Bisexuality is highly misrepresented, misunderstood, understudied, and an often quite highly maligned sexual orientation. It has become increasingly clear to me that bisexuality needs to be talked about much more than it is!
In my role as a Registered Clinical Counsellor, I am in the extremely privileged position of being allowed — no — required, to ask some fairly (let’s face it) invasive questions, like: how do you define your sexual orientation? How do you describe your sexuality? As a result, I get to see something the research has told us, but live and in-person: that there are so many more people who identify as and live on the bisexual+ spectrum than most of us realize! In fact, the research tells us that more people identify as bisexual+ than as gay and lesbian combined:
“Studies suggest that about 50 percent of people who identify as either gay, lesbian or bisexual, identify as bisexual. This makes the bisexual population the single largest group within the LGBTQ community” (https://www.hrc.org/resources/bisexual-faq).
Your mind should be blown away by this! Why do we not hear MORE about this very large group of people?
The current reality is that bisexuality is often invisible — it is the letter in LGBTQ2S+ acronym that seems to get the least airtime. It’s there, but no one really talks much about the bisexual+ segment. Why is this important? Read on, dear reader, read on. It will become clear.
I personally grapple with the realities of being a person who identifies as bisexual+, so I want to share the benefits of my research with you and do my part by being out and open about being bisexual and therefore contributing to normalizing it. Because it IS a normal, healthy, stable, and real form of human sexuality. (It is ridiculous that I even need to say that so clearly and boldly.) As you will see from this article series, the invisibility of bisexuality has significant implications for our health, sense of self, and sense of connection. I believe that the more of us who are out, vocal and normalizing, the healthier we ALL can be in our future.
The invisibility of bisexuality and the implications of this invisibility are interwoven throughout all aspects of bisexual+ peoples’ lives. Gaining a deeper understanding of some of the complexities of being bisexual+ and how this identity can impact a person’s life will help us all be more accepting, affirming, and understanding of this under-studied, and often misunderstood, certainly misrepresented, and, yes, even MALIGNED group of people. Believe me, some of your loved ones are likely bisexual. Your fellow citizens definitely are! Even if you are not bisexual+, this topic IS relevant to you.
My own experience
It is only by delving into my own experience of bisexuality and into the research about bisexual+ invisibility that I’ve come to realize why I have not engaged deeply with or been vocal about my own identity as a bisexual+ person until a few years ago, even though I have been bisexual+ for many, many years now. (I love being surprised about my own blind spots.)
I spent many years in relationships with women, and then found myself in a long-term relationship with a cis male partner. Early on in my relationship with him, I sometimes referred to myself — with my tongue in my cheek — as a bad lesbian, or, jokingly, as a wasbian. I learned from the research that this misnaming of one’s self is very common and that bi-negativity contributes to the term bisexual being an uncomfortable fit for many of us.
In this article series, I first describe some difficulties of even defining bisexuality and I outline some of the problems regarding the seemingly problematic binary nature of the term bisexuality (this article, no. 1). In the next article, I explore what I mean by bisexual invisibility, and outline challenges researchers face when attempting to study us, discuss implications for bisexual+ people, give a sketch of heterosexual and queer attitudes about bisexual+ people according to the research, as well as touch on what bisexual+ people themselves think (article no. 2). Then I write about some counselling implications of bi-negativity, how counsellors can increase their competence in serving their bisexual clients and their partners, and how clients can decide if their counsellor is competent and aware enough to work with (article no. 3).
Whoa! That’s a lot. Are you still reading? (If you’re bisexual, I bet you are.)
What is bisexuality? A category problem. How to define?
It has become clear to me is that there is no clear definition of bisexuality. Not only is the use of the label bisexual hindered by bi-negativity, the label itself can be thought of as plastic and flexible. It refers to quite a variety of lived realities.
But first, a note on bi-negativity vs. bi-phobia
Bi-negativity is a more appropriate term than the possibly more familiar bi-phobia to refer to the negative attitudes and actions towards bisexual people: “This shift in terminology reflects the understanding that prejudiced attitudes do not, in fact, involve a phobia or fear. Rather, these attitudes towards gay and lesbian individuals [for example] are negative cognitions [and effective reactions, which also often include lack of support for civil rights for gay men and lesbians” (Yost & Thomas, 2012, p. 692).
So rather than fears, the term bi-negativity refers to a nasty attitude — the negative ideas and actions coupled with lack of support for our rights as people. In other words: haters are not actually afraid; they're mean-spirited towards us.
Back to the difficulty in defining bisexuality
The label bisexual is complex — it is a category that includes people who have little in common besides an attraction to people of more than one gender.
Consider that there exist:
bisexual people who are monogamous
bisexual people who are in monogamous relationships w opposite sex, heterosexual partners
bisexual people who are in monogamous relationships w same sex, queer-identified partners
bisexual people who are in monogamous relationships w trans or non-binary people
bisexual people who are in non-monogamous relationships w any of the aforementioned genders
people who consider bisexuality and polyamory to be intrinsically linked
individuals with equal attraction to both genders
people with a primary attraction to one gender
people who feel they are bisexual but never have had the opportunity to explore their sexuality
people who feel their desires transcend gender (Binik & Hall, 2014, p. 320)
people who engage in bisexual behaviour but do not identify explicitly as bisexual
people who have been unable to acknowledge or live out their bisexuality due to compulsory heterosexuality (this concept is an entire additional article)
I bet we could think of more possibilities here. Suggestions?
Bisexual+ activist, Robyn Ochs defines bisexuality as,
"the potential to be attracted —romantically and/or sexually — to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree." (Eisner, 2013)
Bisexual is a categorical term that varies as widely as the people we attempt to capture with it. The addition of the “+” symbol is an attempt to capture the range of multi-gender attractions such as pansexuality, queerness, fluid sexuality, etc. This difficulty with definitions has important implications when it comes gathering data to learn about this large group of people, as I will dive into in the following articles.
The seemingly binary nature of the term “bisexual”
Some people find difficulty with the bi piece of the term bisexual — asking: do bisexual people really intend to purposefully exclude any other gender formation from their pool of potential partners? Likely not. Is this term reinforcing the gender binaries? Is this term incorrect for the many people who are attracted to multiple genders?
The assumption in this criticism is that bi refers to cis women and cis men — those measly and familiar two gender binaries — as the only options. In light of the deconstruction of gender and sex categories, many individuals who at one time labeled themselves as bisexual have begun to experience the label as limiting because it does not encompass attraction to trans and non-binary individuals and continues to enforce the primacy of binary gender and sexuality. (Callis A. S., 2013, p. 103) This inherited label seems to have a limit built into it that makes it inaccurate.
Another arguably more accurate way to think of the term bisexual, however, is that the bi refers to same and different, rather than two genders. As noted on American Institute of Bisexuality Journal of Bisexuality website, “As a scientific term to describe sexuality, the word bisexual came into use during the late 19th century as a means of classifying people with both homosexual and heterosexual patterns of sexual attraction or sexual activity. The Latin prefix bi- does indeed indicate two or both. However, the "both" indicated in the word bisexual are merely homosexual (lit. same-sex) and heterosexual (lit. different sex). Bisexuality is not limited by sex nor, by extension, by gender.” (2021, 06, 20: https://bi.org/en/questions) So, originally, the term bisexual did not refer to men and women, but rather to same and different. Therefore the term bisexual is intended to refer to your attraction to people of your own gender and to people with gender(s) different than your own. So perhaps this term is accurate after all.
Many people who identify as bisexual use the terms bisexual, queer and pansexual (which means attraction regardless of gender) interchangeably. While I personally identify most frequently as queer, I use bisexual for the purposes of these articles because the research generally uses this term. I personally find the term queer fits me better because it feels broader, and I appreciate queer as “pithy shorthand”. (Callis A. S., 2009, p. 214). The terminology we use to refer to ourselves is personal and often contextual. It is worth noting that in our embodied lived experience and intimate moments with our chosen partners, however, the labels are tossed aside and what’s important is “what the mind knows and the heart feels.” (Grace, 2015, p. 44). We love whom we love! Labels are not so necessary or relevant in our most intimate moments, are they? However, we need useful terminology to use as tools with which to discuss our experiences.
Summary
In this article I detail the complex nature of defining bisexuality and hinted at some dire implications I’ll outline in the next article, I suggest that the term bi-negativity is the most appropriate term for describing negative attitudes and biases against us, and, after addressing some common misgivings, I promote the term bisexual as accurate after all. I also assert that the research tells us overwhelmingly that bisexuals make up a very large group of people — the largest within the LGBTQ2S+ community — of whom we mostly hear nothing about!
In my next article, I explore what I mean by bisexual invisibility, and outline challenges researchers face when attempting to study the bisexual population, I discuss implications for the bisexual community, give a sketch of heterosexual AND queer attitudes about bisexual people according to the research, as well as report what bisexual people themselves think.
Please join me and learn more about this huge, largely invisible, and often misunderstood group of people who live in our communities among us, and, of course, also are us.