Polyamory

They often refuse to acknowledge the fact that opposite gender relationships are privileged even within nonmonogamy. They don’t learn the community culture. I’ve seen several instances of them expecting queer organization to do the labor for them instead of with them. I’ve got plenty of experiences of them asking to be part of the community, but that alone shows a failure of understanding of what the community even is. Sylvia Rivera did not ask for the T to be included, she screamed that trans people have already fought and bled alongside cis gay people. They don’t seek refuge in unaligned queer spaces en masse. When the rainbow flag is flying they don’t act like “this is my people”.

But I guess the biggest thing is, they aren’t marginalized in the same way that the umbrella is. A straight trans person is still a f@g to a bigot. A man with two girlfriends and no attraction to men isn’t, he’s a player or a cheater or something else in that vein. A woman with a wife is degendered by bigots, a woman with three husbands isn’t, even if they’re all married to each other too, she’s a slut. My monogamous lesbian friends feel fundamentally not in community and collaboration with cishet poly people, and I can tell the feeling is mutual. Both groups are allied to each other but it’s not even like it is with leather where they know the leather folk will throw down alongside. The queer community really is at its core “we’re similar enough to get mistaken for each other by bigots”. Like how the main secondary targets of transmisogyny are cis lesbians.

This isn’t exclusion for exclusion’s sake but rather a statement of the fact that I see mononormativity as fundamentally a different form of oppression to cisheteronormativity. And because of that, even solely from my perspective as a polyamorous person, I think that inclusion of polyamory into the lgbt umbrella wouldn’t help as much as it hurts. Movement focusing on polyamory will likely do more good on its own separate but in solidarity. It won’t take a backseat that way.