Bisexual

Bisexual means being attracted to more than one gender. That is the definition the word has carried for decades, and it is worth stating plainly because almost every argument about bisexuality starts by getting it wrong.

The common misreading is that bi means two, and therefore men and women only, and therefore a word that writes nonbinary people out. Bisexual organising has included nonbinary people since the 1990s, and the wording most bi communities settled on is attraction to genders like your own and genders unlike your own, which has never been a count of two.

It says nothing about balance. A bisexual person is not required to be equally drawn to everyone, to have dated across the range, or to be attracted to more than one gender at any given moment. The orientation describes a capacity, not a quota.

Bi erasure is the name for what happens next: a bisexual woman with a boyfriend gets read as straight, with a girlfriend as a lesbian, and either way the word disappears. It is why so many bi people keep saying it after nobody asked.

For trans people it does a particular job. Bisexual does not require you to have settled your own gender before you can use it, which is one reason it stayed in use while newer words arrived alongside it.

Bisexual does not exclude nonbinary people

The bi in bisexual is read as a count, and from there the word is declared outdated in favour of pansexual. The history does not support it: bisexual communities have included nonbinary people for as long as the current vocabulary has existed, and many nonbinary people are themselves bisexual.

The useful distinction between bisexual and pansexual is not inclusiveness. Bisexual describes the range of the attraction; pansexual describes the role gender plays inside it. Those are two different questions, which is why plenty of people answer yes to both.

Saying it well