Bi-Erasure: What It Is, Examples & How To Avoid It

To celebrate this year’s Bisexual Awareness Week (or #BiWeek), we want to talk about bi-erasure. After all, in a week-long event dedicated to celebrating the bisexual community, there’s absolutely no space for the harmful notion that being bi is ‘just a gateway to being fully gay.’

If you’re rocking the B in LGBT, remember - you’re as much part of the queer community as all the other letters.

Bi-erasure, sometimes called bi-invisibility, is the denial or diminishing of bisexuality. It rears its head in many ways, but the most common is the idea that bisexuals are ‘just promiscuous straight people’ (yuk!) or ‘fully-gay but just scared to come out.’

An easy way to invalidate bi-erasure is understanding that your sexuality doesn’t change depending on who you’re dating. If a bisexual woman is dating a man, she’s still bi. And vice versa for all genders. Alice’s story is a really good example of this in action.

Unfortunately, bi-invisibility is all around us. Examples include:

• Referring to a bisexual person dating someone of the opposite sex as straight.

• Calling a bisexual person dating someone of the same sex as gay or lesbian.

• Assuming someone is gay but ‘not ready to admit it’ when they come out as bisexual.

• Denying someone’s bisexuality by calling it a ‘phase.’

• Excluding bisexual stories and experiences from organisations (yup, even LGBTQ+ ones!) and the media.

You only have to look at the history books to see bi-erasure in action. People love to label Freddie Mercury as solely gay or straight, depending on what they need him to be. When in fact, Mercury had meaningful relationships with both men and women - a bisexual king.

The B in bi-erasure (we think) stands for bad. Not only does bi-invisibility prevent the bisexual community from accessing much-needed resources and support, but bisexual people often feel overlooked both in the wider world and in the LGBTQ+ communities they belong to. A recent HER survey found that 40% of bisexuals report feeling invisible in queer spaces.

Unsurprisingly, this is a recipe for disaster. The stigma and discrimination that bisexuals face can greatly affect their mental health, leading to increased rates of anxiety and depression. Internalised biphobia is another contribution to this, as individuals internalise negative beliefs about bisexuality fed to them by society.

Put simply, no. The easiest way to explain this is by looking at how bisexuals and pansexuals view gender as a factor of attraction. The crux of bisexuality is an attraction to multiple genders, while pansexuality is being attracted to someone regardless of their gender. Some people think there’s an overlap of these identities, but they live side by side — not instead of.

Another harmful misconception is that bisexuality excludes the trans and non-binary community. When actually, bisexuality is inclusive of all genders. The idea that being bi is limited to binary attraction is a big fat myth. As we always say, if the label fits, use it. 

There are many easy ways to make sure bisexuality features in your worldview.

If you’re as chronically online as we are, this could be as simple as not giving bisexual celebrities stick for dating someone of the opposite sex. You can also fill your feed with bisexual creators, activists and groups. Learn from them and educate yourself as you go.

Speaking of education, it’s worth learning your bisexual history — past and present. Leafing through the history books is also a great way to find bi organisations, like BiPhoria and Stonewall, that have been supporting the community for a long old time.

Last but not least, watch your language. Use inclusive terms like ‘queer’ instead of ‘gay’ as a general term. This will go a long way.