Bisexual Erasure: What It Is, Why It Happens, and Why It Matters

“Are You 30% Gay, 30% Straight?” No! I’m 100% Bisexual.

I’ve spent enough time in this field to lose count of how many times I’ve watched this happen: a bisexual person mentions who they’re dating, and the room quietly decides who they are. Date a man, and you’re straight now. Date a woman, and apparently you always were a lesbian. Marry someone, and some people treat it as though your attraction to other genders simply stopped existing. Some people try to be precise about it and ask something like, “So are you 30% gay and 30% straight?” as if bisexuality is a percentage split between two “real” categories rather than its own complete identity. It isn’t a fraction of anything. The answer is, I’m 100% bisexual.

None of that is true. Nothing about a person’s attraction changes because of who they’re currently with, but the assumption gets made anyway, over and over. Typically, by people who mean well and people who don’t, and that pattern has a name: bisexual erasure. It’s something I see constantly in my own work, and it’s also one of the more thoroughly documented patterns in sexuality research literature.

It’s Not the Same as Biphobia

People often use erasure and biphobia interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. Biphobia is open hostility the “you’re just greedy,” the “pick a side,” outright disgust or distrust. Erasure works differently. It doesn’t require anyone to hate you. It only requires everyone around you to assume your orientation is whatever your current partner makes it look like.

That’s what makes it so hard to name, and so easy to miss even for people trying to do right by someone. A friend can say “love is love, who cares who you date” and think they’re being the perfect ally, while quietly making sure the word bisexual never actually gets said out loud. You can get erased by people who adore you. I’ve had clients describe exactly that dynamic with the people closest to them.

The Research Backs This Up

This isn’t a matter of interpretation. It’s one of the more thoroughly documented patterns in queer health research. A 2026 review by McCole and  Anderson review looked at 100 different studies and over 7,000 bi+ people and found the same problems showing up again and again from straight people, gay and lesbian people, partners, families, and even healthcare providers. This isn’t about one bad ex or one bad headline. It’s a pattern that keeps showing up, study after study. There’s even a word for the belief behind it: monosexism, the assumption that “real” attraction only goes one way, and that nothing else is just a phase on the way to picking a side. (Brewster& Moradi, 2010).

This belief has real consequences not because there’s anything inherently unstable about being bisexual, but because constantly having your identity questioned, denied, or dismissed takes a toll over time. Researchers call this minority stress: the chronic strain of navigating a world that doesn’t fully believe you. A 2024 Australian Bureau of Statistics study found that bisexual people reported a mental disorder at some point in their life (80.1%) at notably higher rates than both straight people (41.7%) and gay and lesbian people (63.5%). Other recent research finds a similar pattern with depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts.

The disparity isn’t about bisexuality itself; it’s about what bisexual people are up against. Constant erasure, having to come out over and over, feeling unwelcome in both straight and LGBTQ+ spaces, and getting less social support than other sexual minorities all add up. When you take away the erasure and the disbelief, the “instability” people project onto bisexuality disappears with it. This isn’t just hurt feelings. It’s a real problem, and researchers are actively studying why it happens and how to fix it.

Where It Comes From

Bisexual erasure shows up from nearly every direction, including places people don’t expect. Sometimes, common statements from straight people carry the assumption that a different gender partner settles the question of someone’s orientation for good, like “so you’re basically straight now” or “I guess you found the one.”

Other times, similar assumptions come from within gay, lesbian, and other LGBTQ+ community spaces, such as “you’ll come out as gay eventually,” or Pride programming that never quite makes room for the B. Bi+ people can end up feeling like they have to prove their queerness to the very community that’s supposed to have their back.

Neither of these is the whole story, though both patterns show up on both “sides,” and the assumption underneath all of it (that “real” attraction only goes one way) isn’t confined to any single community. It’s a cultural default a lot of people have absorbed without ever examining it, regardless of their own orientation.

From history, Bisexual erasure doesn’t stop with the present; it also shapes how we interpret the past. Throughout history, many people left clear evidence of attraction to more than one gender through letters, journals, relationships, or their own words. Yet they are often remembered simply as “gay” or “straight” based on the partner they were with later in life or at the time of their death.

A photograph of someone with a same-gender partner tells us who they loved or were with in that moment. It does not tell us the full scope of their sexual orientation. A person’s current or most well-known relationship is not proof that they were exclusively gay or exclusively straight.

This tendency to reduce complex lives into a single label has led historians to reexamine the historical record and distinguish documented evidence of bisexuality from assumptions based solely on relationships. In other words, history doesn’t erase bisexual people on its own; people do when they assume a person’s partner tells their entire story.

From healthcare, it’s a provider who assumes a current partner tells them everything they need to know about a patient’s sexual history and never asks the follow-up question that would’ve caught something clinically relevant. In practice, this looks like intake forms that offer “straight,” “gay,” or “lesbian” as the only real options, sexual history questions that assume a single-gender pattern of partners, and STI risk conversations that get built around the current relationship instead of full attraction history. I’ve sat across patients who’ve had to correct their own provider mid-appointment just to get accurate care, and that’s not a rare exception; it’s a routine failure of the intake process.

From media, bisexual erasure often happens in subtle ways. A bisexual character is introduced as bi, but once the writers decide on an “endgame” relationship, they’re treated as either gay or straight. Celebrity coverage does something similar, with headlines that seem to change a person’s sexual orientation every time a new relationship becomes public.

The common thread is that sexual orientation gets inferred from a person’s partner rather than understood as an enduring part of who they are. Instead of recognizing that a bisexual person remains bisexual regardless of who they are dating, the public, the media, and even fans often assume that one relationship has answered the question for good. A person’s partner may tell us who they are with, but it does not tell us the full story of who they are attracted to.

Concealment Is a Response, Not a Symptom of Confusion

Research also surfaces something that seems contradictory at first: many bisexual people respond to this environment by hiding their identity. Not because they’re unsure, but because they’ve learned, often through direct experience, that stating it plainly invites disbelief or stereotyping they’d rather not deal with in that moment. The label gets simplified, or dropped, depending on the room. This is something I hear directly from clients and students constantly; the concealment almost never comes from internal doubt. It comes from having accurately predicted how the room would respond.

That’s not confusion about identity. That’s a coping response to a problem that was never theirs to create.This isn’t just a comfort issue, either. A 2024 study by Ballard and Oswald found that lower identity authenticity among sexual minorities essentially, not feeling able to be open about who you are was linked to worse behavioral health outcomes, including problematic substance use, and that this connection ran partly through something they called self-regulation depletion: the mental toll of constantly managing how much of yourself you show. Concealment isn’t a neutral choice. It has a cost, even when it feels like the safer option in the moment.

There’s also a body of research on the other side of this: bi+ people actively working to make their identity visible rather than let it be assumed away. A 2019 study by Davila et al. of 397 bi+ participants found 58% had deliberately taken steps toward visibility, stating their identity directly, wearing symbols associated with it, and correcting assumptions when they came up. A 2021 follow-up study by Davila et al. of 715 people found participants generally judged direct, in-person conversation as more effective at communicating their identity than indirect signals like a social media post. Saying it plainly, to a person, still carries more weight than any symbol.

5 Myths That Do the Most Damage

At the heart of bisexual erasure are a handful of persistent myths. They are repeated so often that they shape how bisexual people are perceived, treated, and understood. It’s worth addressing them directly.

1. “Bisexual people are confused.” Attraction to more than one gender isn’t confusion; it’s the definition of orientation.
2. “It’s just a phase.” For most bisexual people, it isn’t transitional at all. Treating it as a phase is itself a form of erasure.
3. “You have to have multiple genders to actually know.” Orientation is about attraction, not a dating history. Straight people aren’t required to date multiple partners to confirm their orientation, and the same standard applies here.
4. “Bisexual people cheat more” or “can’t do monogamy.” There’s no credible evidence that attraction to more than one gender predicts fidelity. Attraction and relationship behavior are separate things.
5. “Bisexual men are actually gay” / “bisexual women are doing it for attention.” Both versions do the same thing: they decide which half of a person’s attraction is “real” based on whichever is more convenient to believe.

What Actually Helps

None of this requires a grand gesture. Don’t let someone’s partner determine what you assume their orientation to be. Use the identity someone tells you, the first time they tell you. Make room for bisexual people in queer spaces without requiring them to prove it. And when one of the myths above comes up in conversation, say something  not as a lecture, just as a correction, the same way you’d correct any other inaccurate claim.

Bisexual Isn’t the Only Word for This

Everything in this piece applies well beyond the word “bisexual” itself. Attraction to more than one gender shows up under a range of labels, and people using any of them run into the same erasure:

• Bisexual — attraction to more than one gender.
• Pansexual — attraction regardless of gender.
• Omnisexual — attraction to all genders, often described as more consciously aware of gender in that attraction than pansexuality implies.
• Polysexual — attraction to multiple, but not necessarily all, genders.
• Multisexual — an umbrella term covering any identity involving attraction to more than one gender.
• Bi+ — another umbrella term used by researchers and advocates to cover this same cluster of identities.

Researchers and advocates often use bi+ or multisexual as shorthand to cover this whole cluster of identities, precisely because the erasure dynamic doesn’t discriminate between the specific label someone uses. A pansexual person gets asked, “So you’re basically bi, right?” in the same breath that a bisexual person gets asked, “So you’re basically straight, right?” The labels are different; the underlying refusal to take the identity at face value is the same.

None of these terms are competing with each other, and none of them need defending against one another. They describe real differences in how people experience and understand their own attraction, and all of them deserve the same thing bisexuality does: to be believed the first time.

The Point

Bisexuality doesn’t change based on who someone is dating. It isn’t a phase, and it isn’t a stop on the way to somewhere else. It’s a stable identity that research has documented thoroughly and one that a lot of people have simply never been asked to take at face value. Believing someone the first time they tell you who they are costs nothing. As someone who works in this field, I’d add: it’s also the single easiest intervention available to anyone, no clinical training required.

Frequently asked questions:

• Can a bisexual person be monogamous? Yes, attraction and relationship structure are separate questions.
• Am I still bi if I’ve only dated one gender? Yes, attraction defines it, not a dating history.
• Does marriage change your orientation?
• Is bisexual the same as pansexual? Overlapping, not identical; many people use whichever feels most accurate, and both are valid.
• Can you realize you’re bi later in life? Absolutely, at any age.
• Why do bi people keep “coming out”? Because every new partner resets everyone else’s assumption to a default that was never accurate.

STAY JUICY

References

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2024). Mental health findings for LGBTQ+ Australians. https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/mental-health-findings-lgbtq-australians

Ballard, Z. B., & Oswald, D. L. (2024). Sexual minority behavioral health outcomes: The role of identity authenticity and self-regulation. Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, 11(1), 69–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/sgd0000578

Brewster, M. E., & Moradi, B. (2010). Perceived experiences of anti-bisexual prejudice: Instrument development and evaluation. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 57(4), 451–468. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021116

Clark, K., Dyar, C., Bränström, R., & Pachankis, J. (2025). Psychosocial stressors explaining the monosexual–bisexual disparity in mental health: A population-based study of sexual minority young adults. Clinical Psychological Science, 13(3), 489–505. https://doi.org/10.1177/21677026241286875

Davila, J., Feinstein, B. A., Dyar, C., & Jabbour, J. (2021). How, when, and why do bisexual+ individuals attempt to make their identity visible? Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, 8(1), 94–105. https://doi.org/10.1037/sgd0000411

Davila, J., Jabbour, J., Dyar, C., & Feinstein, B. A. (2019). Bi+ visibility: Characteristics of those who attempt to make their bisexual+ identity visible and the strategies they use. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 48(1), 199–211. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-018-1284-6

McCole, A. R., & Anderson, J. R. (2026). “Not queer enough”: A systematic review of the literature exploring experiences of bi-erasure. Journal of Bisexuality, 26(1), 1–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/15299716.2025.2498333