Years ago, when I was in my mid-twenties, I woke up one morning with a horrific pain on the right side of my back. I had never felt anything like it before; over a decade later, I struggle to remember what it felt like aside from “very bad.” But what I do remember is this: I immediately tried to figure out what, exactly, the pain could be.
My first guess was menstrual cramps. I had never had bad menstrual pain, but I figured there was always a first time for everything, and if this was what other people were dealing with every month well, shit, I could see why they were so up in arms. I hobbled to the drug store and bought some Midol, but quickly realized that that wasn’t going to do it. The pain, it seemed, was moving, and now I had now to come up with another theory entirely.
The second explanation I arrived at was that I had appendicitis. This, I knew, I could not take care of on my own, so I went to the doctor to get checked out. She decided that I needed a facility capable of more rapid diagnostic and treatment than she, personally, could provide, and sent me off on my way to the emergency department at a nearby hospital.
Eight hours later, I was finally diagnosed with a kidney infection. A mild seeming UTI that I thought had resolved on its own had, in fact, climbed up through my urethra and set up shop in my kidneys and bladder. At the hospital, I was given my first dose of antibiotics and a prescription for the rest of the course; within a few days, I felt back to normal.
What's interesting to me about this story is that, in a way, I had all the information I needed to figure out what was wrong myself. I knew about the UTI I’d had a week before. If I’d given it some thought, I could probably have worked out that the pain I was feeling was in the general location of one of my kidneys, and seen how the bacteria that cause a UTI might have taken root elsewhere. And yet on my own, I couldn’t make the connections at all. That UTI had seemed so mild, had only irritated me for a day or so before disappearing. How could that have led to this searing, debilitating pain in my back?
And so instead of correctly diagnosing what it was that I was feeling, I was left wandering around Manhattan convinced that an errant appendix — something legible to me, something I knew other people had dealt with — was what was actually troubling me.
The reason I bring all of this up (aside from wanting to give you a warning to take your UTIs seriously) is because I feel an echo of that day in my struggle to name, to understand, how I was being harmed — am still harmed — by biphobia. For decades I wandered around with a mystery pain: one that left me feeling isolated and alienated, one that seemed to fuck up my relationships, no matter the gender of my partner. A pain that I couldn’t name. When I attempt to self diagnose the pain, the answer I kept coming back to was that it must be me. I was a shitty person, I was grotesquely slutty, I was insufficiently queer. I was in a hell of my own making.
I cannot recall if it ever occurred to me to blame biphobia for any of what I was going through. I do know that when I did think about my bi identity, it was usually with shame. I was deeply aware of all the ways I fit the profile of a “typical” bisexual woman: white, cis, primarily partnered with cis men, well educated and operating from a place of financial security. I had had threesomes, I had been a slut, I had dabbled in non-monogamy. I was, it felt clear, one of the bad ones: too slutty to be the “respectable” bi woman people could be proud of, too hetero to carry the banner of queer pride, not committed enough to kinky poly lifestyle to define myself in that box. I was failing to fit in anywhere, and I assumed, in some way, that this was simply because I was a failure.
It took me well into my thirties for me to engage with the various ways I was not just a stereotypical bi woman, but a typical bi woman in a more grounded, data driven way. Like many of my peers, I was a survivor of relationship abuse; like many of my peers, I was often treated callously by men, who saw my boundaries as violable and up for negotiation. Like many of of my peers, I had a history of mental illness — in my case, an obsessive-compulsive disorder that went undiagnosed well into my thirties. Like many of my peers, I struggled to fit in, to find community, to feel at home.
Just as with that UTI and my back pain, I struggled to make the connections here even though I had all the relevant data. I knew that I was bisexual — had known since the age of fourteen. And I knew what my life looked like. But in the same way that my UTI had seemed too mild, too easily resolved, to lead to anything resembling the pain that assaulted my back that morning, biphobia seemed too toothless, too insignificant, to wage any real assault on my happiness and well-being.
Men treated me badly because I was slutty, I insisted. It was because I had ties to the adult industry. Never mind that when I first met my abuser I was sexually inexperienced and incredibly naive; never mind that bisexuality and sluttiness are frequently linked in people’s minds purely due to … yes, biphobia. I could only see the way that my actions — my badness — had informed people’s treatment of me, never pausing to ask myself how much of that treatment was shaped by the preconceptions that they came to because they knew that I was bi.
It’s impossible for me to say whether my life would be substantially different if I were straight. Maybe men would have been as callous, as cruel, to me all the same; there are many straight women who’ve experienced countless horrors, after all. But what I can say is that there are many bi women whose lives look like mine — and that these women often weren’t as sexually adventurous, weren’t as openly “slutty,” weren’t anything save for bisexual, and still experienced the same treatment as me.
And what I can also say is that many of the bi women whose lives have looked like mine — who have experienced alienation, insecurity, mental illness, abuse, and many of the other awful experiences that disproportionately plague bi women — are also walking around blaming themselves, convinced that their suffering is purely due to their own actions. And I have to assume that this is not a gendered experience, that many bi men and non-binary people are similarly unable to connect the dots between their symptoms and the cause.
There are several reasons why the doctors at the emergency department were able to diagnose my kidney infection as a kidney infection. They had access to high tech scanners that showed them that my organs were inflamed with bacteria, sure. But they also knew that I had a UTI. And they had seen, many times over, that when people with UTIs come in complaining of back pain, the likely diagnosis is a kidney infection.
If I had been surrounded by a group of people with untreated UTIs who had experienced back pain due to a kidney infection — the same way I was surrounded by people with debilitating period cramps and ruptured appendices — I, too, might have been able to figure out what was going on with me. I would have had a larger context in which to understand my pain, the same way that the doctors did, and that context would have helped me accurately assess what was going on.
In the years since I first decided to become more open about my shame and anxiety as a bi woman, it has become very clear to me that I am far from alone. It’s not just the statistics; actual bi people who have reached out to tell me how much they seem themselves in what I describe going through, how my self-hatred, my alienation, my confusion all mimic their own. I am hoping that more of us can start to see that we exist within a social context: that our pain is not simply ours alone, and something that we are struggling through because we, ourselves, are bad. I am hoping that, with enough data points, we can begin to see that this pain is something we have in common, and that the one potential source that is common to us all is that we all live in a society that is shaped by biphobia.