Another day, another person tweeting some bullshit about how interesting it is that bi people just keep ending up in hetero relationships. Must we do this again?
There are so many reasons why I simply do not care to engage with this line of Just Asking Questions, most notably that it seems pretty clear that even within the supposed safety of a hetero appearing relationship, bi people are not necessarily protected: bi women are, after all, uniquely at risk of intimate partner violence, and it is our male partners who are the most likely to be our abusers. And anyone who thinks that an openly bi man is just waltzing through relationships with women with no abuse or stress or pushback is… not familiar with the stigma against male bisexuality.
But let’s set my distaste for this entire conversation aside for the moment and cover a few basics. If we trust Gallup’s estimates on LGBTQ identification (and there’s no reason not to), only 2.4% of American adults identify as gay or lesbian and 0.1% identify as ace, which means that roughly 97.5% of the population is open to the possibility of cross gender relationships (and possibly slightly more since not all aces are aromantic, etc and so forth). In contrast, only about 7% of the population is open to same gender relationships.
Do you see the dilemma here?
What’s more interesting to me is that at least some data has found that that bi people are actually more likely to wind up with same gender partners than you might expect just given the general breakdown of the population — according to this Pew data from 2015, 9% of bisexuals have same gender partners while 84% have other gender partners.
9 > 7.
84 < 97.5.
Mathematically, it seems like bisexuals actually do want to be in same gender relationships. We’re just more likely to find cross gender partners because it is simply more easy to find them.
But I think what makes me exhausted here is that while it is absolutely true that in countries where same gender relationships and marriage are stigmatized or even illegal, people with cross gender partners are more likely to get access to safety, stability, and resources (as a bi person with a second citizenship in a country that doesn’t recognize same gender marriage, I think about this a lot!), that doesn't mean that bi people are somehow at fault for that disparity, or that we’re “benefiting” from it. It actually greatly depresses me to think about the fact that if I ever find a girlfriend, I could not extend my second citizenship to her even if I wanted to, even if I believed in marriage. The fact that I could potentially do that with a male partner is, quite honestly, cold comfort — I’m not about to explicitly try to date and/or marry a man just to make sure that my partner could get my second citizenship if they absolutely needed to!
What it boils down to, really, is that the state privileges certain types of relationships is a problem. Bisexuals may, it’s true, benefit from that at times, but we suffer from it at others. Most importantly, bisexuals did not create this situation, nor do we seek to perpetuate it. The problem isn’t who we do or don’t partner with, the problem is that the state has a voice in our relationships at all. Like, really, I do not understand why this is so hard for people to understand.
I mean, unless you just really hate bisexuals.
I hear this mostly from lesbians and...do they realize how so few of them exist? And then factor in the ones who only want to exclusively be with other lesbians, and that number is even smaller. It's frustrating.