The bisexuality of it all.

Why do we struggle to see biphobia as a real oppression?

Over the weekend, while I was spending too much time on Twitter (what do you want, it was like 9 degrees Fahrenheit outside!), I stumbled on to a bit of back and forth between bi educators and activists about bi women’s elevated risk of intimate partner violence (IPV). One educator — responding to, ugh, some TikToks from lesbians about how bi women are terrible — had launched into a thread about how disproportionately victimized bi women are, and what this all means.

In response, there were a few comments arguing that while, yes, the stats do show that bi women experience higher rates of abuse, it’s not because bi women are bi, but rather because trans women and women of color — two groups who experience elevated rates of violence — are more likely to be bisexual. Or, in other words, it’s not being bi that puts women at elevated risk of IPV, but rather that women at elevated risk of IPV are more likely to be bi.

Someone else chimed in to point out that research that looks exclusively at trans populations or POC populations has shown that within these communities, bi members are more at risk of violence than their monosexual peers, but I don’t really want to go too far down that rabbit hole, or run the numbers to figure out if the rates of bi WOC/trans women are enough to explain the disparity in rates of abuse between bi women, straight women, and lesbians, because I think that’s kind of a distraction. Hopefully, after all the weeks I’ve sunk into this newsletter, you are aware that biphobia does, indeed, exist and negatively affect the lives of bisexuals.

What I do want to touch on, however, is what is being communicated when someone says that it’s not bisexuality, but rather the disproportionate number of trans women and WOC within the community that leads bi women to experience elevated rates of abuse and assault. Because what I hear when someone says that is that white cis bi women need not view themselves as uniquely at risk of assault or abuse, that white cis bi women are functionally indistinguishable from other white cis women in this regard, because bisexuality itself does not lead to an elevated risk of abuse. And as a white cis bi woman who is a survivor of abuse and assault, I have to say I kinda feel weird about that.

Would I say that I was specifically targeted for abuse because I was bi? I mean, I doubt that when my abuser saw my profile on SparkMatch*, he started twirling his mustache** and gleefully celebrating that he’d found a new bi girl to target. I don’t think his abuse of me was quite that premeditated, and I don’t think he spared the straight women he dated from manipulation and deceit (indeed, I know he did not). But decades later, I can see fairly clearly how my bisexuality enabled additional avenues of abuse. More to the point, I can see the ways that my bisexuality made me feel culpable for my own abuse, further trapping me and making it harder for me to see the abuse as, well, abuse.

And it is also not lost on me that there is one Congresswoman who was subjected to the public humiliation of having her naked photos leaked and her sex life picked apart in the media and she, too, is a white cis bi woman. I’ve written before about Katie Hill, and I think it is bizarre to act like her bisexuality is irrelevant to her experience of both abuse and subsequent public humiliation (itself a continuation of the abusive dynamic). It is bizarre to act as though Katie Hill would have had the same experience if she were Straightie Hill***; the same way it is bizarre to act as though Amber Heard’s bisexuality was not a factor in her abuse, or Evan Rachel Wood’s, or Angelina Jolie’s — the list goes on and on.

And you know, none of this is to say that white cis bi women have the same experience of abuse and assault as our trans women and WOC peers — I feel like everyone loves to toss around the word “intersectionality” but no one ever seems to remember that what it means is exactly this, that to be Black and bi and cis and female is a different experience from being white and bi and cis and female; that to be Black and bi and trans and female is a different experience from being Black and bi and cis and female. That these various interlocking identities lead to different experiences of oppression does not mean that each aspect does not, itself, contribute to a unique experience of oppression. It does not mean that bisexuality, on its own, is not a factor that contributes to whether someone experiences abuse at the hands of a partner, or how that partner attempts to justify abuse as deserved.

(I feel like I should note here, too, that to say that these groups experience elevated rates of abuse is not to say that every bi woman or WOC or trans woman or trans bi WOC is, herself, a survivor or victim of abuse; plenty of women are never raped or abused regardless of their backgrounds and I feel like that’s kind of important to remember!)

But I get tired of this fight, because it feels like people just saying to themselves that if they recognize that biphobia is real, that bisexuality is an oppressed identity, that a bunch of cis white girls with boyfriends are going to come and suck all the oxygen out of the room and leave no space for anyone else. That’s the fear, right? But that fear itself is biphobic; because to acknowledge that white cis bi women are victimized by virtue of our bisexuality is not to say that we are the most in need of services****, it is simply to say that, uh, people should stop being biphobic. Which seems to be the one thing that folks are just unwilling to do.

* The precursor to OkCupid, this was a million years ago, I am old

** He did not have a mustache

*** Sorry. Sort of.

**** A triage system can still exist, anyway