Now that I have been a Professional Bisexual™️ for quite some time, my friends routinely send me anything bisexuality related that happens to cross their paths. The most recent thing sent to me? This Astral Codex Ten essay that attempts to make sense of the higher rates of long COVID among bisexuals.
Buckle up, kids, cause we’re going somewhere weird.
To begin with: if you, like me, are someone who thinks about bisexuality fairly regularly; someone who has read numerous research studies on the general wellbeing of bisexuals, then the fact that bisexuals get long COVID at higher rates than our peers is not a particularly surprising thing to learn. Bisexuals experience many health concerns at higher rates than our monosexual peers, including — perhaps most surprisingly of all! — some forms of cancer. The general consensus when it comes to bisexual health is that there are a cluster of social factors that contribute to our general ill health, including higher rates of stress and poverty, a higher likelihood of social isolation, and a higher level of distrust of the (often biphobic) medical system, which can lead to avoidance of critical medical care.
Long COVID is still very far from being well understood, and the exact causes and dynamics of long COVID are still being sussed out by researchers. But if you recognize — as seems fairly apparent — that people with preexisting conditions are at a higher likelihood of developing long COVID, and that bisexuals are more likely to have poor health due to a complex cocktail of reasons, then the fact that bisexuals are a higher risk of long COVID is so self-evident as to be utterly unremarkable.
But to piece that all together you have to actually know something about the stats on bisexuality and health.
The author of Astral Codex Ten — a psychiatrist named Scott Alexander who used to write the blog Slate Star Codex — does not seem to have much knowledge about the stats on bisexuality and health. Nor does River Page, whose February piece on bisexuals and long COVID inspired today’s Astral Codex Ten piece. And so the place that these two men ultimately end up is… bad. It’s really bad.
Rather than pausing for a moment to investigate whether this long COVID data is an outlier or if, perhaps, bisexuals are at a higher risk of a wide of illnesses both physical and mental (which, again, we are), both of these men instead choose to come up with ad hoc explanations based on what they know (“know”) about bisexuality and long COVID. Alexander begins his journey by attempting to replicate the CDC’s findings through a (highly unscientific seeming) survey of his own readership; when he does manage to find that even among his own readers, bisexuals are reporting higher rates of long COVID, he then attempts to figure out why. Which is what leads us to:
Bisexuals and heterosexuals seem much more likely to be psychologically different than immunologically different, so I think this is a signal that a substantial percent of long COVID is psychosomatic.
I —
You know that line about how when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail? I guess you could say that when you are a psychiatrist, or at least a certain psychiatrist, a whole lot of things just look like mental illness. It is a bizarre leap that is being made here, the idea that long COVID must be psychosomatic because there’s a higher likelihood of bisexuals being crazier than straights than bisexuals being more immunocompromised than straights. Like, just for starters, this extreme oversimplification ignores that bisexuals might have different social conditions than monosexuals, social conditions that might affect not just our mental but our physical health.
I mean, again, if you actually look at the expansive research on bisexual health outcomes, it becomes harder to just hand wave everything away with a “well it’s probably psychosomatic because the bisexuals are just crazy.” Are bisexuals really psychosomaticing ourselves into having high blood pressure? Diabetes? Cancer? At some point you have to accept that maybe it’s not about “psychological differences” (i.e. them crazy bisexuals) or some inherent genetic difference between the bisexuals and the normals, and consider the possibility that, yeah, the poverty and stress associated with being bi might just make this group more predisposed to being sick.
And yet somehow the Astral Codex Ten piece is less hateful than the one that inspired it, which — spoiler alert — also comes to a “bisexuals prove that long COVID is fake and made up by the crazies” conclusion and contains this horrendous paragraph:
Meanwhile, gays and lesbians reported experiencing long Covid at similar levels as straight people. Homophobia certainly does not affect bisexuals any more than gays or lesbians, especially since many bisexuals participate fully in heterosexual life. As a cohort, bisexuals' chief complaint is that they suffer "bi erasure." According to the self-appointed LGBT spokespeople over at GLAAD, examples of bi erasure include saying, "It’s a phase," and "Assuming that a bisexual person is heterosexual if with a different-sex partner or homosexual if with a same-sex person." The first is not unique to bisexuals. Most adult gays and lesbians alive today were probably told it was "just a phase" at some point in their early years. The solution to the second "problem" requires assuming every person you meet is a bisexual until they explicitly tell you otherwise, a deranged and narcissistic request which, in practice, would ironically lead to the same "erasure" bisexual activists claim is so oppressive, for both heterosexuals and homosexuals alike. This barely meets the level of a microaggression. There are no systemic social issues within this community which might lead to a higher incidence of long Covid. There has to be some other reason.
(Emphasis mine.)
The confidence with which this is uttered, the assumption that bisexuals must be full of shit, that there cannot be any systemic social issues experienced by bisexuals — despite, again, plenty of evidence to the contrary — it just… it makes me so tired. These men pride themselves on being rational, on being smart, and yet they cannot be bothered to even begin to look at data that might help to explain why bisexuals have different health outcomes than monosexuals. They can only operate on the basis of what they “know” about bisexuals, extrapolating from assumptions and half-truths and stereotypes and dismissing the actual truth that, you know, marginalized people tend to be sicker for a variety of complex reasons.
And what really gets to me is that these essays, they’re not outliers. This is actually the default way that people operate when it comes to talking about bisexuals: refuse to look at the data, assume the true sounding things rattling around your head (like “bisexuals are basically straight”) are rock solid statements of fact, make up a Just So story about how bisexuals came to be sick. And then, of course, never question your conclusion ever.
I mean, why would they? Society rewards them for this nonsense.
Anyway I made the mistake of looking at the comments on the Astral Codex Ten piece and they are… very bad, very full of people convinced that bisexuals are lying and that it’s a “social contagion” and people who pretend to be bi also pretend to have long COVID and then, I mean, there’s this banger right up at the top:
Here's a potential alternate interpretation of the data that occurred to me: Perhaps bisexual people are more likely to have more sex, which means they're more likely to contract STD's, which means that on average they are immunologically different to some degree and might legitimately get different physiological consequences from COVID. I don't actually believe this - I think your theory is at least as likely - but I'd be very interested in any analysis that tries to look into this.
I think I might need to go back to bed, friends.
Hooooly shit. Can someone figure out a way to harness these guys’ bluster as a form of renewable energy? We might get carbon emissions to zero in a matter of weeks
lux, is it possible that you have linked the wrong webpage to the bi cancer stats line? it’s bc it’s taking me to the long covid cdc page! also, that paragraph from river page is absolutely infuriating but sadly truly seems to be what most monosexuals believe. it’s so exhausting.