The Erasure Is Not a Metaphor

I came out as bisexual when I was twenty-two. Not to everyone — gradually, and in stages — but consistently, and eventually completely. I use the word without hedging. I've been out for over a decade. And in that decade, the two directions from which I've been told I'm not quite real have come with equal consistency: from straight people, who assume it's a phase or performance, and from certain parts of the gay and lesbian community, who have their own version of the same assumption. I want to write about this not as a complaint but as a description, because I think bisexual erasure is one of those phenomena that people hear about but don't fully understand until they've experienced the mechanics of it.

What Straight Erasure Looks Like

Straight erasure is often invisible to the people committing it because it's structured around assumptions rather than explicit statements. It's the extended family member who, once I've been with a man for more than a year, refers to me as straight — not maliciously, just as an update of the category they were holding. It's the colleague who, meeting me in a relationship with a woman, adds "oh so you're gay" and files it away. It's the way people consistently interpret my current relationship as information about my orientation, as though who I'm with determines who I am. There's a word for this: heteroassumption. And its bisexual-specific version is the assumption that orientation is always and only revealed by the gender of your partner. That framework makes bisexuality structurally invisible: you're always either appearing straight or appearing gay, never appearing as yourself.

What Erasure From Within the LGBTQ+ Community Looks Like

This one is harder to write about because it can sound like I'm attacking a community I'm part of. I'm not. I'm describing something I've experienced and that the research consistently documents. Researchers at the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law have published some of the most comprehensive data on bisexual health disparities in the country. The findings are stark: bisexual people report higher rates of depression, anxiety, and poverty than both straight people and gay and lesbian people. The factor that predicts this most strongly is not external homophobia but what researchers call "identity rejection" — the degree to which bisexual people feel their identity is not recognized or respected within LGBTQ+ spaces. The monosexism within some gay and lesbian communities is real. The "pick a side" messaging, the assumption that bisexuality is a rest stop rather than a destination, the quiet discomfort when a bisexual person in a different-sex relationship shows up to queer space — these are documented patterns. I've lived them.

The Health Consequences of Not Being Believed

Here's something that matters and that doesn't get enough attention: the specific kind of stress produced by identity invalidation is different from discrimination based on an identity that's recognized. Being told "you're wrong about yourself" is a particular assault on psychological coherence. It produces a kind of isolation — you can't find community with straight people because you're not straight, and in some spaces you can't fully find it with queer people either. Investigators at San Francisco State University studying bisexual-specific health outcomes found that access to bisexual-specific community and support (as opposed to general LGBTQ+ support) was a significantly stronger protective factor for mental health than LGBTQ+ support alone. The distinction was about having your specific identity seen, not just your queerness in general. Being categorized as "kind of gay" is not the same as being recognized.

A Tangent About the Language

The word bisexual has complicated baggage for some people — it implies a binary that many feel doesn't match their experience. Pansexual, queer, fluid, and other terms have emerged in part to address this. I use bisexual because I found it first and it's accurate enough. But the proliferation of terms reflects something real: people are trying to name experiences that existing categories weren't built to hold. I have more patience for this complexity than for people who use it as evidence that the category itself is suspect. Difficulty in naming something doesn't make the thing not exist.

What I Actually Want

Not a prize for being bisexual. Not extra visibility at every turn. Mostly I want to stop having to explain to people that my orientation is not a function of who I'm currently in a relationship with, and to stop having to decide whether to out myself constantly to correct the assumption that I've seamlessly transitioned into whichever monosexual category my partner implies. I want the assumption to be that people know their own orientation. It's not a complicated thing to extend.