Why We Keep Writing Anyway
Bisexuality, community, and the work of staying present.
We’re living through a political moment that is openly hostile to anyone who deviates from the cult of white supremacy. Across the United States, we’re watching people be detained, tortured, and killed. From a written perspective, we acknowledge the coordinated efforts to ban books from schools and libraries, especially books by queer writers, trans writers, writers of color, and anyone whose work refuses to flatten identity into something palatable.
We’re watching and experiencing anti-trans legislation move at frightening speed, drag bans framed as “public safety,” reproductive healthcare stripped away state by state, and queer lives increasingly treated as abstractions to be debated rather than people who exist. We’re watching public funding for the arts disappear while politicians insist culture is either dangerous or frivolous, depending on who’s telling the story.
And we’re watching bisexuality get erased again.
This is not about hurt feelings. This is not about not being invited to the right party, or not feeling cool enough in a queer space, or having a bad experience at a bar. Framing bisexual erasure that way is itself part of the problem; it shrinks a systemic political failure into a personal inconvenience.
What’s happening to bi+ people is bigger than social exclusion. It’s ideological. It’s structural. And it should alarm anyone who cares about the future of queer liberation. Because when bi+ people are pushed out of queer conversations as “traitors,” “not serious,” “not oppressed enough,” or “politically unreliable,” that isn’t just biphobia. It’s evidence that the logic of white supremacy has already been absorbed into queer spaces, and is doing its work efficiently.
White supremacy does not only operate through overt violence. It operates by enforcing purity. By rewarding legibility. By narrowing who counts as “real,” “deserving,” and “on the right side.” It thrives in movements that start policing their own borders more aggressively than they challenge power. Just think about how activism is policed in queer spaces. If you aren’t upholding activism to a, to borrow a phrase, gold star standard, then you are the enemy.
When bisexuality is framed as suspect (i.e., too fluid, too relational, too difficult to discipline) it’s because bisexuality threatens a worldview that depends on fixed categories. Bi+ people expose how easily movements can start mimicking the systems they claim to oppose. That’s why bisexuals get cast as fence-sitters. As people who “won’t pick a side.”
But that accusation only makes sense if you believe that liberation is a zero-sum game. If you believe safety is earned through exclusion, and that proximity to power is something to protect rather than dismantle.
That belief is not radical. It is reactionary. And we are seeing the consequences of it right now.
Across the U.S. and beyond, broader LGBTQ+ organizations are increasingly distancing themselves from trans people by softening language, dropping commitments, hedging statements, prioritizing donor comfort over trans survival. The same rhetoric used against bisexual people for decades is now being repurposed: they’re too controversial, they’re making things harder, they’re asking for too much, we need to be strategic.
That’s a pattern.
Bisexual people are often the first to be pushed out because we are harder to instrumentalize. We don’t fit neatly into “born this way” narratives or respectability frameworks. Our lives reveal how desire, gender, and community are shaped by context, power, and choice. That makes us inconvenient to movements that are trying to appeal to institutions rather than dismantle them.
When bisexuality is treated as expendable, it signals that the movement has already accepted the rules of the dominant system. That it has decided some people are worth sacrificing for legitimacy.
If bisexual people can’t make it, the question is not why us. The question is who’s next.
We already know the answer, because we’re watching it happen.
This is why bisexuality is not just an identity but a political position. Bisexuality refuses the idea that queerness must be narrow to be protected. It refuses the fantasy that liberation comes from proving we’re “just like” the people who harm us, only slightly different. It insists that complexity is not a liability but a truth.
That refusal is dangerous to systems built on hierarchy. And bi+ writers sit right at that fault line.
Writing is where these ideological battles get fought long before they show up in policy. Stories shape who is imaginable. Who is sympathetic. Who is considered a risk worth taking or a liability to discard. When bi+ writers are pressured to soften or erase our bisexuality to be publishable, that is not neutral market logic. It is political sorting.
When bisexual stories are framed as confusing or unserious, it reinforces the idea that only certain kinds of queerness deserve permanence. That some lives are footnotes rather than foundations. This is why community engagement matters so much. Isolation makes this erasure easier.
When bi+ writers don’t see themselves as part of a collective, it becomes easier for institutions to tokenize one of us at a time. Easier to frame each exclusion as an individual failure instead of a systemic pattern. Easier to pretend bisexuality just “isn’t resonating” rather than actively being sidelined.
Community is how we interrupt that logic. Not because community is always comfortable or unified (newsflash: it isn’t) but because it creates accountability. It creates continuity across moments when institutions pivot away from us.
Engaging as bi+ writers—showing up for each other’s work, refusing to disappear from conversations, insisting on bisexuality as a serious analytic lens—is how we keep this from becoming another quiet historical erasure that only makes sense in hindsight.
Again, this is not about demanding a seat at someone else’s table. It’s about refusing the framework that says there are only so many seats to begin with.
Bisexuality is revolutionary because it reveals how arbitrary the exclusions are. It shows how quickly movements can replicate the violence they claim to oppose when they start valuing safety through sameness.
That’s why leaning in matters now. Writing is not a luxury in this moment. It’s evidence. It’s resistance. It’s how we mark the places where the story was narrowed and where it could have gone another way.
We survive it by refusing to disappear.
Don’t look away,
Bailey