Biphobia

Where the word biphobia came from

The researcher Kathleen Bennett introduced biphobia in 1992, defining it as prejudice against bisexuality and the denigration of bisexuality as a life choice. A later definition widens it to any portrayal or discourse that denigrates or criticises men or women solely on the ground of belonging to that socio-sexual identity, or that refuses them the right to claim it.

The word is a portmanteau on the pattern of Homophobia, built from the Latin bi- and the Greek suffix as it appears in that earlier word rather than from Greek directly. It has a second name, monosexism, which names the assumption being made rather than the attitude produced by it: that everybody is attracted to one sex or the other and that no third position exists.

That second name matters, because most of what the term covers is not aversion. It is a claim about the world.

Why biphobia usually takes the form of denial

The prejudice is described as presenting in three forms:

• denial that bisexuality is a genuine orientation
• negative stereotypes, chiefly that bisexual people are promiscuous or dishonest
• bisexual erasure

The denial arrives by at least four routes and they contradict one another. One is heterosexist: heterosexuality is the only true orientation and anything else is either pathology or antisocial behaviour. One is binary: people are assumed to be monosexual, and through the 1980s research on sexuality was dominated by the view that heterosexuality and homosexuality were the only legitimate orientations, with bisexuality dismissed as secondary homosexuality. In that model a bisexual person is a closeted gay person passing as straight, or somebody of one orientation experimenting outside it. The maxim that people are either gay, straight or lying is the compressed version.

A third route accepts the category and shrinks it, defining bisexuality as equal attraction to men and women, which reassigns everybody with unequal attractions to one of the other two. A fourth accepts bisexuality in women and denies it in men.

The fifth is temporal. Bisexual behaviour is treated as a social trend rather than a trait, and same-sex activity as a substitute or a convenience, with situational homosexuality in sex-segregated settings offered as the demonstration.

Where biphobia comes from inside the community

Biphobia is described as common in the heterosexual community and frequently exhibited by gay and lesbian people too. The reasoning attributed is that bisexual people can escape oppression by conforming to expectations about opposite-sex romance, which leaves them perceived as not enough of either, or as not real.

That is not only an argument. An Australian study by Roffee and Waling in 2016 found bisexual people encountering microaggressions, bullying and other antisocial behaviour from within the lesbian and gay community.

The hatred of bisexual women has a name of its own, bimisogyny, occasionally bisexism, which marks a pattern that neither biphobia nor misogyny describes on its own.

Why the phobia suffix misleads here

Every prejudice word ending in this suffix, Transphobia and Xenophobia among them, is inaccurate about fear. This one is inaccurate twice, because the characteristic behaviour is not avoidance but correction: telling somebody what they actually are.

Erasure is the term the literature uses for it, and erasure is an editorial act rather than an emotional one. A person can carry out every part of what biphobia names while feeling nothing in particular, which is why monosexism is the better word and why the fear reading has nothing to explain here at all.