:: And the primary target of my ire here is boundary policing straight people ::
I misread that on first go, as if the primary target of your ire is straight people being boundary policed, instead of straight people doing the boundary policing. The latter is what I think you meant, yes?
:: Given how much crap bisexuals get given, would anyone really pretend to be one? (The answer: Yes, but only when they think no straight people are around...) ::
I've encountered other times that people will pretend; it has more to do with whether or not one can scrape social mileage out of it, not whether the audience is straight or not. I don't want to get into cases, because itemizing feels too much like distributing a convenient set of boundary-policing pre-authorizations to the straight people who might be reading this.
(BTW, re the case you linked? I'm not convinced she was pretending/lying to AfterEllen; she may have encountered a backlash she did not anticipate and could not withstand, and is attempting to closet herself again. Closeted LGBT people will sometimes privately self-identify to out LGBT people, and she might have been assuming that the LGBT press is ghettoized enough that the story would have stayed in-community. [Naive, yes, but if you click the Shankbone link, it seems clear that there's something not-sense-making about how she makes her decisions about her public statements.] Anyway, she may be a vigorously closeted bisexual, or she may be straight. There's no way for me -- or you -- to know. You'll notice that AfterEllen doesn't claim that she was pretending/lying in that first round of emails [although it's pretty clear that there are difficult-to-account-for inconsistencies between earlier and later emails]; they claim that she took from the community without giving back. In fact, worse than that: she took from the community and then attacked the community. That is not a claim about whether she was pretending to be bi; that's a claim about whether she's a trustworthy member of the community.
...which is the long way of saying that I'm uncomfortable with a straight-identified woman framing that link as if said author is "really" straight and was only "pretending" to be bi. Please leave the identity-policing to LGBT-identified people.)
Which almost segues into what I wanted to say...
For me, LGBT identity is as much or more about identification with a community -- publicly or privately -- than it is about who someone has romantic / sexual / whatever relationships with. Ted Haggard is clearly nowhere near a Kinsey 0, but I do not consider him to be gay or bi in any meaningful way. People who refer to him as gay or bi irritate me, because they usually seem to be trying to shame him with those words, and I am so over using LGBT identities to shame people. LGBT is not a clinical description of someone's sexual desires; these are social identities that people earn.
...which is why I agree with you that it is irritating when straight people assume that other straight people don't experience same-sex desires: that thinking essentializes the spectrum of so-called "sexual" identities to sexual desire. Which, no. LGBT-and-so-forth are social identities that refer to individuals' sexuality-and-more. LGBT-ness isn't about who you boink; it's about how you operate socially with respect to who you boink. As far as I'm concerned, it's wholly possible to be "100% straight" and experience same-gender sexual desire. The one isn't really indicative of the other.
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I misread that on first go, as if the primary target of your ire is straight people being boundary policed, instead of straight people doing the boundary policing. The latter is what I think you meant, yes?
:: Given how much crap bisexuals get given, would anyone really pretend to be one? (The answer: Yes, but only when they think no straight people are around...) ::
I've encountered other times that people will pretend; it has more to do with whether or not one can scrape social mileage out of it, not whether the audience is straight or not. I don't want to get into cases, because itemizing feels too much like distributing a convenient set of boundary-policing pre-authorizations to the straight people who might be reading this.
(BTW, re the case you linked? I'm not convinced she was pretending/lying to AfterEllen; she may have encountered a backlash she did not anticipate and could not withstand, and is attempting to closet herself again. Closeted LGBT people will sometimes privately self-identify to out LGBT people, and she might have been assuming that the LGBT press is ghettoized enough that the story would have stayed in-community. [Naive, yes, but if you click the Shankbone link, it seems clear that there's something not-sense-making about how she makes her decisions about her public statements.] Anyway, she may be a vigorously closeted bisexual, or she may be straight. There's no way for me -- or you -- to know. You'll notice that AfterEllen doesn't claim that she was pretending/lying in that first round of emails [although it's pretty clear that there are difficult-to-account-for inconsistencies between earlier and later emails]; they claim that she took from the community without giving back. In fact, worse than that: she took from the community and then attacked the community. That is not a claim about whether she was pretending to be bi; that's a claim about whether she's a trustworthy member of the community.
...which is the long way of saying that I'm uncomfortable with a straight-identified woman framing that link as if said author is "really" straight and was only "pretending" to be bi. Please leave the identity-policing to LGBT-identified people.)
Which almost segues into what I wanted to say...
For me, LGBT identity is as much or more about identification with a community -- publicly or privately -- than it is about who someone has romantic / sexual / whatever relationships with. Ted Haggard is clearly nowhere near a Kinsey 0, but I do not consider him to be gay or bi in any meaningful way. People who refer to him as gay or bi irritate me, because they usually seem to be trying to shame him with those words, and I am so over using LGBT identities to shame people. LGBT is not a clinical description of someone's sexual desires; these are social identities that people earn.
...which is why I agree with you that it is irritating when straight people assume that other straight people don't experience same-sex desires: that thinking essentializes the spectrum of so-called "sexual" identities to sexual desire. Which, no. LGBT-and-so-forth are social identities that refer to individuals' sexuality-and-more. LGBT-ness isn't about who you boink; it's about how you operate socially with respect to who you boink. As far as I'm concerned, it's wholly possible to be "100% straight" and experience same-gender sexual desire. The one isn't really indicative of the other.