As a general rule, I consider myself a person who approaches scientific findings with a healthy dose of skepticism. Not because I don’t trust science or scientists (this is not about to take a hard right turn into anti-vaxxism, don’t worry); but because, as the daughter of not one but two scientists, I’m very very aware of how, well, human scientists are. How they fuck up, how they misread the data, how the very basis of the scientific process tells us that we can’t be certain of anything until it’s been replicated again and again and again.
And my skepticism gets even more intense when it comes to social sciences, where — I mean, come on, we all can see how bias would inherently be a problem here, right? There are so many studies about sex and dating and relationships where it’s just obvious that the researchers are leading with their priors, where they can’t even see how their baked in beliefs about gender and sexual identity are skewing their findings and analysis.
I mean, if you want to talk about how bias shapes research: it was only very recently that anyone started breaking out bisexuals as a demographic group rather than lumping us in with LGBT folks broadly, or categorizing us based on the gender of our current partner. It was only very recently that researchers started considering that bisexuals might be, not gay/lesbian lite, or some mercurial being whose entire status fluctuates depending on the gender of their partner, but a discrete and unique group, one with its own needs and experiences, one worthy of its own analysis.
And so it’s interesting, as someone who approaches all the papers and findings with this open minded but questioning mindset, to find that so much of the research I read about bisexuals just resonates so intensely with me. It doesn’t always directly reflect my life — as someone who’s never lived in poverty, for instance, I can’t relate to research that shows that bisexuals are at an elevated risk of poverty. But it often maps out a world that feels correct to me, that offers me a framework that helps me understand myself, that makes me feel less alone.
I was thinking of this recently because someone sent me a copy of a 2017 paper from the Journal of Bisexuality (yes, there’s a journal of bisexuality and yes I should read it regularly) titled Bisexual Women’s Experiences with Binegativity in Romantic Relationships. The paper is imperfect — it studies an incredibly small group of bi women — and I didn’t relate to all of it (as per usual, it always seemed like everyone else had higher self esteem and better boundaries than I have ever had). But there was one line in particular — the line that had driven this delightful and generous person to share the article with me in the first place — that really stuck out.
Hoang et al. (2011) conducted the first empirical study of the topic and found that high levels of internalized biphobia were associated with high levels of behaviors reflective of and conforming to stereotypes.
Friends, it’s like looking into a mirror. I’ll need to actually look up the original study to fully make sense of it, but that very idea — the more I hate myself for being bi, the more I act like the exact sort of bi girl I claim to hate — just explains so much of my adult life, so much of my twenties and thirties. It feels akin to the way my shame about being “too slutty” and fears that I had ruined any chance of a “normal” relationship for myself just led me to be even more slutty. The more we hate ourselves, the less incentive we have to act in ways that might lessen the hate. The data backs this (in retrospect, obvious) idea up.
And look as I said above, I think research needs to be taken with a grain of salt, with an assumption of bias. Even research that’s done by bi people about bi people is going to be imperfect, and no one study is going to reveal the entire truth about what it is to be bi. But I have to say that — from both a personal and political perspective — I’m really excited by the fact that researchers have actually started considering bisexuality to be a topic worth studying over the past few years, have started considering bisexual people as a demographic worth breaking out. The more we, as a population, are given attention, the more we can advocate for our communities, for the resources that we deserve and are being denied. And, on a personal level, the more we can see ourselves and realize that actually, we aren’t alone in our struggles.