“Uh Bi People Have It Easier Than Gays”
While biphobia undoubtedly overlaps with homophobia, quite a few gays and lesbians brush it off, reduce it to just homophobia, or insist it isn’t real. Others insist that bisexuals hold privilege over them or generally have less to deal with. Now, do these claims have any basis, or do they merely (and falsely) assume that our different-gender attraction would soften the blow of our oppression?
I’d have to go with the latter.
While bisexuals arguably make up at least half of the overall LGBT community, our erasure is rampant. Biphobia creeps into nearly every part of our lives. We have glaringly higher rates of employment discrimination, poverty, difficulty seeking immigration relief, and mental health disparities. We seldom come out when seeking medical care. We’re much more likely to be victims of rape, stalking, intimate partner violence poverty, and unemployment. We’re most likely to be closeted and suicidal. Bisexual teens, when looking at sexuality, are at the highest risk for bullying, truancy, and suicide.
Wherever there are numbers, there’s virtually always a significant spike or drop for us. While some of these statistics improve for gays and lesbians as they get older and find community support, it remains just as devastating for older bisexuals.
People reduce our sexuality to our current partners, so we’re never “truly” bisexual — we’re either in gay relationships or straight relationships, and we’re deemed prone to “switching to the other team” no matter who we date. A 2013 study conducted by Indiana University and the University of Pittsburgh found that 15% of people refused to accept bisexuality as a “legitimate sexual orientation.” Straights often hate us more than any other group. This is especially true for bisexual men, who most refuse to believe are even real.
We get flak from both gays and straights, very often for the same reasons — they think we’ll give them STDs, they fetishize us, they distrust us, they think we’re predatory, indecisive attention seekers, they disbelieve our very existence — and these sentiments are horrifically prevalent.
Combined with homophobia we already experience from the straight world, gays often accuse us of “appropriating” gayness and invading LGBT spaces. When they aren’t side-eyeing our different-gender attraction, they insist we’re merely in the closet. They paint us as privileged oppressors even though we’re more likely to be transgender and nonwhite. The judgment we face within the LGBT community is just as real as the subjugation we receive outside of it.
Our label often shows up in organization names or mission statements without offering specific programs for us. Only 3–20% of people accessing LGBT services are bisexual. Only 7% of board members on LGBT organization boards identify as bisexual, but 59% are gay. Again, we’re the largest group in the community. Bigots arguably make sure to include us in their legal discrimination more often than many LGBT organizations acknowledge us in their spaces and activism. There’s even a phenomenon of discussing the “gay, lesbian, and transgender” (LGT) community.
Not to mention the insane lack of funding for us. In 2018, $5,571,635 grant dollars were given to lesbian/queer women, and another $16,189,461 went towards gay/queer men. Transgender folks got $33,987,723. Do you how much money was reserved specifically for bisexual people and organizations? $226,978. That is 4% of the lesbian/queer women budget, 1.4% of the gay/queer men budget, and 0.6% of the transgender budget. While bisexuals are in desperate need of bisexual-specific resources, most LGBT organizations don’t provide such content. We received zero funding two years in a row.
But sure, we definitely have the upper hand.
Biphobia isn’t just people saying we’re “really straight/gay.” It’s not just label discourse and calling us sluts. Biphobia kills us — and when it’s not doing that, it’s endangering our lives. If you give even the slightest of damns about us, you need to take it seriously.
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