It is Bi Visibility Day today, and I am delighted to see that even Stonewall are celebrating and acknowledging that we make up the largest part of the LGBT community. A few people have reacted to that piece of information with surprise – which is no wonder, given the systematic erasure of our identity that we experience on a daily basis.

The stat about LGBT people you are most likely to hear is that we as a combined community make up somewhere between 6 and 10% of the population. Data on this isn’t easy to come by, and you will get huge variation in results depending on how exactly you ask the question, but 6-10% is a commonly quoted figure. It’s also handy, in that it makes us as a community look big and significant – people can easily visualise one in ten. You go into a meeting, a classroom, a pub; you count 30 people and there you go: statistically, there’s three queer people there!

What you only rarely get – and generally only when you go digging – is a breakdown of the make-up of the LGBT community itself. I have some theories as to why this is the case and why, in particular, bisexual people making up the largest part of the community is such a surprise to many. It’s an effect of the interplay between hetero– and monosexism.
If, as heterosexism posits, being straight is better than being gay, and if, as monosexism effectively posits, some people have the “choice” to be straight or gay, then clearly those people can just choose to be straight and have no problems whatsoever[1]. These people are not oppressed, so we don’t have to deal with their issues in the same way as we have to deal with lesbian and gay people’s issues, because lesbian and gay people don’t have that “choice”.

From a very warped, monosexist point of view then, acknowledging the size of the bi community within the LGBT community gives our oppressors a tool to dismiss us, make us seem smaller and less significant. If a third or half of us are bi, then suddenly we’re not looking at one in ten anymore, we’re looking at 1 in 15 or 1 in 20. That’s a lot more difficult to visualise – it’s practically no one at all! Hetero- and monosexism combine to give a powerful incentive to both straight and gay people to systematically dismiss, diminish and erase the existence and importance of non-monosexual people and identities.

Of course, sweeping bisexual people under the rug is not a long-term viable strategy for resisting the oppression of queer people. Acknowledging, celebrating and working to meet the needs of all the different parts of our community is the only path to equality for all.

[1] Note also that there’s a hefty amount of gender binarism involved in this way of thinking.