Researchers have historically categorized people as either gay or straight, only recently acknowledging bisexuality as its own identity. But they still won't take it seriously.
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In late February, Gallup released the results of its 2024 sexual identity survey. If you’ve been paying attention to these surveys, which Gallup has been releasing annually for over a decade, the results weren’t particularly surprising. Rates of LGBTQ+ identification have been steadily increasing since the first surveys were conducted in 2012, particularly among the youth, so it shouldn’t be particularly shocking that 9.3% of Gallup’s survey respondents were found to be queer or trans. Equally unsurprising was the major driver of these increasing numbers: young people, and, in particular, young bi women.
Among Gen X and older, the number of LGBTQ+ folks remains rather small: Just 5% of of Gen X respondents identify as queer or trans (which is, itself, more than double the 2% of Silent Generation respondents who do), while 14% of Millennials and 23% of Gen Z fall into this category—and in both of these cohorts, bisexuals significantly outnumber gays and lesbians, with bisexual women outnumbering bisexual men. All of this is in line with patterns that have been reported for a number of years. And yet, for many commentators, the news is apparently shocking, more a sign of young women claiming bi identity as a way of getting attention, or evidence of some kind of social contagion, than a simple statement of fact that Gen Z is more openly queer than previous generations.
It should be noted, first and foremost, that there are a number of fairly obvious explanations for this recent surge in LGBTQ+ identification. In addition to an increasingly supportive environment (well, at least until recently) that might encourage young people to come out, there’s also the rapid declines in HIV-related deaths (an epidemic that was particularly devastating to men who have sex with men and trans women), and, presumably, a decrease in LGBTQ+ suicides to go along with the reduction in anti-queer/trans stigma. Or, to put it more simply: There are fewer older people who identify as queer or trans because many members of those cohorts have either felt pressure to stay closeted or died off before they could answer a Gallup poll. But there’s also another, bi-specific factor that could help explain why people, in particular, are surging in numbers: a reduction in the frequency of bisexual erasure.
If you’re familiar with the term “erasure,” you may already be rolling your eyes. Colloquially, this term is often used to refer to individual bisexuals who are portrayed as monosexual in the media—like Anna Paquin, who infamously explained to Larry King that, no, getting married to a man doesn’t mean that she’s now straight—an experience that, while certainly annoying to individual bisexuals, is often dismissed as a petty complaint. But what I’m talking about isn’t the question of whether society sees Anna Paquin or Alan Cumming or Cardi B as “really” bi. What I’m talking about is the erasure of bisexuality as an entire category.
Take, for instance, the very Gallup poll that’s triggered this conversation. Although Gallup has been collecting information about American sexual identities since 2012, it’s only been since 2020 that anyone thought to break the data out by anything more nuanced than LGBTQ+ or straight, effectively bundling bisexuals and trans people in with gays and lesbians rather than recognizing them as their own nuanced and specific identities. And Gallup isn’t alone here: Up until very recently, most researchers did not break bisexual people out as a separate category (and many still don’t offer trans people that courtesy, which is a topic for another essay), either lumping bi folks in with gays and lesbians or categorizing them according to the gender of their current partner (a highly flawed research strategy, which also raises the question of what category single or nonmonogamous bisexuals fell into). Because of this historical incuriosity about bisexuals and the bi experience, it’s actually hard to say if Gen Z’s is actually all that atypical. Maybe young people, generally, are more likely to identify as bisexual before aligning with a monosexual identity later in life. Maybe it’s not just reduced stigma, but a shifting definition that treats heteroromantic bisexuality as a queer identity rather than just an open-minded form of heterosexuality, that’s led to an explosion in bi numbers. We can’t really know, because we’ve never really asked. And that’s a fairly big problem.
(It is worth noting, however, that numerous studies over the years have found that roughly twice as many people can be categorized as bisexual based on desire, behavior, or a combination of the two than can be categorized as exclusively gay or lesbian, as Kenji Yoshino broke down in a legal paper in 2000. Make of that what you will.)
Ultimately, bi erasure isn’t about Anna Paquin or Cardi B or any individual bisexual at all. It’s not about whether you, personally, refuse to recognize the breadth of my personal sexual history. It’s about how we frame human sexual identity, period. And the more we insist that bisexuality be seen as an aberration, a contagion, as something barely worth counting or considering, the more we reduce our ability to fully comprehend the complexity of human sexuality. That’s something that all of us should be concerned about.