Bisexuals Need Uniquely Bisexual Spaces

One of the reasons I haven't been doing very much blogging here in the last couple of months is that I've become more and more tangled up in the blogging community on Tumblr. In addition to finding an awesome fandom for foreign musicals on there, it's a great place to find LGBTQ blogs. They're all great, in their own way. But, I do have some serious problems with some so-called "bisexual" blogs.

A blog will call itself a place for bisexuals...then have tons of stuff about pansexual people. This bothers me, it really does.

Bisexual people have struggled for years to have their identities recognized as separate from gay and lesbian. Biphobia and bisexual erasure comes from the LGT community as much as it does from cis, straight people. We need spaces of our own, about our own identities - not other people's.

In case you've never heard of pansexual, it's an orientation usually defined as "attraction to all genders", or "attraction to personality as opposed to gender". Many pansexual people refer to themselves as "gender blind" or "loving people, not genders".

Now, there is an increasingly big community emerging for pansexuals. They have plenty of blogs to submit things to. Instead, blogs that I go to to find stuff about my orientation are increasingly dominated by pansexual things.

The fact that this is happening specifically to bisexual blogs instead of, say, lesbian blogs is a large part of the problem. There are so many blogs for only lesbians, only gay men, only pansexual people, only trans men or only trans women. If you submit something that isn't any of those things to those blogs, it won't be posted.

But bisexuals? Nope, we're again pushed aside from having our own spaces. It really bothers me when I see "Bisexual events" whose flyers invite "All bi and pansexual people!"

Because here's the thing: Pansexual people are not bisexual. Including them in a "bisexual" space is as ridiculous as saying "this is a place for trans* people only! But we invite cis people as well! In fact, why don't we have MORE cis people than trans people?"

Pansexual people have quite often also been guilty of blatant  biphobia, claiming that our orientation is "binarist" or "transphobic". Not all pansexual people are biphobic, obviously, but many have said very VERY biphobic things.

I'm also confused as to why pansexual people would want to submit their pictures/profiles to bisexual spaces in the first place - given that so many of them have worked hard to not  be seen as bisexual.

Now, if a blog wants to be a space for lots of different orientations, go ahead! That's fine! But I cannot stand that bisexuals claim a space, then have it - as always - dominated by other orientations.