Heteronormativity is a scam

The argument

This argument holds that bisexuality plainly exists, and that the only thing making people doubt it is heteronormativity — the false, culturally imposed assumption that attraction must point to exactly one sex — which the argument calls a 'scam' because it disguises a social convention as a law of nature. The reasoning starts by diagnosing the doubt. Disbelief in bisexuality almost always rests on a hidden premise: that a person is 'really' either straight or gay, so anyone claiming both must be confused, experimenting or lying. But that premise is not an observation about human desire; it is an inheritance of heteronormativity, the worldview that installs opposite-sex attraction as the default and sorts everyone into fixed, mutually exclusive categories around it. Once that framework is recognised as a constructed norm rather than a fact — a 'scam' in the sense that it has been sold to us as natural while serving particular social ends — the supposed impossibility of bisexuality evaporates. There was never any reason, outside the norm, to expect desire to confine itself to one sex. The positive case is then straightforward. Human attraction is varied and need not be exclusive; large numbers of people consistently report and live attraction to more than one gender, across cultures and throughout history. The 'one or the other' demand is the artificial imposition; bisexuality is simply what attraction looks like when it is not forced through that filter. Doubting bisexuality, on this view, is not scepticism about evidence but loyalty to a norm that the evidence contradicts. From this standpoint, dismantling the heteronormative assumption removes the sole basis for denial. Because heteronormativity is a scam that has disguised a social norm as natural law, this argument holds, bisexuality exists.

Premises

Counter-arguments

This counter concerns the argument's reasoning only, and not the reality of bisexuality, which the conclusion asserts and which the survey and behavioural evidence supports. The difficulty is that the case made here is diagnostic rather than evidential: it explains why some people disbelieve bisexuality, and accounting for a doubt is not the same as demonstrating that the doubted thing exists. The same move would license any claim whose sceptics can be shown to have inherited a norm, including claims that are false, so it cannot be what carries the conclusion. The ground the argument actually needs is the one it mentions only in passing and never develops — the survey, behavioural and longitudinal evidence of people reporting and living sustained attraction to more than one gender — which a sibling argument in this debate sets out directly. Two further weaknesses are internal. Calling heteronormativity a "scam" imputes deliberate deception and implies someone doing the selling, which overshoots what the analysis supports: an unexamined social default can be pervasive and mistaken without anyone perpetrating it, and the stronger word is harder to defend than the weaker one the argument requires. And locating the whole dispute in norms concedes too much. If the disagreement were purely about which framework to adopt rather than about evidence, there would be no fact for either side to be right about — which is plainly not the argument's own view, since it holds that the evidence contradicts the norm. That evidence, not the charge of a scam, is what establishes the position.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Explaining why some people doubt bisexuality does not establish that bisexuality exists — the same move would license any claim whose sceptics hold an inherited norm — so diagnosing heteronormativity cannot carry the conclusion by itself. [Rejecting P2] "Scam" imputes deliberate deception and an agent doing the selling, which overshoots the analysis, since an unexamined social default can be pervasive and mistaken without anyone perpetrating it. [Rejecting P3] The positive case does the real work and is left undeveloped here — the survey, behavioural and longitudinal evidence of sustained attraction to more than one gender — while locating the dispute entirely in norms would imply there is no fact of the matter, which is not the argument's own position.