I don’t remember what it was that first sparked me to look up statistics about bisexual people. What I can tell you is that it was in the summer of 2020, when I had just begun to think of myself as — and here words still fail me — a homoromantic bisexual, a sapphic bisexual, a woman who is sexually attracted to many people of many genders but only wants to forge romantic relationships with women. In many ways it had been such a tiny, lateral shift in my self perception — a move from “I’m bisexual” to “I’m still bisexual” — and yet it had cracked open my entire world all the same, this revelation that I did not want to date or partner with men. After decades of being the girl who desperately wanted a boyfriend, who craved the validation of heterosexual romance with a passionate fervor, I was suddenly able to step outside myself and observe this urge at a cool, collected distance, to see it as a longing that had been imposed upon me rather than one that had originated organically.
And something about that revelation — about realizing, viscerally, what abstract concepts like “compulsory heterosexuality” actually mean — unlocked a door in my brain, freeing me to ask other questions I had never before considered. Questions like, “How have I been affected by biphobia?”
For most of my life, I would have told you that I obviously hadn’t. I was a white cis woman who’d been out since 1997, who came of age in an era when LG had been replaced by LGBT (and then LGBTQ and the acronym’s many other iterations). No one had ever disowned or disavowed me for being bi. No one had physically assaulted me or lobbed bi-specific slurs at me, I had never lost or been denied a job because of my bisexuality. Yes, I had grown up in the era of DOMA and DADT, but those felt like homophobic laws that I was simply the collateral damage to, not biphobic laws that oppressed me, specifically. And since I didn't want to be in the military or get married, the harm they did me was theoretical anyway. Given that the majority of my dating life had revolved around men, well — it was easy to see myself as one of those cosseted bi women who enjoys the privileges of heterosexuality while demanding access to queer spaces. It was easy to see myself as someone whose bisexuality afforded only privilege and zero costs*.
But now, in this moment of reconsidering and reckoning, I could not help but wonder whether I had gotten it all wrong. And for me, the obvious starting point was to look for data, for statistics, that might offer an opposing view on what it meant to be bisexual.
The first statistic that I remember searching for was rates of rape and abuse. Surviving an abusive relationship is one of the defining traumas of my life, and if my bisexuality had been a factor in my abuse, then that was one very concrete way that I could understand myself as a victim of biphobia. When I saw the numbers, my breath caught in my chest. Not only are bisexuals at a significantly higher risk of intimate partner violence and rape than gays, lesbians, and straights, but bi women, in particular, are the standout group, with over 60% of us experiencing rape, physical violence, and/or stalking from an intimate partner at some point in our lives. (37.3% of bi men report experiencing these forms of violence, which is lower than bi women and lesbians but higher than straight and gay men and straight women. Yes, bi men are more likely to be violated by a partner than straight women are.)
This data point forced me to reconsider my past, shading in contours where there had once been flat white space. Was I abused because I was bi? I don’t think that it’s quite that simple, not least because I know my abuser targeted straight women as well. Did being bi make me more vulnerable to abuse? That I could see as a possibility, particularly when I considered my bisexuality as part and parcel of the “sluttiness” I had always felt anxiety about. But the real question that reframed things for me was this: did my bisexuality affect my experience of abuse?
Before seeing the stats on bi women and abuse, I had never thought to ask myself this. Abuse was abuse, right? But now, the answer felt glaringly obvious. My abuser had always treated me like a wind-up sex doll, there to perform on command and in accordance with his desires. Because I was bi, I was routinely expected to participate in threesomes without ever explicitly being asked for consent; because I was bi, I was never given the space to think about whether I wanted to participate in group sex (or even just group sex with this particular group), merely made to understand that I obviously should (I was bi! It’s what bi women were supposed to want!).
More than that: because I was bi, my abuser felt comfortable telling me about the ways that he had violated and disrespected other women — as someone who was attracted to women as well, I was supposed to find his actions hot. His disclosures always made me feel vile. Here was proof that my boyfriend, the man I shared an apartment and a life with, was disrespecting and hurting other women. But they also made me feel complicit. I knew about what he did to other women, and yet I did nothing. I stayed with him. I had been brought behind the curtain, bore witness to awful horrors that laid there, and I had chosen to stay — for reasons that are complicated and colored by abuse, for sure. But in the moment, all I could see was that I was awful.
It is hard for me to imagine a straight woman being abused in these specific ways: made a featured performer in a threeway circus, made a confidante in the abuse of other women with the expectation that she’ll find it hot. To be straight is to be deserving of more protection — not from abuse, per se, but from the unvarnished ugliness that men will show to bi women, the unvarnished ugliness that we are supposed to empathize with, that we are supposed to share. To be straight is to have plausible deniability, to be bi is to be greeted with the full scope of a partner’s abuses, and to have that knowledge compound and complicate your own experience as a victim**.
Armed with this revelation that my bisexuality — that biphobia — might have shaped my experience of abuse, I could also see how it might have shaped, might have stalled, my recovery from abuse. There was a nameless shame hovering around what had happened to me, a sense that I had invited it, that I had asked for it, that boundary violations weren't really violations if I hadn’t explicitly said no. I could see how biphobia had informed some of that shame, and how it had made it harder to seek help for abuse recovery, how it had made it harder to open up about the specific nuances of my own abuse trauma.
Which brings me to the second stat that stuck with me: the fact that bi women are disproportionately at risk of mood and anxiety disorders, suicidality, and substance abuse. If I could see how being bi had made my abuse both more likely and more complex, I could see how that abuse would have compromised my mental health and put me at great risk of turning to maladaptive coping mechanisms. New pathways began to form in my brain, a new understanding of what biphobia might be and how it might be harming bisexuals — even bisexuals who are ostensibly protected by their participation in heterosexuality, who are living straight lives with straight partners. I could see now that however much I may have seen myself as functionally the same as straight women with male partners, the men I dated did not see me as equivalent to my straight peers. From the outside, our experiences may have looked identical, but from within, my straight relationships looked nothing like those of actual, factual heterosexual women.
Not everyone gets this kind of epiphany, though. Most people — most bisexuals — are stuck in this numbed and neutered mindspace, where we are only able to perceive our bi experience in a muted color palette, in greyscale hues. We can only perceive bisexuality as a halfway point between straight and gay, a ping ponging between two worlds, and not as an entirely different way of being, an entirely different life experience. We cannot see, cannot understand, the biphobic forces that are weighing us down, cannot feel our own pain even as our wounds are bleeding us dry***.
This is, for me, the true tragedy of biphobia: not simply that we are struggling, but that we cannot see our own struggle for what it is, cannot understand it beyond “no one thinks I’m really bi” or “everyone thinks I’m a slut.” We may feel this ghostly discomfort in our chest, but we cannot put a name to it — and until we truly can, I fear that we will never actually break free from the forces of biphobia.
After all, you cannot unite to rally against a force which none of you can even comprehend.
* Is this very idea itself a product of biphobia? Yes and we’ll get to that in a second.
** I feel like this is very much the dynamic at play with Katie Hill — a bi abuse victim whose threesomes with her ex and a staffer thrust her into the position of abuser as well — and trust that I will write about that in detail at a future date.
*** We also cannot perceive the full landscape of possibilities for our own happiness and pleasure, the way I could not conceive of myself as a woman who enjoyed sex with men but only wanted romance with women for many, many years. But this is also fodder for a future installment of this newsletter.