Contrary to popular belief, bisexual people don’t centre men in their sexuality.
I’ve been questioning my sexuality since I was 12 years old. The closet wasn’t something I felt I was ever in because I was always vocal to my friends and family about what I was feeling. For years, from ages 14 to 18, there was a running joke with my friends that I was going to “experiment” in university.
Despite my biannual dream where I was in love with a woman, despite the way my eyes were drawn to the women, despite millions of other signs that I would eventually go on to make a powerpoint about, I still didn’t come to terms with being bisexual until I was 20.
There’s a cliche that bisexual people often self-identify as straight because they don’t feel queer enough. The problem with this line of thinking is that it operates within a cisgender/heterosexual framework that demands a binary presentation of your sexuality. I operated in this framework for a long time scared to claim space that wasn’t mine because I hadn’t had a queer crush. To my credit, I crush extremely rarely and so not having a queer crush by the age of 18 was not weird–by that point I’d only ever had three crushes.
Last year, after years of kissing women and still saying I was straight, I was watching a show and saw a masculine lesbian who I couldn’t stop watching thirst edits of when I had to face it: straight women don’t obsess over lesbian thirst traps!
So, I’d come to accept my queerness, but that wasn’t enough to deconstruct the harmful binaries that we are all passed down through society.
I’d been neck-deep in queer history, and discourse online since I’ve had social media so I thought by virtue of acknowledging my queerness I’d done the hard part. What I didn’t realise before is that as much as you can engage with queer theory and history from the outside, unless you’re intentionally deconstructing the cisgender/heterosexual framework we all live under, it doesn’t really hit you until you fully accept your queerness.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about who I am, how I want to present myself, and what I actually want in romantic relationships. I don’t have an answer for any of these questions, but what I do know is that even when I still identified as straight, I never operated in a way that adhered to a traditional cis/het script. I’ve always asked out the people I liked despite being told by family members that that was unattractive and that as a woman, I needed to let people come to me. I have grown out my body hair since I was 15 and, even though many people in my life frequently tell me of how ugly and undesirable they think this makes me, I’ve had relationships and I’ve had people be attracted to me. More importantly, I’m comfortable in my body, and I feel confident and desirable.
So much of the rhetoric I’d been told was centering the opinion of some theoretical straight man who I was supposed to be appealing to.
Bisexuality is societally thought of as a sexuality that centers men. Bimen are secretly gay, biwomen are straight but attention seeking. Bisexuality is squished into a monosexual way of thinking that leads bisexuals to not want to critically engage with themselves or others because of these rigid binaries.
For the record, I’m mainly discussing heterosexual ideas of bisexuality because I have found the queer community to be almost entirely accepting of bisexuality. In fact, surveys seem to show that roughly half of queer people identify as multisexual in some way or another.
The beauty of bisexuality is in its fluidity. There’s a quote I love from Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg that encapsulates bisexuality to me: “But what gets it for me is high femme. It’s funny—it doesn’t matter whether it’s women or men–it’s always high femme that pulls me by the waist and makes me sweat.”
By definition there are no rules with bisexuality, it’s yours to live and define. I hate to be cheesy, but bisexuality is entirely a queer identity—it’s not half of one thing or another. The problem a lot of people have with bisexuality is that they assume that we, like many non-bisexuals, center men and that any queer relationship or desire we express isn’t genuine. My response to that is that no matter your sexuality you can still center men anda cisgender/heterosexual framework. To assume that because bisexual people do date and love men they’re automatically unable to engage with queerness to the fullest extent is biphobic.
As a chronically online person, I often find myself drowning in bisexual discourse that serves no one. One minute I’m watching a TikTok of people saying they’d never date bisexuals because they’re evil and all cheaters, the next I’m watching bisexuals who are sensitised to this endless discourse argue that everyone is being biphobic–even when they aren’t.
It’s a never-ending cycle of feeling not enough while also feeling you’re taking up too much space. The part that traps you in is that unless you log off and actually meet people in the queer community, you might not realise that the vast majority of people don’t think like that in-person.
Still, bisexual people are often systemically an afterthought.
We can see the ways in which bisexuals aren’t considered in the same way monosexuals are. Bisexual women have higher rates of being victims of intimate partner violence than both straight and lesbian women. Bisexuals can’t be lumped in with straight or lesbian women in these cases–being bisexual is a unique risk factor compared to other sexualities.
In the 80s, bisexual men were seen as sexually promiscuous superspreaders of AIDS; having sex with gay men and then spreading it to women. This information isn’t meant to make a case for comparing bisexual oppression against gay or lesbian oppression. It’s meant to outline the ways in which bisexuals occupy different spaces than both straight and gay people and thus need to be accounted for in social programs, studies, and policies.
I want to end on a positive note. Queerness in all its forms is beautiful and liberating. I love being bisexual, I love the queer community, I love the ways in which it pushes me to be myself.
In the words of Nick Nelson from Heartstopper “I’m bi, actually”
Ella Marrie Campeau is a fourth-year Philosophy student.
Tags
bisexuality, Opinions, Pride 2025, queerness
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