Book summary “Bi”: summary

Introduction

You live in a society that demands you choose one side of a binary. Whether it is gender or sexual orientation, culture forces you into rigid categories like gay or straight, man or woman. When you experience attraction to multiple genders, you face a pervasive erasure that renders your life invisible. Mainstream institutions and even queer communities often dismiss bisexuality as a confused phase or a temporary pit stop.

Shiri Eisner argues in Bi that bisexuality is far more than a personal sexual preference. You will discover that bisexuality is a powerful political weapon capable of dismantling monosexism, cissexism, and kyriarchy. The book combines rigorous academic theory with grassroots activism to examine history, privilege, feminism, trans politics, racialization, and the dangers of assimilation.

You might wonder how bisexuality challenges existing power structures.

• How does monosexism enforce the erasure of non-monosexual lives?
• Why do feminist and queer movements often resist bisexual liberation?
• In what ways can bisexual politics build true intersectional solidarity?

1. Mapping Bisexual History and Theory

Early sexologists viewed bisexuality through inversion theory, equating it with intersexuality and psychological hermaphroditism. Researchers like Krafft-Ebing, Ellis, and Hirschfeld treated same-gender desire as latent heterosexuality where inverts were of the opposite sex internally. Bisexuality originally described nonbinary genitals, assuming a bi person's male part desired women while their female part desired men in the minority world.

Early sexologists viewed bisexuality through inversion and developmental theories, while modern activists and scholars established autonomous definitions, umbrella categories, and radical political traditions.

History of Bisexuality

Sigmund Freud framed bisexuality as a primitive, pre-oedipal psychological basis from which normal heterosexuality or pathological homosexuality develops. Freud's theory of polymorphous perversity positioned every child as initially bisexual. Success in the oedipal process resulted in heterosexuality by repressing bisexual desire, while failure resulted in homosexuality.

Alfred Kinsey rejected discrete sexual categories, establishing bisexuality as a viable option on a sliding scale of human sexual behavior. In his 1948 research Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey argued that nature deals in continua rather than discrete categories. He created the Kinsey Scale ranging from 0 to 6, where a 3 represented the true bisexual equally attracted to both males and females.

Defining Bisexuality

Robyn Ochs formulated a broad, enabling definition of bisexuality as the potential for romantic or sexual attraction to more than one sex or gender. This definition emphasizes that attraction does not have to happen at the same time, in the same way, or to the same degree. It counters internalized biphobia by reassuring you that varying experiences and preferences still qualify you as bisexual.

Bisexuality can be defined as attraction to people of genders similar to and different from one's own, which exposes gender hierarchies and power relations. By combining the understanding of homosexuality as attraction to similar genders and heterosexuality as attraction to different genders, this definition highlights how patriarchy and cissexism infuse gender differences with unequal social weight and power imbalances.

The term bisexual functions as an umbrella category encompassing diverse identities that involve attraction to more than one sex or gender. Similar to transgender, the bisexual umbrella includes:

• pansexual;
• omnisexual;
• polysexual;
• queer;
• fluid;
• flexible.

Bisexual Politics and Epistemology

The bisexual movement has a strong radical tradition rooted in feminism, sex-radical politics, trans inclusion, and disability accessibility. Historically led largely by women and feminists, the bisexual movement integrated pro-feminist men, supported racialized communities, pioneered accessibility standards for disabled people, and maintained grassroots organizing structures.

Instead of merely denying biphobic stereotypes through literal myth-busting, an epistemological approach reads them metaphorically as societal anxieties about subversion. Mainstream rebuttals attempt to prove bisexuals are safe, normative, and monogamous, which throws non-conforming people overboard. A radical approach examines why society views bisexuality as a threat and leverages that disruption to challenge oppressive power structures.

Allegations that bisexuality is inherently transphobic because of its linguistic prefix ignore bisexual history and reproduce inter-movement hierarchies. Critics claim the root bi enforces a two-gender binary, but the movement has historically embraced nonbinary genders. You can see that focusing disproportionate criticism on the bisexual community stems from biphobia and replicates a scarcity model where marginalized groups compete for limited recognition.

2. Monosexism and Bisexual Erasure

Biphobia is frequently misunderstood as a series of personal attitudes rather than an overarching social structure. Defining monosexism as a system operating parallel to heterosexism or cissexism allows analysts to deconstruct the underlying power dynamics.

Monosexism is a structural system that presumes universal monosexuality, privileges monosexual people, and systematically punishes nonmonosexual individuals.

Both heterosexual and homosexual social structures share an epistemic contract to actively erase bisexuality to protect their own institutional boundaries. Kenji Yoshino argues that invisibility is actively constructed. Bisexuality threatens both monosexual systems because it destabilizes fixed sexual orientation categories, challenges the primacy of the gender binary, and disrupts traditional norms of monogamy.

Greta Garbo was categorized exclusively as a lesbian by Terry Castle despite historical evidence of her desire for men as well as women.

A Stonewall study examined 127 hours of British television and yielded only 5 minutes and 9 seconds of bisexual representation, with no positive or realistic portrayals. A Google search showed 50 links over the first five pages where 60 percent focused on stereotypes and only 20 percent on erasure.

Adapting Iris Marion Young's model, Miguel Obradors-Campos shows how bisexual contributions are exploited without return, cultural stereotypes persist alongside erasure, and bisexuals face severe workplace marginalization, verbal harassment, and physical violence.

Brenda Howard initiated the first pride march after the Stonewall rebellion, yet her seminal contribution to the LGBT movement has been largely erased from community history. An online study examining LGBT discussions about bisexuality found that 55 percent of comments contained biphobia or monosexism.

Data from the San Francisco Human Rights Commission's Bisexual Invisibility report and various national surveys demonstrate that bisexual people experience higher rates of depression, anxiety, smoking, risky drinking, and poverty compared to monosexual populations. Canadian studies found that 45.4 percent of bisexual women and 34.8 percent of bisexual men reported suicidality. Furthermore, 17.7 percent of bisexual women live in poverty compared to 7.8 percent of lesbians.

Monosexual people receive societal rewards and unearned privileges based on their compliance with monosexual norms. A privilege checklist exposes the myriad ways society validates monosexual identities while invalidating bisexual ones:

• Society assures me that my sexual identity is real and that people like me exist.
• When I disclose my sexual identity to others, they believe it without requiring me to prove it.
• I am never considered closeted when disclosing my sexual identity.
• I can be confident that people will not rename my sexual identity or use different words to describe my identity than I do.
• I can fairly easily find representations of people of my sexual-identity group and my lifestyle in the media and the arts.

3. Bisexuality, Privilege, and Passing

Monosexual and mainstream bisexual discourses mistakenly reduce bisexuality to either heterosexual privilege or homosexual oppression, ignoring unique bisexual experiences. Writers like Orna Izakson and Liz A. Highleyman demonstrate these polarized arguments around invisibility and vulnerability to homophobia in Bisexual Politics. The term heterosexual privilege appears twenty times in that book.

Discussions of heterosexual privilege misrepresent bisexual experiences, making the framework of passing and intentional or coercive concealment essential for understanding bisexual power dynamics.

The Flaws of Privilege Discourse

Allegations of bisexual privilege rely on a false reduction of oppression to visual markers, echoing biases found in lesbian and transgender politics. Statistics show bisexuals are worse off on average than gays, lesbians, and straights, disproving privilege claims. Critics like Lisa Walker show how visibility politics elevates visible groups while erasing invisible ones.

Pepper Mint lists types of heterosexual privilege based on being seen as straight in a man/woman relationship. Trans people in mixed-gender relationships face extreme violence and discrimination despite passing.

Passing Unto Power

Replacing the discourse of privilege with the framework of passing allows a more complex understanding of power, hierarchies, and oppression in bisexual lives. Passing describes being perceived as a member of a dominant group. This happens either intentionally for self-protection or coercively by default due to societal standards.

Intentional full-time passing offers safety and resources at the high cost of constant fear of discovery, self-erasure, and loss upon exposure. Closeted bisexual men married to women pass as straight to gain social status and employment. They risk severe punishment, isolation, and family loss if exposed.

Reba Lee describes in her autobiographical book, I Passed for White, her constant pregnancy worries about her baby's skin color. She felt immense relief over a miscarriage because the baby was white.

Coercive passing occurs by default when a society with a single human standard automatically misreads marginalized identities as the dominant group. Because society defaults to monosexuality, bisexuality is never presumed.

Adrian Piper wrote about being inevitably mistaken for white when failing to identify her racial identity publicly. Black peers asked her to prove her blackness through the Suffering Test.

Bisexuality becomes visibly disruptive in complex situations like multiple partners or cheating across genders. Robyn Ochs notes that bisexuality only becomes visible as a point of conflict, such as when a woman leaves her husband for another woman.

Toward a Bi Politics of Inauthenticity

Passing denaturalizes fixed identity categories by proving that physical appearances and behaviors do not guarantee an inner biological essence. Society attempts to naturalize monosexuality by linking relationship choices to an inborn core.

Eddie Murphy's Saturday Night Live skit Black Like Me highlights white anxiety over infiltration by showing Black performers in white face enjoying white privilege.

To be bisexual is to pass, as bisexuals are coercively passed off as monosexual. Mariam Fraser discusses how lesbian theorists treat the bisexual woman as an inauthentic trope whose presence in lesbian communities triggers identity anxiety.

A radical bisexual politics should embrace pollution, hybridity, and inauthenticity as tools to disrupt monosexual hegemonic order and binary categories.

Gloria Anzaldúa describes the mestiza in Borderlands/La Frontera as a wind-swayed bridge and crossroads containing contradictions within a single whole.

4. Bisexuality, Feminism, and Women

An analysis of bisexual lives requires examining gender-specific oppression. Bisexual men and women experience different forms of biphobia and sexism. Gender hierarchies persist inside the bisexual movement itself, necessitating a bifeminist politics to combat inner-community sexism.

Patriarchy revolves around a single, invisible standard of dominant characteristics. The single standard consists of a white, native-born, college-educated, cisgender, heterosexual, monogamous, middle- and upper-class, nondisabled man aged thirty to fifty. Because this standard is treated as the default, any deviation is marked as an identity.

Female bisexuality threatens patriarchal gender binaries and triggers cultural anxieties around sexual choice, leading to high rates of biphobic sexual violence and internal backlash.

Society enforces an oppositional binary model requiring a coherent continuity where male-assigned bodies perform masculinity and heterosexuality, while female-assigned bodies perform femininity and heterosexuality. Bisexuality creates a crack in this impenetrable wall because desiring more than one gender prevents a person from being wholly tied to a single sex-object choice.

The Power of Choice

Female bisexuality symbolizes the power of sexual choice. It grants women the independence to interact with men strictly on their own terms. By retaining the option to choose partners across genders, bisexual women do not require men for relationships.

In the film Basic Instinct, the bisexual character Catherine Trammel acts as a dangerous riddle that the male detective Nick must solve. She serves as a straight man's journey to neutralize the threat posed by a bisexual woman.

Mainstream media and pornography co-opt female bisexuality. They neutralize its threat by framing it as a hypersexualized performance designed exclusively for the cis straight male gaze. In pornography, woman-to-woman sexual acts are categorized under straight genres and framed merely as preparatory foreplay before penile penetration.

Linda Boreman admitted that her performance in the 1972 hit pornographic film Deep Throat was entirely imposed on her by her partner. She stated that watching the movie is watching her being raped.

Sexual Violence and Consent

Cultural representations of bisexual women as hypersexualized objects create a public atmosphere that normalizes biphobic sexual harassment. Transgender bisexual women face an even greater risk of violence due to intersectional transphobia and transmisogyny.

A January 2013 U.S. government Department of Health study found that almost half of all bisexual cis women were raped at least once in their lifetime, and 75 percent experienced other forms of sexual violence. In 2002, Gwen Arauju, an American trans woman of color, was brutally beaten, tortured, and murdered after being discovered to be trans by her sexual partners.

Certain bisexual activists divide individuals into good bisexuals and bad bisexuals. This discourse adopts dominant patriarchal tropes, unfairly penalizing women for exploring their sexuality and deflecting accountability away from perpetrators of sexual violence.

Bisexual movements must reject victim-blaming and establish a culture of consent. You must support these practices to ensure community safety:

• Assert that women have the right to be sexual whenever and however they wish.
• Assert that women have the right not to be sexual whenever and however they wish.
• Create and maintain sexually safe environments and spaces within bisexual movements.

5. Bisexuality, Feminism, and Men

Patriarchy harms men by forcing them into the role of oppressors and demanding constant control, emotional distance, and physical dominance. You can see how men internalize patriarchal values and view their power as domination. They are expected to be strong, provide financially, suppress emotions, avoid femininity, and remain strictly heterosexual. This rigid enforcement leads to physical injury, emotional numbness, and self-destruction.

Male privilege manifests as safety, higher wages, structural power, and a low-difficulty setting in the social hierarchy. Men enjoy greater access to power, higher pay, property ownership, and social influence. They rarely fear street harassment and their views are treated as socially valuable defaults.

Activist Byron Hurt realized his privilege during a workshop when men could not list any precautions they took against rape. Women listed numerous habits like carrying pepper spray, using keys as weapons, and crossing streets to avoid groups of men.

Erasure of Male Bisexuality

J. Michael Bailey's study "Straight, Gay, or Lying?" attempted to disprove male bisexuality using flawed methodology and medicalized definitions. Bailey used penile gauges and self-reported desires while exposing cisgender men to pornographic stimuli in a lab setting. The study discarded participants without sufficient genital arousal, conflated arousal with identity, and reduced bisexuality to purely physical responses while ignoring social and political contexts.

Bailey and his team recruited 30 straight men, 33 bisexual men, and 38 gay men for the study. Only 22 bisexual men had sufficient genital arousal to be analyzed after viewing 11 minutes of filmed stimuli.

Medicalizing deviance introduces expert control, medical social control, individualization of social problems, and depoliticization. Applying medical frameworks to social identities grants experts the power to define populations, enforce social norms, blame individuals instead of addressing structural monosexism, and strip political deviance of its context.

Feminist Male Bisexuality

Scientific institutions reflect patriarchal and cissexist values by treating white, heterosexual male observers as objective authorities while objectifying marginalized groups. Science historically defines rationality as masculine and emotionality as feminine. Researchers objectify marginalized groups as raw material, reinforcing hierarchies that marginalize bisexual men, transgender people, and nonbinary individuals.

Male bisexuality offers subversive potential by cracking the singularity and monosexual mandate of dominant masculinity. Because dominant masculinity demands single-mindedness and heterosexuality, male bisexuality introduces multiplicity that fractures compliance with patriarchy. This gives bi men a pathway to refuse oppressor roles and construct postpatriarchal masculinities.

6. Bi and Trans Intersections

Both bisexuality and transgender identities subvert rigid societal binaries and trigger deep cultural anxieties by crossing boundaries between oppressor and oppressed classes. Bisexuality challenges the gay-straight binary, while transgender identities challenge the woman-man binary, exposing the underlying hierarchies of social control.

Both bisexuality and transgender identities subvert rigid societal binaries, but mainstream bisexual and trans communities often perpetuate cissexism and biphobia until mutual solidarity is built.

Ungendering the System

Biological sex is as much a social construct and subject to self-identification as gender, since bodies, chromosomes, and hormone levels vary wildly. Transgender politics is inseparable from feminism because challenging binary gender dismantles the fundamental basis of gender-based oppression. If no clear distinction exists between male and female, society cannot determine who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed, thereby neutralizing patriarchal structures.

The 2011 controversy surrounding American company J. Crew's catalog showing its creative director painting her son's toenails pink triggered public backlash and accusations of attacking masculinity.

Cissexism in Bisexual Communities

Mainstream bisexual communities often perpetuate cissexism through binary definitions, gender essentialism, tokenism, and the erasure of nonbinary identities. The 1991 anthology Bi Any Other Name contains about forty binary expressions, Marjorie Garber's 1996 book Vice Versa contains over twenty, and the 2005 anthology Getting Bi contains forty binary expressions. A report titled Bisexual Invisibility spans forty-one pages total while dedicating only three paragraphs to transgender issues.

Transgender communities and literature frequently erase bisexuality completely or relegate it to an afterthought or negative context. In the anthology Gender Outlaws, the word bisexuality appears only four times in passing, and in GenderQueer it appears nineteen times while ultimately rejecting bisexuality as a viable identity.

Building Trans-Bi Solidarity

The bisexual community in Israel and the Occupied Palestine successfully grew out of the transgender movement, serving as a model for trans-bi solidarity and safety. In April 2011, the first bi-trans panel was held in Tel Aviv, and in June 2011 a radical pride march was organized where bi and trans activists took over the stage to oppose capitalism and Zionism.

You can build effective alliances by changing specific behaviors:

• stop using binary cissexist terms such as both men and women or both sexes;
• use all genders instead of reinforcing binary assumptions;
• stop speaking as if cisgender men and women are the only genders worth addressing;
• stop referring to bi and trans as if they were two separate, disconnected groups;
• inform yourselves about what cissexism and transphobia are and subvert them at individual and community levels;
• confront and address monosexual privileges and internalized biphobia within trans communities.

7. Bisexuality and Racialization

Society creates race through discourse and power distribution, much like it characterizes bisexuality. Both identities disrupt rigid binary structures, such as Jewish versus Arab in Israel or monosexual versus homosexual in sexuality. Dominant systems erase these identities, denying existence through claims of universal mixing and consigning them to a primitive past.

Racialization and bisexuality share foundational mechanics of erasure and orientalist projection, requiring bisexual movements to address internal whiteness and build intersectional alliances.

David Ben-Gurion and Israeli journalists in 1949 wrote about Mizrahis using primitive and backward terminology, comparing them unfavorably to European standards. During the 1950s, 80 percent of the Jewish population in Israel was Ashkenazi in 1948. Mizrahi immigrants faced low-standard shantytowns called Ma'abarot, race-based educational tracking, and state-sponsored medical experiments.

During the 1950s, the Israeli government performed medical experiments on one hundred thousand Mizrahi children, mostly Moroccan, exposing them to lethal levels of radiation. Seventeen thousand known cases of children were lost forever through systematic kidnapping.

Mizrahi Oppression and Boundary Markers

Dominant systems divide bisexuality and Mizrahiness into acceptable figures and threatening figures, resulting in a partial identity. Artist Meir Gal in 1997 held out nine pages dedicated to Mizrahi history out of a four hundred-page school history book. Ortal Ben-Dayan presented six pages dedicated to Mizrahi art out of a two hundred-page book in a 2010 photo.

Colonial discourses project bisexuality onto racialized groups, associating them with savagery while reserving pure monosexuality for the West. An Israeli gay movie titled Baal Baal Lev featured a Mizrahi character named Marito whose body was objectified through a homosexual gaze reflecting colonial fantasies.

Taking on a marginalized political identity involves acknowledging personal oppression and hostility. Vicky Shiran wrote that a woman identifying as feminist or Mizrahi decries the social reality from a rebel's point of view and works to remove her chains. Bisexuality can be wielded as a defiant political tool against monosexism and kyriarchy, forcing you to examine your own oppressor status and privileges.

Bisexuality and Whiteness

Bisexuality is structurally a white, minority-world identity whose discourses often replicate colonial legacies and exclude racialized participants. Mainstream bisexual movements assume their spaces are naturally inclusive while remaining predominantly white and alienating to people of color.

At the 1990 National Bisexual Conference, despite nine sessions included in the People of Color workshop track, the event remained predominantly white. At the 2012 Israeli bisexual and pansexual conference in Tel Aviv, five presenters were Mizrahi, two were Russian-speakers, and twelve were Ashkenazi. Attendance remained overwhelmingly Ashkenazi despite intentional planning and free admission.

You must overcome default whiteness by changing specific community behaviors:

• create or utilize existing connections with Mizrahi, Russian-speakers', or Palestinian organizations, creating collaborative projects or hosting common meetings;
• increase accessibility in terms of discourse and language by explaining terms, using accessible language, and never speaking over people's heads;
• address and engage with people's lives and lived experiences rather than treating the standard as universal;
• organize workshops, talks, and lectures about race issues, writing about it in community media, blogs, and online groups.

8. Mainstream Activism and Bisexual Revolution

The mainstream gay movement, termed the GGGG movement, operates on homonormativity to cater to privileged individuals while assimilating into oppressive heteronormative structures. It focuses on the interests of white, middle-class, cisgender gay men. Mainstream bisexual activism has historically reduced its political demands to seeking a mere tagline inclusion within larger gay and lesbian organizations.

Mainstream gay and bisexual campaigns promote assimilationist goals like marriage and military service, whereas a true bisexual revolution demands system destruction and intersectional liberation.

Mykel Board's 1995 essay "Pimple No More" highlights how bisexuals beg to be added as a tagline at the end of titles. The campaign for same-sex marriage reinforces patriarchal, capitalist, and state-controlled structures. The fight for military service aligns the queer movement with American imperialism.

Mainstream Bi Activism and Assimilation

Critique of Marriage and Military

Towards a Bisexual Revolution

You can build a radical movement by following concrete steps:

• stand up for bisexual identities and the threat to normalcy they represent;
• fight for liberation rather than privilege and for system destruction rather than a place at the table;
• conduct grassroots work and develop a radical bisexual language;
• acknowledge shared experiences and address urgent material needs;
• provide safe spaces for learning, expression, and listening to counter isolation and depression;
• take the fight outside to the streets through organized groups, actions, protests, and rebellion;
• embrace the inauthenticity, impurity, and hybridity of bisexuality to pollute and dismantle binary categories;
• commit to feminism and dismantle patriarchy and dominant masculinities;
• actively incorporate trans-positive, gender-inclusive policies and confront cis bisexual privileges;
• deconstruct white privilege and transform the bi community into a racially inclusive space.

Conclusion

Bisexuality emerges as a powerful, disruptive political force that challenges monosexism, binary gender roles, and kyriarchy across all social structures. You can synthesize these insights by recognizing how bisexuality intersects with feminism, trans liberation, anti-racism, and deep systemic critique. Embracing hybridity and building radical coalitions allows you to move beyond assimilationist politics and confront the root causes of oppression.

You must enact this bisexual revolution through concrete daily practices and political commitments:

1. Reject monosexism by explicitly naming and validating bisexual identities, experiences, and desires in every personal and political space you inhabit.
2. Dismantle the gender binary and cissexism by actively supporting transgender liberation and decoupling gender presentation from sexual orientation assumptions.
3. Build intersectional solidarity by addressing racialization, classism, and white dominance within bisexual and queer movements.
4. Cultivate consent cultures and challenge biphobic sexual violence, rejecting the harmful trope that bisexual people are inherently predatory or untrustworthy.
5. Prioritize system destruction over mere inclusion, refusing to trade radical liberation for the privileges of marriage, military service, and normative assimilation.

10 Key Ideas

1. Monosexism operates as a structural system that presumes universal monosexuality, privileges monosexual people, and systematically punishes nonmonosexual individuals.
2. A radical epistemological approach examines why society views bisexuality as a threat and leverages that disruption to challenge oppressive power structures.
3. Replacing the discourse of privilege with the framework of passing allows a more complex understanding of power, hierarchies, and oppression in bisexual lives.
4. Female bisexuality threatens patriarchal gender binaries and triggers cultural anxieties around sexual choice, leading to high rates of biphobic sexual violence and internal backlash.
5. Scientific institutions reflect patriarchal and cissexist values by using flawed methodology and medicalized definitions to attempt to disprove male bisexuality.
6. Mainstream bisexual communities often perpetuate cissexism through binary definitions, gender essentialism, tokenism, and the erasure of nonbinary identities.
7. Racialization and bisexuality share foundational mechanics of erasure and orientalist projection, requiring bisexual movements to address internal whiteness and build intersectional alliances.
8. Mainstream gay and bisexual campaigns promote assimilationist goals like marriage and military service, whereas a true bisexual revolution demands system destruction and intersectional liberation.
9. You can build intersectional solidarity by addressing racialization, classism, and white dominance within bisexual and queer movements.
10. Embracing hybridity and building radical coalitions allows you to move beyond assimilationist politics and confront the root causes of oppression.