Journal of Bisexuality, 11:498–502, 2011

Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1529-9716 print / 1529-9724 online
DOI: 10.1080/15299716.2011.620848

Reflective Paper: GL Versus BT: The

Archaeology of Biphobia and Transphobia
Within the U.S. Gay and Lesbian Community

JILLIAN WEISS
Ramapo College of New Jersey, Mahwah, New Jersey, USA

Heterosexism against bisexuals and transgenders exists not only

in the straight community but in the gay and lesbian com-
munity as well. Are ‘biphobia’ and ‘transphobia’ examples of
‘phobias’—irrational fears? No, such heterosexist attitudes are all
too rational, mirroring social tensions, which only appear to be an
ahistorical psychological phenomenon. Rather, as the gay, lesbian,
bisexual, transgender (GLBT) community developed, power rela-
tions arose which resulted in the four different groups (G/L/B/T),
assigning them different social locations. Prejudice in gay and
lesbian communities against bisexuals and transgenders is hetero-
sexism because it is, among other things, an accommodationist
attempt to discover these more ‘radical’ forms of sexuality.

KEYWORDS biphobia, transphobia, heterosexism, prejudice,

discrimination

The original article was published in the Journal of Bisexuality,

Volume 3, Numbers 3/4, 2003.

In 2004, when I wrote this article, the question of whether ‘the community’ in-
cluded bisexual and transgender people was much more unresolved than it is
today. More problematically, the discussion of the issue was often phrased in
terms of ‘biphobia’ and ‘transphobia,’ which are wholly unsatisfactory terms
for discussion of intracommunity relations. Although I believe that ‘LGBT’
is now here to stay, the lack of transgender representation in organizations
calling themselves LGBT brings to mind Dean Spade’s (2002) formulation

A special thank-you to the author’s research assistant Santali Villafane.

Address correspondence to Dr. Jillian Weiss, Ramapo College, 505 Ramapo Valley Road,
Mahwah, NJ 07430, USA. E-mail: jweiss@ramapo.edu

498
 J. Weiss 499

of “LGBfake(t),” and the same appears to be true with regard to bisexual

representation, or lack thereof. In fact, I was recently treated to a long ora-
tion from a friend of mine, well known in the LGBT activist community,
who insists that there is no such thing as a bisexual man, because my friend
has never seen a personal ad by a bisexual man looking for a woman. The
usage of phobia to describe internal tensions within the LGBT community
also continues. Thus, though the playing field has changed somewhat in the
intervening 7 years, the points made in the article continue to be relevant.
Transgender rights have traveled a long, hard road since 2004. These
have long been dependent politically upon the rising fortunes of gay
elites, particularly with the reintroduction of the federal Employment Non-
Discrimination Act, which at the time the article was written, had included
only sexual orientation, and not gender identity. At the same time, transgen-
der rights were also independent legally from sexual orientation discrimi-
nation because more and more courts were declaring discrimination against
transsexual people to be an illegal form of sex stereotyping under the federal
civil rights act, a protection denied to homosexuals. To complicate matters,
the notion of ‘gender identity’ as legally separate and distinct from sexual
orientation was a fairly recent invention, for better or worse, and the rela-
tionship between these two discursive formations was (and still is) in flux.
The problematic relationship of bisexuality to the homosexual move-
ment I saw as quite similar. Just as some transgender people, who refused to
conform to any normative gender, were considered far too queer by some
gay political elites, and other transgender people, who conformed com-
pletely to gender norms and disappeared completely into the woodwork of
society, were considered not queer enough by some gay scholars, bisexuals
were also assigned this discontinuous space: too queer (as in polyamory),
and not queer enough (as in heteronormative). I saw these problems as
political, as power relations, and as a reluctance of gays to share in hard-
won victories that had been achieved by gay efforts and gay money (despite
the mythology of a Stonewall Rebellion run largely by drag queens and
transsexuals). I did not, at that time, have the word homonormative in my
vocabulary, but it would have been a fitting one.
Since the article was written, the federal Employment Non-
Discrimination Act bill was reintroduced in 2007, and it contained sexual
orientation and gender identity, which surprised and pleased me. I did not
know that, in a few short months, gender identity would be stripped out
of the bill because its inclusion made it seem politically unwinnable to its
sponsors. I found this explanation thoroughly unconvincing because it was
clear that the entire enterprise was unwinnable, because President George
W. Bush had vowed to veto it, and the Senate refused to consider the issue.
This occurrence was personally devastating, and the bitterness remained
well into 2009, when the bill was again introduced, but this time into a
Democratic majority in both houses of Congress under President Obama.
500 Journal of Bisexuality

Although, fortunately, gender identity was not stripped from the bill this time,
and the bill attracted the largest number of sponsors of any previous LGBT
bill, it unfortunately went nowhere. To my view, the gay political elites who
controlled gay legislation in Congress preferred to work on a gay-only bill,
the repeal of the antigay military policy called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which
was passed by Congress in the waning days of the lame duck session before
a new Republican majority took office in 2011. The victory was bittersweet
for transgender activists, as transgender military personnel were not cov-
ered by the bill, and there was never any question of including them. I
found it striking, and consistent with my views on power relations, that the
transgender-inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) was left
by the wayside, with unconvincing expressions of regret. Many gay activists,
and Congressmen, expressed the opinion that the presence of transgender
protections made the fight unwinnable. Their willingness to concede without
a fight, in my opinion, clearly involved the psychological phenomenon of
‘projection,’ in which one assumes that one’s own attitudes are or will be
held by everyone else. Because they believed that transgender people were
‘too queer,’ and that everyone must feel the same, they threw in the towel.
The ‘power relations’ issue is not limited to the struggles among gay,
bisexual and transgender communities. It is suggested in the attempt to as-
sociate the gay rights struggle with that of the Black Civil Rights Movement.
This project has had uneven success, as some African Americans have con-
cerns about the analogy, particularly as the Civil Rights Movement is not
over, and some claim convincingly that there is more segregation in today’s
society, though of the de facto form, rather than the de jure form, than there
was when the Civil Rights Movement began. In addition, gays were not en-
slaved for more than 250 years, nor subjected to legal and social racism and
violence to the extreme degree faced by African Americans. Last, some Black
churches, though certainly not all or even most, are concerned with Biblical
proscriptions on same-sex relations. At the same time, the Black Civil Rights
Movement, despite its initial controversy, has succeeded so wildly, at least
at the level of formal legal changes and public relations, if not in actual
improvement in the lives of most African Americans, that the analogy is too
tempting to resist. The cover of The Advocate in December 2008 proclaimed
in large black letters: “Gay Is The New Black,” a double entendre referring to
both fashion (“the new black” referring to any ubiquitous new clothing fash-
ion) and to race. This led to a furor, which left many LGBT people scratching
their heads in wonderment, not understanding the power relations inherent
in the appropriation of hard-won gains by the African American community.
This gaffe was even more poignant in my mind because of the gay concerns
about bisexual and transgender attempts to ‘appropriate’ hard-won gains of
the gay community. It also brings to mind the fight by certain transsexual
separatists to distance themselves from the gay and transgender communi-
ties. These separatists consider themselves to be ‘real’ women and ‘real’ men,
 J. Weiss 501

‘normal’ heterosexuals, unlike those whose gender falls along a continuum

or those whose romantic interest lies in a same-sex partner. Likewise for
the insistence by some transgender advocates that everyone is transgender
because everyone has at least some stereotypically masculine attributes and
some feminine ones, even those unwilling to acknowledge the label. The
same goes for those who seek to create our community as a ‘queer’ com-
munity, ignoring those who resist this formulation, a term that covers every
nonnormative sexuality and gender, and paradoxically harkens to ‘queer
theory,’ with its hypothesis that intersectionality of identity makes political
representation through identity politics unsatisfactory, if not impossible. Are
all of our justice movements shot through with hegemonist dreams?
These are all power relations issues, formed in the Foucauldian crucible
of power knowledge, in which the discursive formations of gay, lesbian,
bisexual, transgender, transsexual, GLBT, LGBT and queer are vying for
hegemony. I find it meaningful that my Google search as I write this in early
2011 shows 500 million results for the word gay, 250 million for lesbian,
45 million for bisexual, 30 million for queer, 20 million for GLBT or LGBT ,
17 million for transsexual and 14 million for transgender. If we fail to un-
derstand our community tensions as power relations, believing them instead
to simply be the result of insufficient education, elitism, or phobias, then we
will find ourselves unable to solve the puzzle of our continued fractionation
and political ineffectiveness. As Judith Butler noted of the feminist movement
in Gender Trouble (1990):

On the one hand, representation serves as the operative term within a

political process that seeks to extend visibility and legitimacy to women
as political subjects; on the other hand, representation is the normative
function of a language which is said either to reveal or to distort what
is assumed to be true about the category of women. For feminist the-
ory, the development of a language that fully or adequately represents
women has seemed necessary to foster the political visibility of women.
This has seemed obviously important considering the pervasive cultural
condition in which women’s lives were either misrepresented or not rep-
resented at all. . . And the feminist subject turns out to be discursively
constituted by the very political system that is supposed to facilitate its
own emancipation. (p. 1)

This is also true of gay advocacy today, and even of ‘LGBT’ advocacy. Those
in charge of the movement have attempted to represent us as people who
are ‘just like you,’ but many of us are not that. The gay subject, just as the
feminist subject, is constituted by the very political system that is supposed to
facilitate our ‘LGBT’ emancipation. This is problematic if that system can be
shown to produce gay subjects who are not ‘gay’ enough. As Butler (1990)
correctly said, an uncritical appeal to such a system for emancipation will
502 Journal of Bisexuality

clearly be self-defeating. As the feminist movement discovered, the represen-

tation of women as upper-middle-class White females resulted in a backlash
among many women, to the extent that many women today deny they are
feminists, though they seem to be such, and conservative commentators feel
free to bash feminism in full public view without recognizing this as bigotry.
Although many voices have been raised to point up similar problems in
the LGBT movement, the LGBT movement has yet to discover this in any
meaningful way. It is my hope that we will be able to avoid these problems
as a movement by recognizing the power relations at work, and using this
understanding to create, in the words of Sedgwick (1990), a universalizing
movement, rather than a minoritizing movement.

REFERENCES

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble. New York, NY: Routledge.

Gross, M. J. (2008). Gay is the new black: The last great civil rights struggle. The
Advocate, 1021, Cover.
Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the closet. Los Angeles, CA: University of
California Press.
Spade, D. (2002). Remarks at Transecting the Academy conference, Race and ethnic
studies panel. Makezine. Retrieved from http://www.makezine.enoughenough.
org/transecting.html
Weiss, J. (2004). GL vs. BT: The archaeology of biphobia and transphobia in the U.S.
lesbian and gay community. Journal of Bisexuality, 3(3), 25–55.

Dr. Jillian Weiss is Professor of Law and Society at Ramapo College of New
Jersey. Her research area is transgender workplace law and policy. Her disser-
tation was about the primary influences on the adoption of transgender human
resources policy by U.S. employers.
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