If you ask someone what bisexuality is, chances are good that you’ll get some dictionary definition about attraction to multiple genders, or attraction to one’s own gender and others, or a little lecture about bi vs pan (regardless of whether or not you asked for one).
That’s not what this essay is about.
I know the general idea of what bisexuality is. Obviously. I know bisexuality takes many forms, doesn’t have to be 50/50, that if you’re only attracted to two people in the entire world and they’re different genders then congrats, you’re bisexual. I know all that.
It still doesn’t really answer the question, though.
Because to say that “bisexuality” is this amorphous and diverse umbrella category; to say it’s a bucket into which anyone who is not strictly straight or gay will ultimately fall is not really to say what bisexuality is. And defining what bisexuality is? It’s kind of fraught.
I’m not the first person to wrestle with this. I often reference Kenji Yoshino’s essay “The epistemic contract of bisexual erasure,” and guess what, I’m going to do it again, because that essay has a whole entire section about how to classify bisexuals. Is it everyone who has had even the most fleeting attraction to more than one gender — i.e. everyone on the Kinsey scale save for the purist 0s and 6s — and if so, what are we to make of the fact many people who might acknowledge at least occasional attraction to multiple genders do not see themselves as bisexual? Is it only the people who see themselves as bisexual? If we go that route, how do we account for the fact that many people with bisexual attractions and even lifestyles do not identify as bisexual?
Is bisexuality an affinity group that one opts in and out of? Is it a hardcoded attraction to multiple genders? Do you have to actively do bisexuality to “count”?
You could try to find answers to these questions, but I would offer that you are wasting your time. The very notion of “defining” bisexuality requires one to buy into the idea that human sexuality is some orderly, boundaried experience, that there’s some grand plan that sorts each and every one of us into a little box that explains to the world what our whole deal is. And I think that idea is complete bullshit. There is no grand plan behind human sexuality; it’s pure chaos that we’re all just doing our best to make sense of. If it’s hard to figure out who is and isn’t bi it’s because there is no Inherent Bisexuality™️, there are only people who don’t fit into the gay or straight boxes (or actively reject them) and wind up here.
And yet even as I believe all that, I also believe that there’s a group of people loosely known as The Bisexuals™️ who are struggling because of society’s preconceived ideas about bisexuality, because of structural biphobia. As I’ve said before, the data repeatedly shows that. But with such a diffuse definition of bisexuality, one does have to wonder what it is that’s leading to these problems — you can’t say, for instance, that bisexuals experience higher levels of poverty because of the gender of their partners (as you might with monosexual queers), because there’s no consistent pattern there. You can’t even say bisexuals suffer because of something related to touching all different types of genitals, because there’s no guarantee that all people classified as bisexual have even had sex with partners of multiple genders, or even any partners at all.
I think what I’m getting at here is that there’s an idea of a Real Bisexual™️, right, the one who is sufficiently queer and sufficiently suffering as a result. But I don’t think that person actually exists. And I think what harms bisexuals — even “fake” bisexuals, even bisexuals who don’t know they’re bisexual yet — is the very idea that fluid sexuality is somehow deviant and obscene, the very idea that it leaves you less deserving of respect. If someone rapes you because you say that you’re bisexual, if that self-identification leads them to assume that you are promiscuous public property, does it matter if you are “actually” bisexual or not?
Bisexuality is real in the sense that there are plenty of us who find multiple genders hot and may even pursue sex and relationships with people of a variety of genders. It’s fake in the sense that there is no Real Bisexual Person™️, no way to secure the borders of bisexuality, to keep the pretenders out. But more important than any of that is that biphobia is extremely real, and while the card carrying, open bisexuals are its most direct targets, its victims are far and wide (and, again, can even be those “fake” bisexuals!).
I don’t think we can really ever define bisexuality. I don’t think we’ll ever really know the “true” number of bisexuals. But I think we can name and identify biphobia — and I think we can, we must, uproot it wherever we find it.