A diagnosis of exclusion.

Bisexuality as the anti-category.

Earlier this year, on a hot August day, I experienced my first (and, thankfully, only) ocular migraine. It came on suddenly, hitting me as I stepped outside of my apartment: an intense pressure in my temples, and then my vision collapsing into a small circle on the right side, with everything else a sea of black. I tried closing one eye, and then the other, to test if that might change things up, when it didn’t, I concluded there must be something going wrong in my brain.

To my relief, my eyesight began to come back after a few minutes: blurry at first, but at least my peripheral vision had been restored. As a responsible adult, I made a virtual appointment with my doctor, who sent me to urgent care, who sent me to an ophthalmologist. It was the last doctor who confirmed what I’d suspected the second I realized that both my eyes were serving up the same truncated field of vision. I’d had an ocular migraine.

An ocular migraine, I learned from the ophthalmologist, is a diagnosis of exclusion. There is no specific thing that tells a doctor that what you experienced was an ocular migraine, no migraine test that comes back with a specified level of a migraine-related protein in your blood. The way you are diagnosed with an ocular migraine is simply by not being diagnosed with anything else. The ophthalmologist checks your eyes for every other problem, and if none of them are indicated, then a migraine is what is left.

I think, in some ways, that bisexuality is like an ocular migraine*. Once you determine that you are not straight and not gay, then bisexuality is simply what is left. And maybe you call it being queer or pansexual or omnisexual or mspec, but what I’m getting at here is that there is no one defining bisexual test, no one specific way of being a bisexual (or queer or pansexual or omnisexual or mspec) person. You simply fall into this bucket because you do not fit anywhere else.

Around the time I had my migraine, I was also trying to sell a book idea about the bi experience and biphobia — a book that would have pulled from my own life story to explore many of the themes I’ve elucidated in the essays I write for this newsletter. That book, as you’ve probably guessed, did not find a home, for reasons that were probably due to the current state of the publishing industry and possibly due to nicheness of the subject matter.

But I digress. Because the reason I bring up this book proposal that ultimately did not become a book is because in the process of drafting it, I kept being asked to answer a question that I really had no answer for — a question that, if I’m being honest, I very much resented. People kept wanting me to offer a vision of a positive bisexual identity — not simply positive as in upbeat and feel good, but positive as “this is what bisexuality is, this is who bisexuals are.” And I simply could not do that because to do that would undermine my very goal, you know? To tell you who the bisexuals are is to create one more box for people to contort themselves into, one more litmus test to assess whether or not you are doing sexuality “correctly,” when the only person who can offer that assessment is, well, you.

And obviously some people disagree with me on this. Some people find it very useful to explain that bisexual means this and pansexual means that and that there are significant differences between these two identities. (Personally, the most significant difference I’ve seen between pan and bi and queer and whatnot is that apparently trans people are more likely to identify as pan/queer, which can obviously affect the lived experience of pan/queer people just because they’re more likely to be dealing with gender identity-based oppression on top of everything else.) Some people need bisexual to mean something specific, to offer a predetermined life path, to tell them what to wear and how to speak and who to be. And I just… I just don’t know that it should. I don’t know that it can, honestly, because the more we say who The Bisexuals™️ are and aren’t, the more we leave people who need support, who need care, floundering by themselves.

Would it have been nice if my doctor had been able to definitively determine that I had an ocular migraine through some special migraine test, to remove all doubt instantly with a little poking and prodding and eye examining? I mean, sure, I guess. And it would certainly be easier if there was some one-two-three guide to being a bisexual, something that made it all obvious and effortless and clear.

But “easier” is not the same as “better.” And that, I think, is important to remember.

* And not just because living in a biphobic society is such a headache (rimshot)