Tell the Truth: Bisexual People Don’t Have Straight or “Straight Passing” Privilege

Bisexual people are not very popular in the queer community. Stop lying: we aren’t welcome. Period. We are told that we “pass as straight”, and thus “enjoy heterosexual privilege”; when we are in relationships with someone of another gender, we also have “heterosexual privilege”. The MYTH of bisexual straight privilege (listen to yourselves) is generally at the crux of how bisexual people are perceived in the broader queer community… like shit scrapped off your shoe on the way in the door. 

There’s just one problem: bisexual people are more oppressed on almost every single material axis than EITHER straight or gay peers. Which means that we absolutely don’t have heterosexual privilege, and in fact, we have LESS privilege than homosexual people AND straight people. Where is the straight privilege? 

Before I give you the data, I want to remark on the fact that these statistics are never, ever discussed in the popular culture; there is almost a deliberant secrecy around what bisexual oppression, and our public health profile looks like. When there have been so many efforts to educate the public about what gay men and lesbians experience, there has been no similar effort to educate about bisexual people, much less acknowledging that they have the worst outcomes in many areas. Much less acknowledging that some of those outcomes are emerging from the queer community itself. Much less doing literally anything to include us in the protections of the queer community and umbrella even as we are, materially, the greatest targets of queerphobia.

The real biphobia is not about us getting into your stupid little Pride gatherings —  rather, it is about denying the public health crisis that faces us. The effort to minimize the definition of biphobia to these superficial, individualistic factors — who we sleep with, whether or not we are welcome at lesbian events, if we “look” straight or not — is a total op. The idea that these are the concerns of bisexual people, is insulting and demeaning, when we are in the middle of a public health crisis, in which our general outcomes, safety and mental health are consistently worse than for straights or homosexuals. These lies are meant to paint us as frivolous, attention-seeking and imposters; meanwhile we are experiencing violence far above our counterparts in the queer community. 

We get absolutely brow beaten by the queer community from the second we enter it or identity ourselves with it. I grew up thinking that lesbians and gay men had it way worse than us; and anytime it came up that perhaps bisexuals DO face some kind of unique issue, bisexual WOMEN were told that they had it better than bisexual men, which is absolutely not the case; because misogyny exists, the differences are very clear in the statistics. That said, the outcomes of bisexual men are still far worse than for straight or gay men; our trajectory is consistent across genders, so even though I will focus primarily on bisexual women in this piece, know that the tracks very consistently with variances between bisexual men and straight/gay men. 

I literally do not understand how this flies, but it never is stated that one of the biggest areas of divergence between bisexuals and our counterparts is in the category of violence. We are just overwhelmingly overrepresented in the victim pool.

Deeply concerning in particular is the rates of sexual violence that bisexual people experience. 63% of bisexual women will experience rape in their lifetime; compared to 29% of lesbians and 35% of straight women. It’s not just that we get raped more in general, but actually that we’re getting raped repeatedly — bisexual women are over seven times more likely to be re-victimized, while lesbian women are three times more likely than heterosexual women. And yet that only offers a flattening binary too: How *many* times are bisexual women re-victimized? I, and many bisexual women I know, have experienced severe sexual abuse over and over and over again across a lifetime. 

The sexual violence that bisexual people experience is significant, and particularly to our youth — bi women get raped at a younger age in life; between ages 11 and 17, close to 50% of bi girls are raped. Girls who have been sexually abused before 18 are more than 13.7 times more likely to get raped in their first year of college. The sexual violence that bisexual girls and women experience, and from a younger age, is above and beyond what straight and lesbian women experience. 

One question I have is why having fucking half of bisexual girls being literally raped —HALF — is not being called corrective rape, an issue that the queer community supposedly cares so much about? It is only called corrective rape when it happens to gays and lesbians, but when it happens to bisexual people, we don’t call it anything, not even a health crisis, much less corrective rape. This is part of invisabilizing the oppression that bisexual people actually face; what we experience is not even put into the terms and constructs accepted for other queer people. I suppose the dominant theory is that if bisexuals pass as straight, then how would anyone know that they’re queer, to commit corrective rape on us? And yet, again and again, we experience the most violence. 

Weird. 

Why in the fuck would people be able to tell when someone is gay or straight or lesbian, but our powers as human beings to recognize each other somehow fail as soon as it is a bisexual person? This is beyond absurd. Our rates of YOUTH CORRECTIVE RAPE show pretty definitively that people can tell we are bisexual, and that we are targeted for it, at levels far beyond what the gay and lesbian community is.

This is the most baffling thing to me about biphobia: while the entire community is always talking about the queer youth, that doesn’t seem to include bisexuals. Half of bi girls are being sexually abused before 18, HALF of them; I’ve never heard this once discussed, except in the research, or prioritized in the queer community. Bisexual women are 3x more likely than straight women to need abortions and the most likely to have a teen pregnancy — notably, this is never mentioned in the abortion discourse. Even in areas where we represent the height of an important, urgent social issue, it is more important to discard us than it is to even tell the truth about how sexual abuse of children works — you cannot understand child sexual abuse without understanding the role bisexuality plays in it. 

Considering the extreme seriousness of child sexual abuse, its particularly alarming that we are viewed as being privileged and fake queers, while bisexual children are in the middle of a massive sexual health crisis that will affect them the rest of their lives and often results in suicide, poverty and addiction. Literally being attacked by pedophiles in mass numbers? And that they are the category most likely to get a young-age pregnancy and/or abortion? Privilege? Who told you that?

 It’s interesting that many feminist and queer platforms will discuss sexual assault and rape as systemic factors without acknowledging that bisexual women make up the highest rates of such. Lesbians have a victim-blaming mentality towards bisexual women — essentially, “well, you like men/are with men, so what do you expect?”, which honestly is some of the basest and most callous victim blaming I’ve ever seen. For one, of course, straight men are the largest threat to the overall queer community, yet it is *us* who must suddenly be responsible. It’s also alarming because lesbians actually have higher rates of domestic violence than straight people. I’ve often wondered how much of that disproportionate domestic violence is aimed at bisexual women in particular.  It makes it particularly suspect that lesbians accuse us of having some kind of “privilege.”

Here I find it interesting to consider that bisexuals are hyper-sexualized by every population, gay and straight, that we are looked at as hedonists, perverts, promiscuous, performative… and contrast that with things like our rape statistics. The *projection* of hyper-sexuality onto us is so offensive when it also operates to imply that the huge amount of sexual abuse we experience is our fault; after all, all we want is sex, and that is all we care about, so how could we be facing a sexual violence crisis when we clearly …. Liked it ? Deserved it? Provoked it? Wanted it? 

The total sexualization that is projected onto us only serves as a cover for the abuse. This is the real biphobia — not only ignoring and submerging violence against us, but then actually sexualizing it and projecting it onto us. We are “privileged” huh? How exactly is it privilege to receive more sexual violence than any other group? How is it privilege for HALF of bisexual girls to be raped, and for most of that rape to begin at far younger ages? And by the way, you see similar trends in bisexual men wrt sexual violence. 

You can predict how this plays out more broadly. Child sexual abuse is a core indicator of long-term outcomes, and I argue is a foundational base of oppression more generally. Bisexuals are thus of course the most likely to experience interpersonal violence, like domestic violence and stalking — further indicating that hatred of bisexuals is specifically a factor in this. 

And it goes on and on and on. In fact, I get sick of pulling out all the stats, but you can find a lot of them here. Bisexual people are more than 6x more likely to be in the closet. 30% of bisexual women live in poverty — while 21% of straights do and 23% of lesbians. Bisexual women are more likely to be on food stamps. Bisexuals are 2.3 times more likely to experience a hate crime, and they are 3x more likely to experience police violence. We are at significant risk for multiple substance use behaviors. Bi women have a higher rate of PTSD, of mental illness in general.  And it goes on and on and on. Most recently, of bisexuals that have gotten COVID, a third of them have gotten long COVID.  We’re more likely to report office harassment and to not be out in the workplace. There’s even a bisexual pay gap — yet when I report this online, I was made fun of for days.

This, of course — all of these patterns of abuse and discrepancy — starts to culminate in mortality. We are 4x more likely than straight people to kill ourselves. That is a giant epidemic of suicide, and it is totally alarming that this is left out when this is literally one of the top issues both currently and historically that the queer community has taken up, and that has been a defining part of our fight against the straight establishment: that the social shame and stigma, the inability to be ourselves, the homophobia we face, culminates in increased risk of suicide. But the biggest contributors, by the body, to suicide out of all sexualities are from the bisexual community. And in my entire life I have NEVER seen that acknowledged by a community that regularly talks about teen and life long suicide rates. 

In almost every major area that we look at as far as quantifying oppression and outcomes of marginalized people, bisexuals consistently come up more harmed, and more at risk, than either straight or gay people. If you measure the standing between groups through a materialist lens, this seems to indicate that bisexuals are not, in fact, more privileged than gay and lesbian people, in fact, much the opposite. We are LESS privileged.  We are the most victimized, and yet the most ignored. In fact, only 1% of annual funding goes to bisexual people in general, and of course, most of the outreach in the schools also leaves bisexual kids left out. 

This makes it complexly insulting that we are painted as frivolous, privileged, lucky, when in OUR community, we are actually having to deal with life or death situations that are higher than any of our peer groups, yet, are being treated like dilettantes that are “choosing” our sexuality to deliberately be more provocative or to get laid more, when these are actually the very serious harms we are experiencing. Why are we considered privileged among the queer community, but somehow we are standing out as the most impacted sector in alllll of these areas that we use to describe oppression again queer people? 

These statistics make it clear that we are, in fact, our own unique category, having much different experiences than other sexualities, and in no way derivative from either gay people or straight people, nor a hybrid of them. And yet we are told again and again, we pass as straight, we pass as straight. We are told that there is no way we could possibly have our own unique identity, because we are indistinguishable from straight people, even as our life experiences diverge sharply. So there has been a profound cultural effect where, because we are explicitly cast from the gay community, and told that it is because we belong with the straight people, we haven’t even had the opportunity to organize around our (invalidated) identities. 

Especially because we face so much violence and so many health obstacles, and a very unique experience, being able to organize as a bisexual community to end much of the oppression we face, is very key. Other groups consistently discuss the challenges that are faced by their category, make them known, raise money for them, and address the power structure that causes it. Why would we even look to do that as bisexuals when we are told that we are basically fake queers, that we have straight-passing privilege, and are exempt from the oppression faced by other queer people? 

How come you can “just tell” when someone is gay or straight or a lesbian, but when it comes to bisexual people, we suddenly are undetectable in our disguises as straight people? There’s no absolutely defined rules for picking up on someone’s gayness — it is something “you know KNOW, you know” “I was picking up totally gay vibes from him”, “I don’t know, she looks like a lesbian but it sounded like she had a boyfriend”, “i KNOW he’s married but I just, my gaydar started going off”. Why would bisexuality be somehow indistinguishable even though people accept as a matter of course that you can often “tell” if someone is gay, straight, or a lesbian? Suddenly the powers fail, we don’t know anything about each other, because what? “Straight passing” privilege again? 

Calling us straight passing is an insult to our entire community. There are so many bisexual stars and celebrities and authors that are cherished for their work, yet their sexualities are ignored and they aren’t seen as performers that emerge from the queer community and are a part of its legacy. We have made gigantic contributions to the cultural canon, and while areas like “gay arts” and “lesbian feminism” are recognized, we are just boxed in with the same group as everyone else, if we’re lucky, under the label “queer”. That we don’t even have a lineage that is recognized as a bisexual arts, a musical canon, a literary canon, that is remotely recognized in either the gay or the straight world, is another thing that completely erases us off of the map. 

It means that bi youth, who, again, are facing significant pedophile attacks, experiencing extreme social alienation, mental health problems, don’t even see themselves in the queer body. What are the top 10 most important bisexual books? Who are the top ten greatest bisexual singers? These are not things we think of about bisexual people, yet come readily to mind about gay and lesbian contributors. There *is* a huge canon of work by bisexual authors, it’s just that it isn’t arranged in the public consciousness in such a way that that is accessible or even considered important, in any of the many displays and educations around queer culture and theory and arts. Without any focus on us as a unique class, it is reinforced that we aren’t actually queer, that we are indistinguishable from straight people. This makes us invisible to both ourselves and to others. 

When you say that we are basically straight people, the very foundation of forming our own identity is taken away. The very foundation of organizing principles, a unique identity with unique problems, is removed. Bisexuals have been exceedingly respectful of the rest of the community, including its constant demands that we step back. But the fact that we are required to is a great shame in the queer community.

Regardless of your little party guest lists, you do, actually, have to listen to what bisexual people have to say about the queer community. We have been left behind again and again; we are accused of wanting to center ourselves under the guise of a non-existent privilege, that when we have demands for the community we are just being privileged, that that this is just about us wanting to bring our straight boyfriends into queer spaces. This makes our beef look profoundly unserious, as if we are petulant children who just want attention: another biphobic construct is that our entire sexuality is some kind of performance. We are accused of “lesbophobia” and “queer washing” and “playing gay”. While we are ignored and shit on in the queer community, we are made to look as if we are the ones who are oppressing everyone else, when really it is them casting us out, covering up information about our health crisis, and painting us a “privileged” even as we have *check notes* astronomical rates of child sexual abuse. 

Okay!  

Bisexual people literally get only 1% of the money devoted to LGBT people, which means that essentially lesbian and gay men have hijacked the movement and leave us out of it. Where we need money to get bisexual teens abortions, to take pedophiles to court, to get women out of unsafe homes with their kids, to do emergency evacuations for bisexual women from abusive situations, to get bisexuals better health care, and substance abuse treatment, and to ACTUALLY educate the country on us - we have been left behind and not even most BISEXUALS understand biphobia: biphobia is marginalizing us in the middle of serious public health crisis. 

I wrote this mainly so that I would have a place to send people every time this comes up; it is part of my work and framing of the bisexual community. This is just the basics, and I hope to address these topics more in further posts. As far as an overall address to the other parts of the queer community: time is up, and all of you need to either stand in solidarity or fuck off, because we are in the middle of a giant public health crisis that no one will admit exists. We are dying while you call it privilege. 

That is straight privilege? LMFAO. Stop lying. Time for us to tell all of you to either stand in solidarity or shut up. Your opinions about our community are not welcomed or needed. Support, or say you don’t actually care about ending queerphobia and go. You cannot address queerphobia without including its largest targets — not gay people, as they have told you, but bisexual people.