If you had told me a few years ago that I was going to reach a point where I was branding myself as a Professional Bisexual™️, where I was actively pitching projects big and small about bisexuality, where I was writing daily essays about bi issues, I would not have believed you. At the time, I was deeply convinced that referencing bisexuality in any extensive way was the height of cringe, absolutely corny, utterly embarrassing.
Part of this was due to internalized biphobia, no doubt. But another part of it was a reaction to the fact that, well, conversations around biphobia seemed so boring, so small, perpetually stuck at this 101 level that grounded all understandings of biphobia in an individual, this makes me feel bad, level. Going into a classroom to do some good old fashioned bisexual myth busting? Dear god, no thank you: I can think of few things that would bore me more than endlessly lecturing college students on how, no, we’re not necessarily poly or swingers or into threesomes or untrustworthy or slutty or vectors of disease or — you get the idea.
So then: what changed? How did bisexuality become a part of my — ugh — branding; how did it become the topic I now constantly want to talk about at all hours of the day? How did bisexuality, and biphobia as well, become my passion?
Well, it was a couple of things. Initially, my renewed interest in talking about bisexuality came from a personal need. Coming out as homoromantic forced me to consider the depths of my internalized biphobia, and how believing that my bisexuality was bad and tainted me had prevented me from pursuing the kinds of romantic relationships I actually wanted to be in (i.e. relationships with women). Recognizing the ways that biphobia had harmed me, had prevented me from pursuing my own happiness, shifted the way I thought about biphobia. Maybe it wasn’t just some cringe discussion about bisexuals’ hurt fee-fees. Maybe this biphobia thing actually was having a significant impact on the bi community.
Once I allowed myself to accept that biphobia might actually be a serious concern — once I actually started reading the stats, and learning the shocking facts about the myriad ways bisexuals are suffering — another possibility came to mind. What if biphobia is not just an individual offense, something that makes you or me or that other bisexual over there feel bad? What if biphobia is, in fact, a structural oppression, something meted out institutionally, what if it is baked in to the very structure of society?
That question was what really grabbed my interest. Considering biphobia as something larger than just my own hurt feelings, something fundamentally wrong with society — that felt like a question worth devoting time to. That felt like a question worth turning into a brand.
I want to pause here for just a second to toss out a few definitions. Specifically, I want to make a distinction between a prejudice and a structural oppression. A prejudice is simply a (usually negative) belief about a group or a type of person. A structural oppression is a system that takes that prejudice and builds social structures that help to uphold and reinforce it. In the case of anti-Blackness, the prejudice is the belief that Black people are inherently inferior; the structural oppression is the collection of systems both past and present — chattel slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow, redlining, racial profiling, and the various and sundry echoes of all of these that exist well into the present day — that strengthen and reinforce that belief throughout society.
So what, exactly, might it mean for bisexuality to be a structural oppression?
It’s not hard to identify the central prejudice that we call biphobia. At its core, it’s a belief that bisexuality does not exist or is, at best, a manifestation of hypersexuality. It’s this belief that’s inspired all the “myth busting” you’ve undoubtedly heard over the years: this notion that bi people can’t be trusted, that we’re tainted and untouchable, that we require constant sexual stimulation — all of that stems from this notion of bisexuality as either fake or just a sign of a rampant, indiscriminate libido and not an inborn sexual identity, equivalent to hetero or homosexuality.
And pushing back on that belief alone — that place where we keep getting stuck when we talk about how, no, we’re not all slutty (though some of us are and that is valid), no, we’re not all poly (though some of us are and that is valid), no, we don’t all love threesomes (though some of us do and that is valid), and so on and so forth — that’s not a conversation about structural oppression. That’s just responding to prejudice wielded at the individual level by individual biphobes towards individual bisexuals. The reason that discussion has always felt a bit small to me is because, well, it is.
Structural biphobia may be built on this belief that bisexuality isn’t real, but it goes beyond that simple assertion to create something much, much bigger. Something… systemic. I owe a lot of what I’m going to say next to the legal scholar Kenji Yoshino, and specifically his January 2000 Stanford Law Review paper “The epistemic contract of bisexual erasure,” which really helped me organize my thoughts about this topic in a legible way. (I highly recommend reading the paper; yes, it’s an academic — and legal! — paper, but it’s incredibly readable and just so incredibly good.)
Although many of us associate the phrase “bisexual erasure” with, well, endless conversations about how it’s biphobic to forget that Anna Paquin is bi just because she has a husband, that is not what Yoshino means when he wields the phrase or talks about the “epistemic contract” behind it. This “bisexual erasure” isn’t about celebrity bisexuality; it isn’t about individuals, themselves, being seen or not seen as bisexual at all. Instead, Yoshino is concerned with the erasure — and visibility — of bisexuality as a concept, a possibility, as something we, as a society, routinely leave out of our conversations about the breadth of human sexuality and experience.
Early on in his paper, Yoshino offers a collection of stats about how often bisexuality is mentioned in American paper, the results are pretty grim. Over and over again — in the media, in academic research, in our body of laws — bisexuals are either underrepresented or utterly erased, with human sexuality persistently reduced to a hetero/homo (or, in more modern parlance, straight/queer) binary with no in between, even as the numbers routinely show that there are more bisexuals than there are gays and lesbians. Although Yoshino’s paper was written over twenty years ago, the effect he documented remains today: over and over again, bisexuality is simply not mentioned, not considered, not factored in.*
This, for me, is a good starting point towards understanding biphobia as something structural, something systemic, rather than a bunch of mean myths and opinions that hurt my and other bisexuals’ feelings. If the prejudice is that bisexuality does not exist, then the structural oppression is the persistent erasure of bisexuality, not merely in terms of individual bisexuals’ identities, but the very concept of bisexuality being wholly absent in law, medicine, scientific research, and more.
Once you accept this framework for structural biphobia, you start seeing examples of it everywhere. I’ve mentioned bisexual asylum seekers before, and I’ll mention it again now because they’re a good example: when bisexuality is not seen as a valid identity, and biphobia not seen as a standalone prejudice, then bisexuals are less likely to be seen as worthy of asylum, presumed to be able to secure safety by simply remaining in hetero relationships (on the flip side, bisexuals who wind up securing asylum by identifying as gay or lesbian find themselves locked out of hetero relationships in the country that has granted them asylum lest they be accused of having lied to get asylum).
But asylum seekers are hardly the only example here. Many of the stats I cite about bisexual well being are fairly new, this is not because bi well-being has only taken a turn for the worse in recent years. It’s because it’s only been in recent years that researchers even thought to break bisexuals out as a discrete, unique group rather than lumping us in with gays and lesbians or categorizing us based on the gender of our current partners (How were single bisexuals categorized in those studies? I have absolutely no clue.). This, too, was a form of systemic erasure: no one could see that bisexuals were suffering because no one thought to look; when researchers actually opted to observe bisexuals as a distinct group, the results were… pretty alarming. (Is the turn towards including bisexuals in research a sign that systemic biphobia is waning? One hopes, but I remain skeptical.)
And then, of course, there are the ways this research — much of which lumps bisexuals in with lesbians and gays, or does not consider our existence — is used to shape the healthcare, the therapy, the interventions that are offered to bisexuals. Earlier this year, I was asked to write an article on sexual orientation OCD (SO-OCD) — an OCD subset in which someone is obsessed with the idea that their sexual orientation is going to switch against their will, or that they’ve been lying about their sexuality without even knowing it. In the course of reporting that piece, it occurred me that a) I had suffered from SO-OCD, b) I had been screened for SO-OCD, and yet c) no one had identified me as suffering from SO-OCD, and I had never been properly treated for it, because the entire diagnostic was intended to screen for SO-OCD as it manifested in straight people. Reading through the SO-OCD literature, it becomes clear that no one has considered the possibility of bisexuals suffering from this OCD subset, nor have they given thought to the ways that treating a bisexual’s SO-OCD might require different treatments, a different mindset, than treating SO-OCD as it manifests in monosexuals**.
And it’s not just SO-OCD. Therapy, as a whole, does not give a lot of consideration to bisexuals; even queer friendly (and queer) therapists don’t always understand the specific needs and struggles of their bisexual clients. Doctors, too, are rarely trained to understand bisexuality as a core part of their patients’ identities — the kind of bi affirming care discussed in USA Today this week is utterly foreign to most medical professionals (and, I would assume, most bi patients as well).
Zoom out further and you start to see how this systemic erasure of bisexuality reduces our access to community resources, to community itself; how the absence of any discussion of who we are as a basic concept renders us isolated, alienated, invisible even to ourselves. You start to see the workings of the mechanisms that explain so many of these ill effects — the poor health both mental and physical, the frequency of intimate partner violence, the elevated risk of suicidality, the high rates of poverty.
This is the bisexual discussion that I find interesting, the one that frames biphobia as something utterly beyond the question of whether or not my feelings are hurt because you do or don’t see me as bi, the one that doesn’t force me to talk to you about who does, or doesn’t, like threesomes. This is the discussion that inspired me to launch this newsletter, that led me to identify as a Professional Bisexual™️, that made me want to talk endlessly about bi identity even as I don’t really think of bisexuals as some cohesive identity group or culture all on our own.
Well, this discussion and the challenge of how to combat it, of course. That one, however, is something I am still working out.
* I feel like I should mention here that the majority opinion in the SCOTUS case Obergefell v. Hodges — you know, the one that struck down DOMA and made marriage equality the law of the land — never once mentions bisexuals, speaking instead of “gay and lesbian Americans.” The Equality Act — an as yet unpassed non-discrimination act — does mention bisexuals, though, at one point defining sexual orientation as “homosexuality, heterosexuality, or bisexuality” (which, yes, does erase asexuals, who also frequently get forgotten and invalidated).
** I don’t want to completely derail this essay with an entire discussion of SO-OCD, so the Cliff Notes version of what I’m talking about is this: when a monosexual person (be they straight, gay, or lesbian) gets SO-OCD, it comes in the form of a fear of a gained or swapped attraction — i.e. a straight man being terrified that he is secretly gay or bi. A core way of addressing this is by exposing the patient to stimuli representing the feared identity — in this example, making straight men do gay stuff until they realize that no, they’re not actually gay (I’m oversimplifying but that’s the gist). But with bisexuals, the fear isn’t going to be a gained attraction, but instead a fear of a lost attraction. I, for instance, was terrified that I was actually straight. But exposing me to heterosexual content wasn’t going to cure me of that fear; I was surrounded by heterosexual content all the time (that’s why I was worried I was straight). The core fear that needed to be addressed was my sense that I was fraudulent; not every therapist (even OCD specialists!) understands that — and again, that’s assuming they even correctly identify SO-OCD in their bisexual patients. (The screening question I was asked was, “Do you have homosexual thoughts?” which… I mean, yeah. Yes I have homosexual thoughts.)