I should start by saying that I don’t know if “ex-bi” is actually a thing; if there are people identifying in this way in good faith or not. All I know is that bi activist Shiri Eisner posted that ex-bi sounds a lot like ex-gay, and that my immediate thought was that, well, that even beyond that, ex-bi simply sounds like an oxymoron.
Let us just start by accepting that a person’s sexual attractions can and will shift over time, regardless of their sexual identity. The crush you had when you were twelve will seem ridiculous when you are forty; a passionate love affair will feel like an embarrassing mistake once your oxytocin levels have returned to a more normal level. Does it always go that way? Of course not — but generally speaking, the people we are attracted to in one moment are not necessarily the people we are attracted to before or after that moment.
If you are monosexual, the shifts in attraction that you experience over your lifetime will always remain firmly within the bounds of one specific gender. You may be into feminine women at one point and butch at another, or twinks in your youth and daddies as you settle into adulthood, but you will always stay within that one bounded space. If you are bisexual, on the other hand, the shifts you experience in attraction may be far less predictable, tossing you, not merely among different types of men or women, but from men to women to non-binary people to who knows.
But here’s the thing that is crucial: bisexuality does not require you to experience attraction to multiple genders at the same time. It simply requires you to experience attractions to more than one gender over the course of your life.
Which means, of course, that if you’ve ever been bi, you are always bi. You cannot cease to be bisexual; the mere fact that you ever experienced attraction to a gender other than the one you are currently interested in means that you are bisexual, full stop. One can only be “ex-bi” if one was never bi in the first place — one can only be “ex-bi” if bisexual behavior was adopted due to social pressure rather than genuine attraction.
(Does that mean you have to call yourself bi just because you had a fleeting crush on someone of the gender you’re not generally attracted to at one point in your life? Of course not, you’re never required to call yourself anything. I’m not the police, go live your life.)
It is interesting to me that people find this so uncomfortable, that it is offensive to be told that your monosexuality is voided by attractions you once felt but no longer feel. I mean, I think I get it: biphobia aside, there’s this anxiety that if you say you are bisexual, you will be forced to date people from a gender that you’re not currently interested in — the same way I call myself a vegetarian even though I sometimes eat fish because I don’t way people to assume that I’m going to eat whatever fish they place in front of me*.
But I find that anxiety as odd as the fear that someone is going to be forced to date one of their exes simply because they were attracted to them in the past. Being bisexual doesn't mean you don't have agency. You can acknowledge your bisexuality while primarily — or exclusively! — pursuing only one gender. That’s your business and no one else’s.
I think, also, that if we started embracing this expansive definition of bisexuality — if we allowed people to stand under the bi umbrella just because they’re (in the words of the immortal Jean-Ralphio Saperstein) 🎶 open-minded as hell 🎶 — then we’d start to realize that strict monosexuality is far more rare than we think. Lots of people experience attraction that’s not as predictably bounded as they might publicly admit. Lots of people are a little bit bi. Being bi: it’s not a big deal.
* For the two of you that are bizarrely fascinated by my dietary habits: I don’t know how frequently I eat fish (sometimes not at all, sometimes multiple times a week), but when I do it’s usually salmon or canned tuna, and usually just to make things easier for my mom (though sometimes it’s because I having a craving). I do not eat shellfish, kind of for Jewish reasons but also just out of habit. In kashrut terms my diet is milchig-pareve, but I can’t really claim that because I’m not dedicated enough to reading labels to really be considered kosher.
This really hits home! I call myself a bi lesbian because I've almost always been attracted to women, but there have been several periods where I'm attracted to men as well, sometimes more than women. I don't want to ignore all of those feelings, hook ups, and relationships, or imply that they were not genuine by calling myself a lesbian. Yes I'm bisexual. I'm not currently into men, but I have been in the past and probably will be again in the future.
I love this! The way we think about sexuality can sometimes be very limiting. I see the 'labels' as things we use to explain a part of ourselves more clearly to ourselves sometimes and maybe to others. It's quite important to know that bisexuality can be so fluid and identifying as such doesn't automatically mean one thing or the other, it just means that we've experienced attraction to multiple genders in some way at some time. There's no one size fits all or specific percentages for that attraction to be defined it just is.