There’s an interesting trend I’ve been noticing lately in stories about LGBTQ people, one that particularly jumped out to me while reading a recent New York Times piece about the state of queer youth. People will, far more often than they used to, acknowledge the existence of bisexual people. They will even — as this Times piece does — remind the reader that bisexuals are the majority of LGBTQ people (from the Times piece: “One in five adults in Gen Z (those roughly 18 to 26) identify as L.G.B.T.Q., according to Gallup polling, compared with 7 percent of adults in the United States overall. The majority of them identify as bisexual.”). From there, though, they will just… not mention bisexuals ever again.
Indeed, check out this absolutely bizarre paragraph from midway through the piece:
Support for transgender rights lags that for gay rights, and it’s easier to be a young gay person than a young trans person, teenagers said. “It’s a lot easier to go and say, ‘I’m attracted to the same gender,’” said Athena Stiles, a new Topeka High graduate who is bisexual. “A lot easier.”
Even as the writers are quoting a bisexual person, they are still flattening the landscape into “gay or transgender.” The notion that, say, bisexual people might have our own issues and fights that aren’t automatically covered by “gay or transgender” does not seem to occur to the writers; we are, presumably, assumed to simply be half gay (and, potentially, trans, though the phrasing here seems to be doing that thing where “transgender” is itself positioned as a sexuality. Oof.).
I don’t think anyone means any harm when they do this — I don’t even know that I would specifically call it biphobic, as it doesn’t feel hostile, per se — but it still is just… bizarre. You recognize that the bulk of LGBTQ people fall into one bucket, and yet it… never… occurs to you to interrogate whether we might have our own problems to contend with? Honestly given the amount of bi-specific research and writing, it feels not merely ignorant but actively lazy to keep doing this, to refuse to flag bisexuality as a unique experience not necessarily covered by “gay or transgender.”
Especially since — I mean a lot of writing on queer youth (including this piece) is relatively rosy about what it is like to be growing up queer now; young people have more accepting schools and media landscapes than I did in the 1990s, even with the aggressive right wing backlash that has been mounting. And it could lead you to believe that we’ve just solved biphobia, that the bi kids are all happily waving their tricolor flags with no problems in sight. But personally I suspect it is probably more complicated than that.
It’s just… if no one ever asks — if no one ever considers the possibility that bi kids might be having different experiences from their monosexual queer peers, well… no one’s going to find out the answer, are they.