The invisibility of bisexual invisibility

When your very crisis of not being seen cannot be seen

Imagine, for a moment, a group of people who are in crisis. No matter the metric, this group is not doing well: when it comes to mental health, they’re at elevated risk of mood disorders, anxiety disorders, and suicidality, with a tendency to develop unhealthy relationships with alcohol and drugs. Their physical health is also poor: they’re more likely to experience a wide range of health conditions, including high blood pressure, asthma, and cancer. For the women in this group, relationship abuse, rape, and stalking are a frequent threat. And, notably, they experience a shockingly high rate of poverty — nearly double or even triple that of the national average.

Would it shock you to learn that the group I’m describing is bisexuals*? Because it certainly surprised me. I spent most of my life assuming that as a bi person — and specifically a cis bi woman — that I was one of the most privileged members of the LGBTQ community, that I was, in a way, more of an ally than an actually vulnerable member of the community, someone with issues in need of visibility and support. Sure, it sucked to have to deal with the headache of not being seen as bi, not feeling welcome in queer spaces, constantly feeling stressed out by the sense that I was fraudulent. And I didn’t love ping ponging back and forth between being a fetishized sex object and an undesirable monster, depending on who was assessing me. But none of that felt like an actual problem. As a bisexual, I didn’t feel like I was subjected to real discrimination, or any kind of structural oppression.

And yet, the data says otherwise.

I should pause here to note something that will hopefully be obvious to my readers: the fact that bi people as a group, are living with mental illness, struggling with their substance use, experiencing poverty, and more likely to experience health conditions like asthma and cancer does not mean that that is a picture of every single bi person out there. I’m a bi woman, and yet I’m financially comfortable and physically in good health (although I do have OCD and am a survivor of relationship and sex abuse). Yet these elevated rates — the fact that when you break bisexuals out as a separate group from the LGBTQ umbrella, you find that across the board, bisexuals are faring far worse than straight people, gays, and lesbians — clearly point to something systemic, something that is affecting all bisexuals in some capacity; even those of us who are privileged enough to avoid the worst of the harm.

But what, exactly, is it? And why do we never seem to see it, even when it’s in front of our faces? Why is it that so many of us are surprised to learn a basic fact that should be patently obvious: that we are drowning, and there is no one coming to rescue us.

Because the thing is, the moment I became aware of this horrific disparity in bisexual wellbeing, I started talking about it. A lot. And yet even as people seemed surprised, shocked even, in the moment, they usually forgot everything I had said moments later, returning to their conviction that to be bisexual is to be privileged, to be barely queer. In some cases, people even outright rejected the data even as they were looking at it: bi women might experience a shockingly high rate of mental illness and poverty, but everyone knows that bi women are doing fine, therefore the data cannot be valid, or doesn’t mean the very thing that it is obviously demonstrating.

It is weird, this dynamic where people reject the existence of your suffering, your oppression, even after you have collected extensive evidence to prove that it is true. It is, honestly, the quandary I find myself in a lot lately: I want people to take biphobia seriously, to understand it as a structural oppression, and yet the very existence of biphobia means that people reject the possibility that biphobia exists. It a crime that erases its own evidence, that renders its own extensive paper trail invisible to the human eye.

And I’ve thought a lot about why it might be that people are so reticent to believe that, yes, biphobia is real and that it is more than just some sad girls crying because the fact that they have boyfriends means that no one thinks that they are queer. Part of it, I think, is that there's no obvious mechanism by which bisexuals are oppressed — or at least oppressed uniquely, separately from other members of the LGBTQ community. Bans on same sex marriage or queers in the military are seen as gay issues that harm bis simply as collateral damage; and there’s no bi-specific medical care that legislators are rallying to ban. Biphobia lacks some central, animating issue, a thing that we can point to and say, “See? This is proof that they are coming for the bis.”

And yet, maybe that is by design. In his excellent (and over two decade old) essay, “The epistemic contract of bisexual erasure,” Kenji Yoshino posits that perhaps bisexuals, and bisexuality, are erased from the conversation because the mere mention of bisexuality presents an existential threat to both straights and gays. The very existence of bisexuality means that no one can definitively declare themselves straight or gay; one can only be a bisexual who has not discovered it yet. For straights, it creates an inability to affirmatively prove oneself to be “pure,” for gays, a constant threat that one could be forced into being straight. To actively legislate against bisexuals, to codify bi oppression into law or common conversation, would be to call too much attention to bisexuality.

And so, instead, we are erased. Not merely erased on the individual level, the way people mean when they talk about bi people being assumed to be straight or gay depending on the gender of their current partner. But erased as a concept, rendered unspeakable, and yes, turned so invisibility that even our very invisibility does not register as a possibility. We are transformed into, to paraphrase a horrible man, an unknown unknown.

Bisexuals are drowning. I have the proof. And yet because the waves that are pushing us down are invisible, everyone around us is convinced that we are fine.

* Some citations on that data! Mental health stats are here, bisexuals and cancer is here, bi women and high blood pressure here, bisexuals and asthma here, bi women and sexual assault and abuse here, and a pretty shocking breakdown of poverty by sexual orientation and gender in which bi cis women and trans people of all sexual orientations are found to have a poverty rate of 29.4% (!!!). These are all things I’ve either saved or just quickly googled, if you look for more you will absolutely find them.