The invisible invisibles

What we don't talk about when we talk about bisexuals

One of the things that I realized fairly early on in my time as a Professional Bisexual™️ is that while we talk a lot about bisexual “invisibility,” there are actually quite a few bisexuals who are hypervisible — at least compared to our peers. If you are a white cis woman, and especially if you are a white cis woman with a male partner, you are the default picture that comes to mind whenever someone hears the word “bisexual.” You just are.

If I had to wager a guess, I’d say there are a couple of factors behind this: for starters, white cis bi women with male partners are likely the people with the most incentive and ability to be out as bi, which means white cis bi women are the most visible bisexuals in the culture. If you ask most people to name a famous bisexual, I’d wager they’re more likely to say Kyrsten Sinema than Cardi B, for instance. And because white cis bi women with male partners are more likely and more able to be out, there’s a persistent reinforcement that these women are the sum total of bisexuality, that when we talk about bi issues, we must be talking about these women’s issues.

And further: I suspect that the persistent attachment to the idea that bisexual necessarily means a white cis woman with a male partner is also part of why people are so resistant to accepting the many dire facts that research has revealed about the wellbeing of bi people — and bi women in particular. Higher rates of poverty, poor health, abuse, and suicide? It just does not gel with people’s mental image of what they think they know about bi people. Kyrsten Sinema certainly isn’t poor, and neither is Debbie from work, so how could bi women be suffering?

Anyway. I am thinking about this today because of recent research that suggests that the people at highest risk of suicide ideation, plans, and attempts are Black bisexual women who live in rural areas. When you think about this, it makes a lot of sense: suicidality is increased by isolation and loneliness, and being a Black bisexual woman in a rural area seems it would be a pretty lonely and isolating experience — especially since that whole phenomenon of white cis women with male partners (and probably ones who are relatively cosmopolitan) means that most people don’t even think about rural Black women when they’re thinking about bisexuals and our needs. It is an erasure within an already erased community.

And honestly —

Well. One of the reasons why I get so tired of so much Bisexual Discourse™️ is because of how small, how navel gazey it is; because of how fixated it is on whether white cis women with male partners are a pox on the queer community and not on, you know, rural Black women at an elevated risk of suicide. If we cannot see bisexuality as the most vulnerable bisexuals — if we insist on making the conversation about the Kyrsten Sinemas of the world — then what are we actually doing, you know?

If we cannot combat the belief that a “bisexual” is a cis white woman with a male partner, then we cannot truly understand bisexuality. I don’t know how to lower the suicide rates of rural Black bisexual women. But I have to assume that expanding our conversations about bisexuality to include these women — that chipping away at the predominance of cosmopolitan white women in our representations of bisexuality — would be a pretty decent start.