September 23rd is Bi Visibility Day, and all this week has been designated Bi Visibility week. Among the jokes about being invisible for the other 51 weeks of the year lies a pain many feel. This year alone Prides have forgotten bi people exist, called them greedy or undecided from main stages and generally reinforced the feelings many bi people have of not belonging to the LGBT community. There seems to be a resistance at times to even using the word bi, as if it is a slur, or somehow unacceptable. We see this very often when celebrities come out as bi, and the media describes them as gay. Bi seems to be too fluid, too challenging, still.
I wonder how much ambiguity or fluidity is a large part of the problem, a challenge, and something to be resisted. Whilst traditional psychoanalysis may be out of favour with many, I am drawn to the theories of Melanie Klein, and that first binary split when a baby is either joyfully nurtured or completely abandoned (in its own mind). Binary thinking does seem to have something very childlike about it, saints and sinners, superheroes and villains, elation or despair. It could be said that the movement towards adulthood is a move to embrace ambiguity and sit comfortably with it.
We (as in humankind) seem to seek so often to remain in places of binary thinking. For a long time heterosexual was seen as right, correct, morally acceptable, and any other sexuality was collected under the term homosexuality and termed deviant, incorrect, a sin. As the fight for rights progressed, a reframing occurred, homosexuality might be the opposite of heterosexuality, it was argued, but it did not mean it carried the opposite moral values.
Just as the world (or our Western corner of it) seemed to settle down into accepting this new binary (gay and straight as opposite, but not in moral opposition), those who did not fit the binary started advocating for their rights too. It has to be said that mainstream L&G organisations have not always welcomed this. Bi people (and I use it as an umbrella term to include bisexual and biromantic) have faced accusations of failing to pick a side, of being part-time homosexuals, of not knowing their own minds. Indeed bisexuality is still pathologised within mental health communities where the idea of “not knowing one’s own mind” seems to have taken hold. It seems that in trying to overturn the binary that heterosexuality was morally right, and homosexuality was morally wrong a residual fear remained that the only other option was a return to that old binary. In telling bisexual people they must pick a side the shadow of there being sides looms large, even if it is just a phantom, a creation of those who would deny all LGBTQ+ people rights.
When I speak to any group of bi people, of whatever age, ethnicity, class or background, I am struck by a universality of experience of biphobia and bierasure. Perhaps this is part of the resistance to fluidity, to not fitting binaries. It is never as simple as “four legs good, two legs bad” but that is how so often the arguments have gone. Bisexual people have been told over and over again that they are somehow lesser, because they reject a simplistic framing of human sexuality.
A You Gov survey found that almost half of young people do not identify as 100% homo or heterosexual. This does not of course mean they identify as bisexual. Many people do not, since it carries so many negative stereotypes, from greedy to downright murderous. However it speaks to a generation who do not feel as threatened by the ideas of ambiguity and fluidity. It speaks to a more adult, measured and considered attitude towards the variety of human experiences we put in the box marked sex and relationships. However, as a therapist, it feels that whilst people are rejecting binary thinking, and demanding their place at the table, therapy is to some extent stuck within the either/or trap. Bisexual people are all too often seen as needing help to decide what they are instead of being accepted as who they are.
Whilst this is the case, events such as Bi Visibility day are vital. The only way to counter the erasure of bi identities, and prejudices against them, which come as often from within the LGBT community as without, is to increase visibility. Every time the binary of there just being gay or straight is challenged, a brick in the wall of prejudice is taken away. Every time bi people are accepted as valid, embraced as who they are, rather than being told they need to change, then we move towards a world where bi people will be fully seen as members of both wider society and the LGBT community.