Monosexism is the assumption — usually unstated, often structural — that sexual orientation is binary: that you are either attracted to people of your own gender, or to people of a different gender, and that these are the only coherent possibilities. It is the water in which bisexual, pansexual, and other non-monosexual people swim. And it shows up, sometimes acutely, inside LGBTQ+ spaces that might be expected to know better.

What Monosexism Looks Like in Practice

Monosexism is not always hostile. Sometimes it looks like erasure by omission — an LGBTQ+ panel that discusses gay and lesbian experience without mentioning bisexual experience, an event marketed as queer-inclusive that has no bisexual-specific programming, a coming-out narrative in which the only options presented are gay or straight. Sometimes it looks like active skepticism. "Bisexuality is just a phase." "You're not really queer if you're with a man." "Pansexuality is just bisexuality with extra steps." "You're probably just gay and not ready to admit it yet." These are not marginal views. They circulate in LGBTQ+ spaces regularly, and they function to police who counts as a legitimate community member.

The Historical Roots

The tension between monosexual and non-monosexual identities within LGBTQ+ politics has a history. In the early decades of gay and lesbian activism, some organizers worried that acknowledging bisexuality would undermine political messaging around an immutable, binary sexual orientation — messaging that was being used to argue for civil rights protections. If orientation was binary and fixed, certain legal arguments were easier to make. Bisexuality complicated that. This was, in retrospect, a strategic choice that came at the cost of bisexual people. Research from the Williams Institute at UCLA has documented that bisexual adults report the lowest rates of community belonging among LGB individuals — lower than gay men and lesbian women — and that this is correlated with their specific experience of rejection from within LGBTQ+ spaces, not just from mainstream culture.

Bisexual Health Disparities and Community Exclusion

The health data on bisexual people is striking and underacknowledged. A comprehensive analysis published in LGBT Health, drawing on population-level survey data, found that bisexual adults had higher rates of depression, anxiety, poverty, and domestic violence victimization than either heterosexual or gay and lesbian adults. A leading explanation in the literature is dual minority stress — stress from outside the LGBTQ+ community and from within it. Monosexism is not an abstract political concern. It is a contributor to measurable harm.

A Detour on Gatekeeping

A pattern worth naming: gatekeeping in LGBTQ+ spaces often operates on criteria that claim to be about political solidarity but function to exclude people whose identities are inconvenient. Bisexual people are sometimes told they are not queer enough. Trans people whose identities do not fit a particular framework are similarly questioned. Intersex people have historically been left out of both LGB and T conversations. The energy spent determining who counts could be redirected toward actually building the community that the rhetoric claims to value.

How Bisexual Activists Have Pushed Back

Bisexual activists and organizations have been documenting and challenging monosexism since at least the 1970s, though their work has often been underresourced and underpublicized. The Bisexual Resource Center, BiNet USA, and the work of scholars like Dr. Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli have built substantial bodies of knowledge on bisexual experience, bisexual health, and bisexual community specifically as distinct from broader LGBTQ+ experience. The concept of bisexual erasure — the systematic dismissal or denial of bisexual identity — was articulated by scholars and activists specifically as a response to the ways monosexism operates even in ostensibly queer-friendly spaces. Naming it was the first step toward addressing it.

What Inclusive Spaces Actually Look Like

LGBTQ+ spaces that take monosexism seriously tend to share some characteristics: they explicitly name bisexual, pansexual, and non-monosexual identities in their programming and materials, not just as a line item in an acronym. They have programming that addresses bi-specific concerns. They do not require bisexual members to justify their presence based on relationship history. They treat community membership as a function of identity rather than of current relationship status. This is not complicated. It is the application of the same logic that should govern inclusive spaces in the first place: that people get to define their own identities, that those definitions do not require external verification, and that belonging is not contingent on performing a sufficiently legible queerness for the community's comfort.