We are (almost) halfway through Pride Month, and I have been writing this newsletter — which I started on a whim on Bisexual Visibility Day 2022 — for about eight and a half months, and somehow I have 1300 subscribers, so it feels like a good time to give you all a brief recap of my core principles when it it comes to this little thing we call bisexuality.
I believe that:
Bisexuality is a socially created category. There are no bisexual genes, there is no universal bisexual signifier, there isn’t even anything that can reasonably be considered “bi culture.” To the extent that “bisexuals” — which I’m using to mean all multigender attracted people, including pansexuals and omnisexuals and people who don’t like labels and some queers and so on and so forth — are a cohesive category at all, it’s simply because a society that finds itself befuddled by the concept of multigender attraction tossed all of us into one bucket.
Your experience of bisexuality is unique to you, shaped not just by your own gender, but by the specifics of your own attractions. A cis bi man has a different experience of bisexuality than a trans bi man; two cis bi women who are mostly attracted to men can still have different experiences if one of them is attracted to masc women and non-binary people and the other is only attracted to femmes. To talk about “bisexuality” as some unified experience is absolutely bizarre, because the only thing that truly binds us all together is living under a system of…
Biphobia, which is very real, though not in the ways that are most commonly discussed. One need only look at recent research on bi well being — research that repeatedly shows that bisexual people are at greater risk of poverty, poor health, sexual abuse, and even suicide than many of our peers — to recognize that there’s an oppressive force that’s holding many bisexuals back, and it’s easiest to just call it “biphobia.” The problem here, though, is that when we talk about “biphobia,” it is often heard as “people being mean to individual bisexuals,” which while certainly painful is more a symptom of what I am talking about when I talk about biphobia. Which is to say, I believe that
Biphobia is a systemic oppression, not an individual level microaggression. Here is where I recommend that you read Kenji Yoshino’s amazing (and surprisingly readable) legal paper “The Epistemic Contract of Bisexual Erasure,” which really cracked my brain open when it came to thinking about biphobia as a systemic oppression. Although many of us frequently talk about bi erasure as an individual level offense — people forget that, say, Anna Paquin is bi and that is erasure — what Yoshino is talking about when he talks about bi erasure is something all together different. To Yoshino, bisexual erasure is a categorical erasure: the refusal of society to even acknowledge the existence of bisexuality as an option; defaulting to a gay/straight binary even as bisexuals vastly outnumber gays.
Thinking about bi erasure this way really reframed everything for me. I realized, for instance, that my own mental healthcare had been compromised by the fact that bisexuality is rarely factored in mental health frameworks. My OCD screener, for instance, failed to properly screen me for sexual orientation OCD because the screener was not designed to account for bisexual people — and it is undeniable that that is just one small example of a larger systemic problem of bisexual people not being considered as a unique group subject to unique pressures, rather than simply people halfway between straight and gay.
It is notable here, too, that it was only very recently that any researchers thought to break out bisexuals as a unique category separate from gays and lesbians — only very recently that the bisexual poverty rate or experience of abuse or mental and physical health was considered to be something distinct from the general “LGBTQ” experience. This, too, is a form of large scale erasure: if you are not explicitly looking to see whether, for instance, bisexuals are more prone to suicide than “LGBTQ” people as a whole then you cannot accurately assess the impact of biphobia. This, to me, is the most dangerous form of erasure — particularly since, as noted above, when researchers did start breaking bisexuals out as a separate group, they repeatedly found that, rather than being halfway between gays and straights, bisexuals often fare the worst of everyone.
Everything else is a distraction. Do bisexuals cheat more? Are we less likely to be monogamous? Can we truly be satisfied if we’re not constantly chowing down on a smorgasbord of genitalia? Truly, I could not care less. While these are the discussions that come up most frequently when bisexuality is proffered as a topic for discussion, they’re not actually relevant or worth discussing. Bisexuals contain multitudes, bisexuals are many things. What matters far more than our individual sex lives and choices is that we live in a society that has deemed multigender attraction to be an aberration, and that that society level belief has left people with multigender attractions — who, again, have a variety of experiences and identities and desires! — isolated, alienated, and more prone to bad ends.
That’s what I care about. That’s what I believe.
My sincere response: YES.
My flip response because I can't help it: excuse me but bi culture is real, it's called having some angst and not being able to sit properly in chairs. :P :P :P
I do think there's a of culture that's formed around the sort of bi person who's an activist within groups that meet online and in person. Dating back to the "soc.bi" grouping on usenet you'd see nerdy tech people, many of them polyamorous, plenty of science fiction fans, DIY types, mostly liberal.
I'm not sure if that's "bi culture" but there's *a* culture to that kind of group. It's a community where people do activism together, and they do start to build a shared shorthand for common topics they run into. They go to events. They march. They hold meetings in LGBT centers for newly minted bi people. Or coffee shops. Or diners.
It's not all bi people, but it is a group or groups with a history and roots.