If I had a nickel for every time I've heard or read a well-intentioned progressive say something along these lines:
I no longer believe in gay or straight. (37+ / 0-)
I think everyone has the potential to enjoy whatever body part they want, dangly or otherwise.
I'd...well, I'd at least be able to treat myself to a very nice dinner. It's odd, to me, but "I don't care what you say, everybody's really bisexual" is apparently not a fringe point of view. It's about as mainstream as the equally incorrect "bisexuality doesn't exist," but strangely doesn't elicit the same negative reaction in liberal and progressive circles.
And that's strange, I think, and quite unfortunate. Denying the existence of gay people is a fairly obvious form of homophobia, just as the similarly motivated denial of the existence of gender identity is a fairly obvious form of transphobia. It gets a pass, I believe, because it comes across as so terribly avant-garde - deconstructing genders and sexualities and binaries of all sorts is very fashionably progressive. If there were no sexualities and no genders and no binaries at all, no matter how fuzzy, if we could all blend together into a smoothly homogenous pudding, then how could there be any discrimination?
But the world doesn't work that way. And when you claim that it does, you deny the lived reality of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of people. And you create an argument from the left that supports arguments from the right. The truth is that there exist people who are exclusively attracted to people who fall in certain bands of the sex and gender spectra.
One doesn't have to assert a strict binary of sex and gender in order to believe in sexual orientations. Sex and gender can vary continuously on a spectrum while still presenting differences that are meaningful (and seemingly discrete) in human perception. Light also varies continuously on a spectrum, and yet we don't use that fact to argue that red and violet don't exist or that both are actually green.
Just as red and violet exist, gays and lesbians exist. Male and female bodies exist. Male and female gender identities exist. We are not all androgynous bisexuals, no matter how utopian the world might be if we were. Bisexuals certainly exist, as do androgynes, intersex people, and green. But the existence of intermediates doesn't erase the difference between end points of a continuously varying data set.
And this sort of argument isn't just factually wrong. It's harmful. There are people who simply cannot be sexually and/or emotionally fulfilled with a partner who doesn't fall within their preferred range of sex and gender. For the heteros among this group, this isn't a big deal; there's no particular pressure on them to enter into or stay in a relationship with a same-sex partner. At most, it might encourage them to experiment. But for gays and lesbians, there's a huge amount of social pressure to attempt to form intimate relationships with opposite-sex partners. Telling us that we're really bi, that we could have a straight relationship if we really wanted to, that our orientation doesn't actually exist...it hurts. It's damaging. It reinforces, in different language, the bigots' argument that our sexuality is a "choice."
Now, if it were a choice (and for some people it is), there wouldn't be anything wrong with that. I support the right of the actual bisexuals and sexually-fluid people among us to choose relationships with any partner they happen to like. But defending that freedom to choose doesn't require denying the lived realities of gay, lesbian, and straight people.