The Bisexuality Report: Out in Spanish!

Thanks to the wonderful Manuel Sebastia we now have a Spanish translation of The Bisexuality Report.

You can download El Informe sobre Bisexualidad, along with the original version of the report here.

You can also access Manuel’s translation of our guidelines for researching bisexuality here.

We hope that the translation proves useful and might prompt further discussion about the different situations of bisexual people and communities across the globe.

We also welcome further translations of the report which we’ll happily make available through the BiUK website.

Some people are bi

Today is international day against homophobia and transphobia but instead of the obvious post about the bi erasure going on in that title we’d like to celebrate a couple of bits of bi visibility that have happened this week.

First Stonewall introduced a facebook banner to add to their ‘some people are gay, get over it’ campaign. Good on you Stonewall!

Second, Amy Andre, the authors of Bisexual Health: An Introduction, is conducting a fascinating interview with researcher Lisa Diamond over at The Huffington Post.  Lisa is a committed bi ally and her work on sexual fluidity in women is really important for challenging fixed ideas about sexual ‘orientation’.

When Dr. Lisa Diamond gave a keynote speech at the recent BECAUSE conference, I just had to sit up and listen. As whipsmart as she is unapologetically outspoken, this University of Utah psychology professor has her finger on the pulse of human sexuality research — and the attention of homophobic and biphobic conservatives who try to twist her findings to further their own agenda. She’s the last person who’s going to take that lying down.

Dr. Diamond isn’t just the author of the groundbreaking book Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire. She’s also a lesbian, a self-identified ally to the bi community, and a social scientist who declares that bisexuals “represent the vast majority of individuals with same-sex attractions” and are the norm in the LGB (lesbian, gay, bi) population!

In this two-part interview I got a chance to learn more about Dr. Diamond’s research, her precedent-setting commitment to the truth about bisexual lives and lesbian desires, and how she stands up to bigots at the federal level. Here is part one:

Read more.

Where do we go from here? Addressing conflicts within LGBTQ etc. communities

Meg Barker reflects on recent debates about relations between bisexual and lesbian women in DIVA magazine, and considers wider issues of the ways in which we engage with such divisions within our communities.

The DIVA Article

Back in January Louise Carolin, one of the team at DIVA magazine, decided to write a piece about relationships between bisexual and lesbian women. She wanted to explore the fact that some lesbians are cautious about dating bisexual women, or even have exclusion criteria around bisexuality, and also about the sense of rejection and marginalisation experienced by bisexual women who come across such attitudes within lesbian communities, or from partners or potential partners.

Louise put a post up on the DIVA facebook page (January 18^th 2012) entitled ‘why won’t some lesbians date bi women?’ and asked for comments from both groups. The post got 102 responses altogether which included a diversity of views. Of the original 80 comments, the majority were from lesbians and bisexual women who said they hadn’t experienced such exclusions or that they had good relationships; or questioning why it should make a difference whether someone is left for a man or for a woman and challenging myths around bisexuality. These positive comments received several hundred ‘like’ responses. There were also some accounts of painful experiences of infidelity or rejection, and some examples of biphobia (such as claims that there is no such thing as a bisexual person, or that all bisexual people are untrustworthy). There were fewer of these than the positive comments, and they were ‘liked’ less by other readers, but they certainly stand out for a bisexual person reading the comments.

Louise also interviewed me, as one of the authors of The Bisexuality Report to talk about these responses and to reflect, as a relationship therapist, on potential ways forward for bisexual and lesbian women who do come up against these issues in their relationships.

Following the publication of the article there have been several blogs and online discussions complaining about it (including two thoughtful posts on blogwasred and one on mercury_pheonix’s livejournal). Glasgow LGBT students’ association has demanded that DIVA reconsider their policies and practices around bisexual inclusion. Interestingly, they’ve suggested that DIVA editors read The Bisexuality Report – the very report that prompted them to contact me in the first place.

Most of the commentators don’t have too many problems with the article itself (although I’ll address some that they do have below). Rather, their problem is with the way in which it the article is framed. Whilst the title of the article is ‘why do you have to be a heartbreaker?’ (which could refer to either the bisexual or lesbian women involved in such situations), the front cover strapline is ‘bye biphobia – how to overcome your fears and date a bisexual’ which clearly suggests that intended readers are lesbians rather than bisexual women, despite DIVA being described as a monthly magazine ‘for lesbians and bi women in the UK’. Commentators pointed out that this is exactly the kind of bi invisibility which has been linked to feelings of alienation amongst bisexual people in countless studies. They were also concerned with the biphobic views expressed by some of the readers whose experiences were included alongside the article, and (in the case of the Glasgow LGBT student association) with an earlier piece of satire in the same issue of the magazine sending up the stereotype of bisexual people being ‘paralyzed by indecision’ (which could perhaps be read either as pointing out the ridiculousness of such stereotypes and/or as perpetuating them).

Addressing such conflicts

I am very interested in these debates, not just because of the content – which has such relevance for bisexual visibility and for relationship conflict – but also because of the process of how the debates are playing out. These processes are reflective of so many conflicts that we have seen in recent years, within LGBTQ communities and more broadly, when issues of marginalisation, privilege and oppression are being discussed.

Interview with bi activist, Yemisi Ilesanmi

Very interesting interview with bisexual activist Yemisi Ilesanmi on the Sporah show:

 

New guidelines for working with sexual & gender minorities

The British Psychological Society have just published guidelines for psychologists working with sexual and gender minority clients (also of relevance to therapists, counsellors and other practitioners). The guidelines are freely downloadable and available to all.

The document includes guideline statements covering:

• The socio-political context and attitudes towards sexual and gender minorities
• Key issues in sexual and gender minority work
• Children and young people
• Schools and families
• Education and training
• Professional development

Regarding bisexuality, the guidelines (which were produced before the recent Bisexuality Report) says the following:

“Bisexuality can often be completely overlooked as a potential sexual identity because Western culture is still prone to see gender and sexuality as ‘dichotomous’ (you are either a man or a woman, you are either attracted to a man or a woman, see also section on gender minorities below) (Barker, 2007).Therefore, many people feel pushed towards a gay/lesbian or straight identity rather than feeling that bisexuality is a legitimate sexual identity in itself.

The Bisexual Index on relationship recognition

The Bisexual Index has written a very thoughtful piece on the place of bisexuals in same-sex marriage and civil partnership debates, calling for the law to change to recognise both ‘same-sex’ marriage and ‘opposite-sex’ civil partnerships, and exploring the reasons why bisexual people wanting recognition of partners of a different gender to themselves might well opt for civil partnerships over marriage if that was possible.

The post includes comments from OutRage! and Stonewall about the continued invisibility of bisexual people in their policies and activism on these matters, such as the use of terms like ‘gay marriage’ and ‘heterosexual civil partnership’ in OutRage!’s campaign, and Stonewall’s consideration of ‘opposite-sex’ civil partnerships not being within their remit (despite being an LGB organisation).

Quote from The Bisexual Index:

“The way the law is currently written does not mention sexuality, but instead the genders of the people. Why can’t the people campaigning for equality understand that the way to amend the law isn’t to talk about ‘gay vs. straight’ but instead to address the genders – remove the genders from the law and it’s not just gay and straight men and women who’ll have equal love, but all of us.

Equality isn’t saying ‘gay and straight people can marry’, or ‘same-sex and opposite-sex couples can marry’.
Equality is saying ‘people can marry’”

Read the full post here.

Queer lecture

Meg talking about the different meanings of queer at Birmingham University:

 

You can see the presentation here.

Queer prezi

There’s a prezi presentations from Meg here on what queer means and why it might be useful for practitioners and others to engage with it. It covers queer as an insult, a reclaimed word, a form of politics and a kind of theory.

Reasons we might usefully engage with queer include the way it opens up LGBT to various sexualities, genders, relationships and practices which are outside heteronormativity but don’t fit within LGBT, and the challenges it presents to binaries of gender and sexuality (man/woman, gay/straight). However, the associations that some may have with queer (due to their generation or culture, for example) as well as the potential it has to erase bisexuality, mean that it is worth being careful in the ways in which we employ queer.

BiReCon 2012 – Bisexuality and Mental Health: Call for Papers

Research suggests that bisexual people are more likely to experience depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicidality than lesbian, gay or heterosexual people. Biphobia and bisexual invisibility can mean that if bi people seek help from health professionals and therapists they are not always well supported. However it is also clear that many bisexual people experience benefits to their mental wellbeing from being bi, such as a sense of independence, self-awareness and authenticity and an ability to develop identities and relationships without restrictions. In this conference we aim to explore both mental health problems and mental wellbeing for bisexual people.

BiReCon is a conference for anyone with an interest in contributing to, or finding out about, current work on bisexuality.

BiCon 2011 Research Workshop

Originally published in Bi Community News, Oct 2011, issue 109

At BiCon this year BiUK held a workshop to talk about the various projects we’ve been working on during the last year. It felt great to be able to completely fill a workshop with our activities, and a good sign that BiUK is going from strength to strength following its formation in 2007. Here’s a quick overview of what we covered in the workshop. Over subsequent issues of BCN we will fill you in with more details on all of the projects.

BiUK History
BiUK formed in 2007 at a stage when the number of active people researching bisexuality in the UK reached something of a critical mass. A group of us had just had a paper about the BiCon survey accepted by the international Journal of Bisexuality, and Libby had talked us into putting on a research event prior to BiCon 2008 (which she cunningly named BiReCon). We’d been running an email list for some years which had evolved from its original yahoo list format, BiBlio, into the official JISCmail Bi Research Group. At that time we put up a small website to collect together all these things and put together a list of official ‘founder members’.