugs), but i think thats because in Spain, especially the youth (which im part of), are very open to LGBTQ people, very socially progressive in general. I have always been pretty open about my bicuriosity, especially at parties (when im on drugs/drunk i rarely shut up, i often talk too much), and have never faced any problems due to it. Same with some gay and lesbian friends i have, they are very open about it and 99,99% of young people just accept it. Because of this, i dont consider myself to be oppressed due to my sexual identity, although im definetely oppressed because of my status as a drug user.
Im not trying to appropiate LGBT struggles. All im saying is all this talk about “asexual/demisexual liberation” and so on, like its on the same level as LGBT liberation, trivializes the real oppression LGBT people face. There is no country where asexuals/demisexuals are hanged for just being themselves. However, there are many countries in the world in which LGBT people face torture and brutal execution by hanging for just being themselves. There is a very real objective difference between the oppression LGBT people face and the one faced by asexuals/demisexuals and similar identities. Look, i myself have experienced severe bullying, i know what its like to be constantly mocked by your high school peers because “you never had a girlfriend/youre a virgin ahahsjsha”. And im not asexual, i actually love sex! So i cannot imagine how awful that must have been if you are asexual, if you just didnt like sex but were mocked for this. Im not denying this, i agree its terribly wrong and shouldnt happen.
But this is not even remotely on the same level as LGBT people being beheaded with a sword in Saudi Arabia just for who they are. Do you see what i mean? Im not saying asexual/demisexual/etc people shouldnt have the right to express themselves freely and be free of mockeries and mean jokes. All im saying is its a different struggle, and thus should imo be separated from the LGBTQ struggle. I dont think theres anything controversial with this. Is the LGBTQ liberation struggle on the same level as the black liberation struggle? Ofc not, blacks have suffered an oppression unfathomable to white LGBTQ people, they were literally enslaved, transformed into a commodity to be shipped and sold on demand. This doesnt mean LGBTQ people havent been oppressed, it just means that some people are oppressed more than others. Ofc all liberation struggles are important, but we must keep in mind the realities of these oppressions so as not to trivialize them. Thats all im saying.
I will say that a bisexual person has the right to acknowledge their identity even while being on a safe space from bi/homophobia and not having relationships with the same gender, maybe ever. The bi community benefits from the normalization of the identity and the bi person can understand themselves better.
I understand feeling like “not enough bisexual” but there’s not a long checklist my guy. But that’s a personal thing. Feel free to reach out to me if you need to talk about this, I struggle with it as well.
Idk im not a huge fan of labels personally, which is why i originally said “why do we need to label everything”, although its ok if people want to label themselves. I really dont care what i am, whether you think im heterosexual or bisexual, i dont care. When i describe it to people, i generally say im “80% heterosexual, 20% homosexual”. I think it describes it more accurately than just saying im bisexual. I dont think checkbox labels are very fitting to describe these types of things, i prefer more accurate lenghty descriptions, but thats just me.
Nah you did not make me feel uncomfortable my dude. Frankly the absolute dogpiling i got today for posting a video of Infrared here made me way more uncomfortable than anything you ever said to me in this thread lol (if you dont know what im talking about see my post history).
I’m sorry for this invasive question. But are you LGBT? If you are, you should realize how irrelevant this conversation is. You can’t appropriate LGBT struggles. A heterosexual person has no impact on our oppression if they call themselves “demisexual”.
This is a useless conversation unless you believe that LGBT identity starts and ends at some flags and hashtags in social media.
The moment you can prove they are taking real resources away from LGBT people then you could start worrying about it.
All this to say: “Is it the same? No, but I can’t give less of a shit when I have to stay closeted to keep my job”
Well, depending on how you define it, i could be either heterosexual or bisexual. Im mostly attracted to women (im male) although i have felt attraction in the past towards specific men (not all of them were acquaintances). I have never had sex or a relationship with men tho, so i consider myself heterosexual but open to homosexual relationships (here in Spain we call this “bicurious”). Still, i wouldnt say i have ever faced oppression/discrimination for my sexual identity (although i have faced extreme discrimination due to me being a drug user/addict, on the level of being immediately evicted, threatened and beaten up by a landlord as soon as he found out that i used drugs), but i think thats because in Spain, especially the youth (which im part of), are very open to LGBTQ people, very socially progressive in general. I have always been pretty open about my bicuriosity, especially at parties (when im on drugs/drunk i rarely shut up, i often talk too much), and have never faced any problems due to it. Same with some gay and lesbian friends i have, they are very open about it and 99,99% of young people just accept it. Because of this, i dont consider myself to be oppressed due to my sexual identity, although im definetely oppressed because of my status as a drug user.
Im not trying to appropiate LGBT struggles. All im saying is all this talk about “asexual/demisexual liberation” and so on, like its on the same level as LGBT liberation, trivializes the real oppression LGBT people face. There is no country where asexuals/demisexuals are hanged for just being themselves. However, there are many countries in the world in which LGBT people face torture and brutal execution by hanging for just being themselves. There is a very real objective difference between the oppression LGBT people face and the one faced by asexuals/demisexuals and similar identities. Look, i myself have experienced severe bullying, i know what its like to be constantly mocked by your high school peers because “you never had a girlfriend/youre a virgin ahahsjsha”. And im not asexual, i actually love sex! So i cannot imagine how awful that must have been if you are asexual, if you just didnt like sex but were mocked for this. Im not denying this, i agree its terribly wrong and shouldnt happen.
But this is not even remotely on the same level as LGBT people being beheaded with a sword in Saudi Arabia just for who they are. Do you see what i mean? Im not saying asexual/demisexual/etc people shouldnt have the right to express themselves freely and be free of mockeries and mean jokes. All im saying is its a different struggle, and thus should imo be separated from the LGBTQ struggle. I dont think theres anything controversial with this. Is the LGBTQ liberation struggle on the same level as the black liberation struggle? Ofc not, blacks have suffered an oppression unfathomable to white LGBTQ people, they were literally enslaved, transformed into a commodity to be shipped and sold on demand. This doesnt mean LGBTQ people havent been oppressed, it just means that some people are oppressed more than others. Ofc all liberation struggles are important, but we must keep in mind the realities of these oppressions so as not to trivialize them. Thats all im saying.
I will say that a bisexual person has the right to acknowledge their identity even while being on a safe space from bi/homophobia and not having relationships with the same gender, maybe ever. The bi community benefits from the normalization of the identity and the bi person can understand themselves better.
I understand feeling like “not enough bisexual” but there’s not a long checklist my guy. But that’s a personal thing. Feel free to reach out to me if you need to talk about this, I struggle with it as well.
Sorry if I made you uncomfortable with this.
Idk im not a huge fan of labels personally, which is why i originally said “why do we need to label everything”, although its ok if people want to label themselves. I really dont care what i am, whether you think im heterosexual or bisexual, i dont care. When i describe it to people, i generally say im “80% heterosexual, 20% homosexual”. I think it describes it more accurately than just saying im bisexual. I dont think checkbox labels are very fitting to describe these types of things, i prefer more accurate lenghty descriptions, but thats just me.
Nah you did not make me feel uncomfortable my dude. Frankly the absolute dogpiling i got today for posting a video of Infrared here made me way more uncomfortable than anything you ever said to me in this thread lol (if you dont know what im talking about see my post history).