Pride Month should be a time of celebrating the LGBTQ community, a time when everyone can proudly be themselves regardless of their sexuality and gender identity. Unfortunately, biphobes are using the month’s visibility to manipulate already-fraught conversations around sexuality and create rifts in the LGBTQ community.
Over the past several days, the hashtag #droptheB has been on the rise. The claim, made by supporters of the hashtag, seems to be pretty straightforward: If there are more than two genders, as many LGBTQ advocates claim, then bisexuality is exclusionary to non-binary people and is therefore invalid.
But not so fast with that logic. For starters, bisexuality means attraction to two or more genders and is non-binary inclusive. In other words, no one ever said bisexual people can’t be attracted to non-binary people. Then again, the incorrect definition makes sense when you know where the hashtag started: 4chan, according to internet sleuths.
(Warning: The following tweet contains anti-Semitic and homophobic language.)
https://twitter.com/AmazonChique/status/1007988760963776512
This would not the first time 4chan has pulled a false flag stunt during Pride Month in an attempt to vilify the LGBTQ community. In 2016, they created a fake flyer that advocated for adding a P for “pedosexual” to the acronym. The 4chan posts also suggested strategies for disseminating this idea, including hashtags. While people in the LGBTQ community can easily see this as false, it played into the longstanding (and disproved) idea that there was a link between being gay and being a pedophile.
#droptheB works along the same lines, using established biphobia within and outside of the LGBTQ community. Much of the discourse around Pride this year has been about attendees who are excluded based on perceived cis-ness or straightness, and the erasure of non-monosexual identities.
The good news is, a quick perusal of the #droptheB tag shows almost no one falling for it. The vast majority of tweets are folks speaking in support of bisexual inclusion, rejecting the attempts to sow discord, and calling out the toxic culture that allows these ideas to spread.
https://twitter.com/arhourigan/status/1007993196989833216
https://twitter.com/GreatWhiteSkank/status/1005777036592500737
https://twitter.com/nataliereed84/status/1007870510737207296
No matter the sabotage and bigotry, you can’t stop—and can’t co-opt—the real spirit of Pride.
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