Bisexual invisibility and binegativity
Bisexual invisibility is the way bisexuality goes unseen or gets explained away: read as gay or straight depending on the current partner, or treated as a phase, confusion or a stop on the way to coming out as gay. Binegativity is the negative attitude itself, which can come from straight people and from gay and lesbian people.
What drives it
With a partner of a different sex a bisexual person is assumed straight, and with a partner of the same sex, gay, so the identity disappears whichever way they turn. Coming out has to be repeated and often isn’t believed. For identification it explains a sense of belonging nowhere, which may sit behind distress that seems out of proportion to how easy the person’s life looks from outside.
How it shows
Work
Mentioning a wife at work and being filed as straight, then hearing a colleague call bisexuality a phase. Feeling unwelcome at the LGBT network because ‘you’re married to a man’.
Relationships
A partner who worries the person will leave for someone of another gender. Gay friends who joke about picking a side. A family that treated the coming out as over once a different-sex partner appeared.
Self
Notice whether you leave your bisexuality out of conversations because it is easier than explaining it, and how you feel when someone decides for you what you are.
What tells it apart
Sexual fluidity (Diamond): Fluidity describes attractions that change over time. Bisexual invisibility concerns lasting attraction to more than one gender that others don’t see or believe. The two can overlap, and bisexual people are often asked to prove they are neither confused nor in transition.
Concealment stress (hiding a sexual orientation): Concealment is choosing to hide. Invisibility happens without a choice, because others assume. A bisexual person may be out and still unseen.
Internalized homophobia (internalized stigma): Internalized binegativity is turning the doubts on oneself (‘maybe I’m just confused’). It is more likely the issue when the doubt is the person’s own and persists with nobody outside voicing it.
A test
Ask the person how many people in their life know they are bisexual, and how many of those treat it as real. A wide gap between being out and being believed may point to invisibility as a source of strain.
Questions to carry
- Who decided what I am the last time I mentioned a partner?
- Where do I leave part of myself out because explaining it costs too much?
How strong the research is
moderate. A meta-analysis of 52 studies (Ross and colleagues, Journal of Sex Research, 2018) found heterosexual people had the lowest rates of depression and anxiety and bisexual people had rates higher than or equal to lesbian and gay people. The authors proposed discrimination, invisibility and lack of bisexual-affirming support as causes, which the pooled data could not test. Of the studies they screened, 562 were ruled out because they did not report bisexual people separately. In a 1999 US national survey (Herek, 2002), heterosexual adults rated bisexual men and women lower than every other group asked about except people who inject drugs. In a 2013 Pew survey of 1,197 LGBT adults, 28% of bisexuals said all or most of the important people in their life knew, against 77% of gay men and 71% of lesbians. Among bisexual men the figure was 12%. Doubts that male bisexuality exists were tested in a pooled analysis of eight arousal studies (Jabbour and colleagues, 2020, 474 to 588 men), which found bisexual-identified men’s arousal more bisexual than that of gay or straight men.
Where it comes from
Kenji Yoshino, ‘The epistemic contract of bisexual erasure’, Stanford Law Review, 2000. Gregory Herek, ‘Heterosexuals’ attitudes toward bisexual men and women in the United States’, Journal of Sex Research, 2002. Lori Ross and colleagues, meta-analysis, Journal of Sex Research, 2018