BiUK response to Stonewall bi consultation

Back in February, several of us from BiUK were involved in a consultation between Stonewall and the UK bisexual community about how they could improve their work around bisexuality. You can read Bisexuality Report author, and head of The Bisexual Index, Marcus Morgan’s summary of this hopeful day here.

Last month Stonewall published a report of that consultation which you can download here.

Here is BiUK’s response to Stonewall’s report, also downloadable as a pdf here.

CAMPAIGNING AGAINST BIPHOBIA

BiUK’s response to the outcome of Stonewall’s consultation with bi communities

1. BiUK remains supportive of Stonewall’s decision to consult with bi communities with a view to becoming more proactively engaged with challenging biphobia in the United Kingdom. We also welcome Stonewall’s acceptance that some of its actions over its first twenty five years, whilst claiming to represent the interests of bi people, often led to greater marginalisation and exclusion of people who identify as bisexual, or may have identified in this way had they not been made to feel unwelcome as bi within lesbian and gay communities and spaces.
2. BiUK was pleased to receive the short note prepared by Stonewall following its consultation session with around 40 bi activists and others in February 2015. Like others though, we regret that it took until late July for the note to appear, some three months after the promised circulation date of Easter.
3. In terms of the contents of that note and the actions Stonewall proposes to take internally and externally, we of course welcome any steps which will seek to challenge biphobia in L&G and straight communities and to enhance bi visibility within Stonewall and beyond.
4. In particular, we support Stonewall’s proposals to empower its staff to be bi allies and role models. We regret however that Stonewall has failed to acknowledge that at present none of its trustees or senior staff identify as bisexual, nor did it propose to take steps to rectify this situation. Stonewall has undertaken at least two trustee recruitment exercises in the last twelve months and on neither occasion did it identify that bi people were under/un-represented on its board. BiUK notes that this is in stark contrast to the efforts Stonewall has made to recruit both a trans trustee and senior staff member, which we nonetheless fully support.
5. We would also ask Stonewall to recognise the difficulty that is presented by asking comparatively junior staff to take the lead on engagement with bi communities. Whilst we welcome the fact that the staff coming to BiCon 2015 to continue Stonewall’s conversation with bi communities are bi identifying, and the engagement of the same staff in liaising with bi organisations, it is problematic that they are not in a position to commit Stonewall in policy and resource terms.
6. Turning to what Stonewall proposes to do externally, we welcome the initiatives identified in the note, particularly by empowering bi role models and campaigning against biphobia within lesbian and gay communities. Our deputy chair, Edward Lord, has already offered to assist Stonewall in securing some funding for this work and our chair, Meg John Barker, has made some content suggestions for the anti-biphobia campaign.
7. In supporting this work, however, we expect to see Stonewall pay more than just lip service to bi people. We would hope that graduates from the bi specific role models programme would be used by Stonewall in its work in schools and workplaces to ensure that Stonewall role models are more fully reflective of the wider LGBT community.
8. In terms of the proposals to hear, listen, and engage more with bi people, we look forward to hearing much more about how Stonewall proposes to make this a reality as we are yet to see any significant evidence of active engagement with bi communities. BiUK, as the UK’s national organisation for bi research and activism through its expert academic trustees and associates wants to reiterate its comprehensive and open offer to partner with Stonewall to ensure that its publications, campaigns and programmes are fully reflective of the needs and experiences of bi people and in line with the most up to date research data available.
9. We were disappointed that Stonewall’s most recent research-based report, Unhealthy Attitudes, did not make use of this offer. BiUK would certainly have emphasised the need to tease apart the data from LG and B people given what we know about how bi people generally suffer more in these areas, and how amalgamating data erases this difference and means that resources rarely get to bi people. It would also have been nice to see some reference to ‘The Bisexuality Report’ and to the recent Equality Network ‘Complicated?‘ report which dealt with very similar issues in the bi community specifically.
10. Finally, whilst we accept entirely that this will take time to get right, we are disappointed that the next report from Stonewall is not planned until late 2016, potentially almost two years since the first consultation event. We would urge Stonewall to consider an interim report in early 2016 and also recommend that Stonewall establishes a small bi advisory group to assist it to remain focused on speedy and effective delivery. We would naturally be willing to participate in such a group.

Dr Meg John Barker

Chair, BiUK

August 2015

LGBT history in the making: Stonewall bisexuality consultation

On Saturday 7th February several members of BiUK attended a historic event: the first consultation between Stonewall UK and bisexual communities. The day went very well and we were left very hopeful about possibilities for working together more closely in the future.

Marcus Morgan, from The Bisexual Index, has written a great summary of the day here.

New research on bisexual women’s mental health

Lisa Colledge writes:

On 14 January 2015, sexual health researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) published a new UK study in the Journal of Public Health showing worse mental health in UK bisexual women than lesbians, based on data from the Stonewall 2007 Women’s Health Survey. The link to the full paper (permanent open access) is here.

This paper was publicised in the following press release, which was sent to 40 media targets covering local, national and international general news (print, radio, television and online) plus general health, mental health and LGBT publications.

At the time of writing it had been picked up by 12 news websites (including Daily Mail Online), featured on the LSHTM news and Bi Community News websites, and sent via 20 Twitter accounts to more than 157,000 followers.

Bisexual women have worse mental health than lesbians in the UK

Largest UK survey of its kind finds bisexual women more likely to self-harm, have eating problems and feel depressed

Equal marriage: why we need equal civil partnerships too | Edward Lord

Good post on the place of bisexuality in equal marriage debates amongst other things.

http://edwardlord.org/2013/05/21/equal-marriage-why-we-need-equal-civil-partnerships-too/

Video of The Bisexuality Report launch

We now have a video of the launch event of The Bisexuality Report – with subtitles (thanks Jen!) Great to see speakers from the Government Equalities Office, Stonewall, and the Metro Centre commenting on what the report means to them.

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.

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.

Update on The Bisexuality Report

Things are going very well with The Bisexuality Report since its launch on February 15th.

The launch itself was a great success with attendees from many organisations, groups and political parties. The Metro Centre and Stonewall (who sponsored the event) gave great speeches about how useful the report would be, and the Government Equalities Office were extremely positive. We are now working with them (and BCN and The Bisexual Index) on five key recommendations to prioritise putting into practice.

So far there have been over 20,000 downloads of the report from the various places it is available online (here, on The Bisexual Index, and through the Open University)! Also, the American Institute of Bisexuality is keen to put the report on a free memory stick to give out at the various sexology conferences that are happening this year (along with the Stonewall report on bisexuality in the workplace and the San Francisco Bisexual Invisibility report). We hope to give the report out at BiReCon and the LGBT health summit as well.

The report also made it into various newspapers, magazines and radio programmes. We’re keeping a list of media reports here.