Commentary: 'I’m bi, actually'

Elodie Bailey Vaudandaine (she/they) is a third-year student in the UBC-Sciences Po Dual Degree Program majoring in Sociology. She is passionate about political philosophy as a compass for her activism.

“I’m bi actually.” Simple yet telling, Heartstopper’s Nick Nelson season 2 catchphrase perfectly sums up my experience being out as bisexual. Although it is a label I don’t fully identify with anymore, I still resonate with the constant feelings of exclusion, invisibility, and invalidation bi people at the hands of both straight people and the LGBTQIA+ community.

For many, identifying as bisexual is a bit like being the middle child of the LGBTQIA+ community. A group of researchers use the term “identity invalidation” in their 2019 article published in the Journal of Bisexuality to describe this common experience. As opposed to discrimination which tends to reinforce ties among members of a perceived group as it has in the case of lesbian and gay communities, identity invalidation leads to uncertainty and lack of a sense of belonging. The concept of identity invalidation was created to describe the experience of multiracial people, but more broadly can be described as typical among people who hold identities that don’t fit into a binary, including bisexuals.

In a 2019 survey, respondents were asked to describe instances others have invalidated their bi+ identities. These included others not accepting bisexuality, one’s partner not fitting beliefs about bisexuality, accusations of being confused, and even accusations of faking bisexuality for attention.

My experience as a bisexual has been living in constant fear of not being perceived as “bi enough”, whether that means straying too straight or too gay.

Growing up, I didn’t feel legitimate telling people I was bisexual seeing as I had never dated a girl – or anyone for that matter. Heterosexuality being considered the default, of course I didn’t feel required to prove my attraction to boys. However, I felt great pressure to find proof beyond a reasonable doubt that I was attracted to girls before I was allowed to label myself as bi.

The pressure I felt led me to seek out experiences with girls, even if I wasn’t genuinely interested in the people involved, in my quest to feel secure in my sexuality. I searched for any evidence to make my case to anyone who might interrogate me on my self-proclaimed bisexuality.

My first experience dating a girl was a turning point. I finally felt free to be loud and proud about who I was. My relationship was incredibly validating, living proof against those I felt would put into question my sexuality. Finally, I had a real tangible experience and could finally be secure in my bisexuality… oh, how naïve I was!

Being openly in a relationship with a girl now led others to question whether I was even into guys at all. I became the target of “U-Haul” jokes and remarks about my haircut being telling of my sexuality. In the aftermath of that relationship, I had begun to date a man to which my friend reacted, “I thought you were a lesbian now”. "Wait... did you just say HE?", was the reaction of my queer friend to me first introducing a pronoun while talking about my high-school ex. I had finally felt accepted as a part of the LGBTQIA+ community, but this acceptance came at the cost of invisibilizing the experiences I had with people of the opposite gender.

In an ironic plot twist, I finally reached the point in my journey where I am not afraid to affirm my attraction towards women. Yet, I now feel scared to bring up my experiences with men, or at least I feel pressured to invalidate them for fear of being perceived as lesser in the eyes of the LGBTQIA+ community, especially as someone who is deeply vocal about queer activism. But what accounts for the constant invalidation I and many other bisexuals experience within the LGBTQIA+ community?

In a 1994 interview for Radical Philosophy, Queer theorist Judith Butler offers a philosophical take on the question. Butler considers that our sexual identities are defined as much by what they exclude as what they include. When someone decides to describe themselves as heterosexual, lesbian or gay, they simultaneously make a whole set of sexual possibilities unintelligible within the confines of their identity.

Bisexuals, Butler says, are unique in that they are not defined by such a gender based exclusion. But, in a world where exclusion has become the basis of these political communities, bisexuals are reduced to being perceived as diluted Lesbians and gays or simply on a path towards becoming ‘fully gay.’ Butler’s account shows how bisexuality poses a radical challenge to the constraints imposed by our rigid notion of sexual orientation. It does not come as a surprise then, that bisexuals are consistently invalidated and invisibilised by both heterosexuals and the LGBTQ+ community.

However, bisexuals are not the only ones to face the constraints of the binary. Butler believes that our rigid way of thinking about sexual identity comes with an inherent anxiety that we all deal with. “I think that crafting a sexual position, or reciting a sexual position, always involves becoming haunted by what's excluded. And the more rigid the position, the greater the ghost (...),” Butler explains.

Personally, I have a lot of friends for whom the label they most strongly identify with does not always capture the nuances of their sexual attraction. I’ve spoken to gay guys who were open to experimenting with masc lesbians, or fantasized about being with girls as a kid. I also have lesbian friends who have listed guys to me who they could “be straight for”. These cases show how our rigid model of sexual orientation, leaving little room for fluidity, fails at allowing a lot of people to authentically describe themselves.

Bisexuality is not the only identity that is difficult to grasp through our modern concept of sexual orientation. Bisexuals are shedding light on how these concepts are failing us all. Bisexuality serves as an uncomfortable reminder to heterosexuals and other queers that their same or opposite-sex attraction does not imply their sexuality cannot be fluid and potentially subvert itself. This could explain why bisexuals face so much animosity from the rest of the LGBTQ+ community.

The point here is that simply improving public opinion of bisexuals might not be the answer to reducing biphobia. This issue escapes the realm of what opinion surveys can quantify. It is a question of ontology: how we think up the categories we use to classify ourselves and how these classifications can be exclusionary to those who live on the margins of them.

For me, the solution has been to reject labels altogether. I am unapologetically queer in all my fluidity and suspicious towards identity as a normalizing force.

British academic, Tim Dean considers that “queer” is “far more than a handy moniker covering the rainbow coalition of nonnormative sexualities (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, and so on).” The initial purpose of the term “queer” was in fact to oppose the very existence of “normal” sexualities, a highly anti-sectarian stance. By dividing ourselves between those we consider more or less “queer”, we are forgetting the work that has been done by activists in the 1990s to question the oppressive nature of sexual identities.

To be queer is to be united, yet this while I have much spite towards bi, pan, and fluid identifying people from the rest of the community. As a chronically online person, I am bombarded with videos of queer people bashing bi-curious girls and self-proclaimed lesbians who later go on to sleep with men. Instead of infighting, shouldn't we instead focus on the attacks on LGBTQIA+ people that affect us all ? Like the BC conservative leader’s shocking comparison of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) programming to residential schools, or attempts in both Saskatchewan and New Brunswick to regulate the recognition of preferred pronouns in institutions of public education? In this time of relentless attacks on our community, we need unity over division more than ever.

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