Bi Visibility Day: its history, and bi trans and non-binary lives

Bi Visibility Day falls on 23 September every year, a Wednesday in 2026, and closes Bi Awareness Week, which starts on 16 September. Three American bi activists started it in 1999, under the name Celebrate Bisexuality Day, for people who get read as straight or gay depending on who they happen to be standing next to. For bi people who are also trans or non-binary, that misreading can happen twice over, and this article looks at both.

When is Bi Visibility Day?

The date is fixed: 23 September, whatever the day of the week. By the count of the Bi Visibility Day website, 2026 is the 28th year it has been marked. It is the last day of Bi Awareness Week, also written #BiWeek, which runs from 16 to 23 September. GLAAD co-founded the first #BiWeek with BiNet USA in 2014, and now marks it with the Bisexual Resource Center and Still Bisexual.

It has had several names. It began as International Celebrate Bisexuality Day and has also been called Bi Pride Day and Bi Day. The name most people use now came from the UK, from Jen Yockney, who has run the Bi Visibility Day website since 2001. She chose bi rather than bisexuality on purpose, so that the day would include people who are biromantic as well as those who are bisexual, for example asexual people who want romantic relationships regardless of gender. GLAAD calls it Celebrate Bisexuality+ Day, with the plus standing for the wider bi+ umbrella: pansexual, fluid, queer, no label.

The same website lists three related dates for people under that umbrella: Pan Visibility Day on 24 May, Omni Visibility Day on 6 July and Polysexual and Polyromantic Visibility Day on 26 July. If you want all of these in order, with the trans dates, our LGBTQ+ awareness calendar lists them month by month.

Where it comes from

The founders were Wendy Curry of Maine, Michael Page of Florida and Gigi Raven Wilbur of Texas. There had been bi celebration days before, but according to the Bi Visibility Day website this was the first that went beyond a one-off and was marked again the following years.

The date is Wilbur's birthday. Curry later recalled that it started with a suggestion, probably Wilbur's, made at one of the annual bi conventions: that they should throw a party. The three wanted a September date partly because they admired Freddie Mercury, who was born that month. The first celebration is usually placed at the world conference of the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), held in Johannesburg from 19 to 26 September 1999. ILGA's own report on that conference does not mention it, so that detail rests on later accounts. In its first year the day was marked in the United States, the UK, Canada, Japan and South Africa; the website now counts more than 30 countries.

Page had designed the bisexual flag the year before, in 1998. He explained that most of the bi people he had spoken with felt no connection to the rainbow flag, the pink and black triangles or the lambda, and needed symbols of their own. If those older symbols are unfamiliar, our guide to LGBTQ+ symbols explains them.

Wilbur is intersex, and has spoken publicly about being both intersex and bisexual. In a 2008 interview with the Houston magazine OutSmart, Wilbur put it this way: "When we can see gender as a spectrum, then we can be the gender we are and celebrate in our diversity."

What the day is for

The founders were clear about the problem they wanted to solve. Wilbur said: "Ever since the Stonewall rebellion, the gay and lesbian community has grown in strength and visibility. The bisexual community also has grown in strength but in many ways we are still invisible." Asked what the biggest threat to bi people was, Curry answered in one word, invisibility, and explained that most people look at a couple and decide they are straight or gay from the combination of apparent genders, so bi people fly under the radar, many stay isolated, and the stereotypes go unchallenged.

That invisibility sits oddly with the numbers. In Gallup's 2025 polling of more than 13,000 adults in the United States, more than half of those who identified as LGBTQ+ said they were bisexual, about 5 per cent of all adults. GLAAD describes bi+ people as the largest group in the LGBTQ community.

They are also the least likely to be out. In a 2019 analysis of a 2017 Stanford University survey, the Pew Research Center found that only 19 per cent of bisexual adults said all or most of the important people in their lives knew, compared with three quarters of gay and lesbian adults. In Britain, a YouGov survey of more than 5,000 LGBT people, carried out for Stonewall in 2017 and published as a bi report on Bi Visibility Day 2020, found that 20 per cent of bi people were out to all of their family, against 63 per cent of gay men and lesbians, and that 42 per cent had hidden or disguised being bi at work for fear of discrimination.

Jen Yockney, in the Bi Visibility Day media release for 2026, puts the result in one line: "Where lesbians and gay men have one closet to escape, many bi people find that leaving one closet just leads to being put in another." What the word bisexual means, and why bi has never meant two, is in our glossary entry for bisexual, along with the everyday shape of bi erasure.

Bi erasure when you are trans or non-binary

Curry's point about couples has a second layer for trans people. The glance that decides whether a couple is straight or gay is also deciding what gender each of them is, and when it gets someone's gender wrong, it gets the orientation wrong with it. A bi trans man holding hands with his boyfriend may be taken for a straight couple by someone who misgenders him, for a gay couple by someone who does not, and for a bi man by almost nobody.

The older assumption was that trans people and bi people were two separate groups. Martin Rawlings-Fein, a bi trans man and former lead organiser of the Bay Area Bisexual+ and Pansexual Network, told NBC News in 2020 that in the 1990s people were "really confused" that a trans person could be anything other than straight, or a bisexual person anything other than cisgender. When he looked at the bi people around him then, he said, a lot of them were trans or genderqueer. Bi organising had already said as much on paper: the Bisexual Manifesto, published in 1990 by the Bay Area magazine Anything That Moves, told readers not to assume that bisexuality was binary, and added: "In fact, don't assume that there are only two genders."

The numbers point the same way. In a US study of a national probability sample of 274 trans adults, surveyed between 2016 and 2018 and published in 2023, bisexual was the orientation identity chosen most often (18.9 per cent), just ahead of queer and straight. Among the bi respondents to Stonewall's survey in Britain, 16 per cent identified as trans. And Gallup reports that the small share of US adults who identify as non-binary overwhelmingly identify as LGBTQ+, particularly as bisexual or transgender.

What bi trans people run into is less a lack of numbers than a lack of belief. Stonewall's Bi Report, drawn from that survey, notes that trans bi people are sometimes invalidated when others question how their bi identity fits with their gender identity, as if one of the two had to give way. Some bi trans people also use pansexual or queer, or change words depending on the room, and the day is theirs too. AC Dumlao, a trans non-binary advocate, told NBC News that being out as bisexual was a way to show people that "there's no one way to be bisexual".

How people mark it

Most of it is local and social. The Bi Visibility Day website expects more than 250 events in 2026, and its listings so far come from the UK, the United States, Belgium, Switzerland, Australia, France, Canada and the Netherlands. They include:

• Socials and meetups, from picnics and hikes to evenings in bi-friendly bars, and speed dating nights.
• Talks and panels, film screenings, poetry readings and book clubs.
• Marches and conferences. In 2025 there were bi pride marches in France and Germany and a conference in Belgium, and the city of Boston issued a proclamation.
• Flags. Public buildings fly the pink, purple and blue flag, and workplace LGBT staff networks hold themed meetings.

Online, GLAAD suggests spending the week learning bi history and following bi+ organisations such as the Bisexual Resource Center, Still Bisexual, BiPlus Organizing US and the American Institute of Bisexuality. If there is nothing listed near you, a local LGBTQ+ centre or trans group is the quickest way to find out whether anything is planned, and how to find a trans support group has starting points.

Marking it quietly, or not at all

Visibility days lean on being seen, and being seen as bi, trans or both is not safe or wanted for everyone. As our guide to trans awareness days puts it, visibility is a choice, not a duty.

There are ways in that tell nobody anything. Pink, purple and blue can be worn as an ordinary outfit that only people who know the flag will read; our Pride outfit ideas has combinations. You can read bi history, go to an event that is open to allies as well, or send a message to a bi friend rather than posting in public.

Be careful with the public version. A like, a share or a new profile picture can reach people you have not told, and if you are not out as trans to everyone, a post about orientation can start conversations about gender that you did not plan to have. If that matters, keep it to private messages. The date will come round again next year.

If you are not bi

Stonewall's Bi Report includes advice from bi people themselves, and most of it takes no effort:

• Believe people. Someone who has mostly dated one gender, or been with one partner for years, can still be bi.
• Make no assumptions from partners. A current or past partner does not define anyone's orientation. Follow the words people use for themselves.
• Watch catch-all words. Calling a mixed group gay erases the bi people in it.
• Do not interrogate. Pinning down someone's identity with intrusive questions is harmful, and so is outing them.

With bi trans and non-binary people, add one more: do not treat someone's gender, or their transition, as the thing that decides their orientation. Whether anyone's attractions shifted along the way is theirs to share or keep, and not a question they owe you an answer to.