Bisexuality describes attraction to more than one gender, and it is considerably more common than many people assume. U.S. survey data show that the share of adults reporting both male and female sexual partners has roughly tripled over the past three decades, and bisexual identification is especially prevalent among younger adults. Yet bisexual people face a distinctive set of challenges: higher rates of mental health difficulties, stigma from straight and gay communities alike, and a tendency to be overlooked in research that lumps all sexual minorities together.
Identity, Attraction, and Behavior Are Three Different Things
One of the most consistent findings in sexuality research is that the label someone chooses, the people they find attractive, and the people they actually have sex with often don’t line up neatly. A study of adolescents found that among those who reported at least one marker of nonexclusive heterosexuality, no single question captured the full picture. Asking about attraction identified about 71% of this group, asking about identity captured 52%, and asking about behavior captured only 31%.1PubMed. Concordance and discrepancy in sexual identity, attraction, and behavior among adolescents In raw numbers, more students who called themselves heterosexual reported same-gender attraction than students who identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.
This gap persists into adulthood. In a study of men who have sex with men in Vancouver, about 15% identified as bisexual, but a third reported attraction to both men and women, and nearly a quarter had recent sexual activity with partners of more than one gender.2PubMed Central. Sexual orientation measurement, bisexuality, and mental health in a sample of men who have sex with men in Vancouver, Canada The practical takeaway is that bisexuality, however you measure it, is broader than the number of people who use the word “bisexual” to describe themselves.
A Sharp Demographic Shift
Bisexual identification has grown rapidly in recent years, particularly among younger adults and women. Data from the General Social Survey show that among respondents surveyed in 2012–2018, about 9.3% reported sexual partners of both sexes since age 18, up from 3.1% in the 1989–1994 waves. Women were roughly twice as likely as men to identify as bisexual (3.7% versus 1.6%), and over 6% of 18- to 29-year-olds identified that way, compared with fewer than 2% of those over 40.3PubMed. The Rise of Bisexuality: U.S. Representative Data Show an Increase Over Time in Bisexual Identity and Persons Reporting Sex with Both Women and Men
Whether this reflects more people experiencing bisexual attraction or more people feeling comfortable saying so is impossible to fully separate. It’s almost certainly both. Growing cultural acceptance lowers the cost of disclosing an identity that once carried severe social penalties, and social environments influence how people interpret and label their own desires. Either way, bisexual people now represent the largest segment of the broader LGBTQ population in many national surveys.
Stigma from Two Directions
Bisexual people face a form of prejudice that is, in some ways, structurally unique. The concept of monosexism, the assumption that people should only be attracted to one gender, runs through both straight and gay or lesbian communities.4PubMed Central. Internalized Binegativity, LGBQ+ Community Involvement, and Definitions of Bisexuality Bisexual people can absorb negative messages from both sides, internalizing doubt about whether their identity is “real.” Research has found that the discrimination bisexual people perceive from the heterosexual community is, on average, somewhat higher than what they perceive from the gay and lesbian community, though both are meaningful sources of stress.5Journal of Bisexuality. Between a Gay and a Straight Place: Bisexual Individuals’ Experiences with Monosexism
The stereotypes bisexual people encounter tend to cluster around a few themes. A qualitative study of British bisexual women identified recurring accusations: that bisexuality is just a phase on the way to a “fully realized” gay or straight identity, that bisexual people are confused or immature, that they are inherently unfaithful, and that they are incapable of monogamy. The women in the study rejected these characterizations, noting that they did not reflect their actual experiences and that the stereotypes made them feel invisible in both LGBTQ and mainstream spaces.6Feminism & Psychology. Bisexual women’s understandings of social marginalisation: ‘The heterosexuals don’t understand us but nor do the lesbians’
This two-sided marginalization has real consequences. When a bisexual person is in a relationship that appears straight-passing or gay-passing, people around them often assume the relationship reveals the “real” orientation. That erasure makes it harder to maintain a visible identity and to find community support, which feeds directly into the mental health patterns described below.
Mental Health Disparities
A substantial body of research shows that bisexual people experience worse mental health outcomes than both heterosexual and gay or lesbian populations. Reviews of the literature have concluded that there is strong evidence of increased risk for mental health and substance use difficulties among bisexual individuals.7PubMed Central. Bisexuality, minority stress, and health This isn’t simply a matter of being a sexual minority. When researchers compared bisexual people directly with lesbians and gay men, bisexual participants showed higher levels of depression and anxiety. The reasons pointed to identity-specific stressors: greater uncertainty about their sexual identity, a stronger tendency to conceal their orientation, and a weaker sense of connection to the broader LGBT community.8Journal of Affective Disorders. Bisexual individuals are at greater risk of poor mental health than lesbians and gay men: The mediating role of sexual identity stress at multiple levels
That weaker community connection deserves attention. Gay and lesbian communities have built extensive networks of support, social spaces, and political organizations over decades. Bisexual people can sometimes access these, but the binegativity described above means that access often comes with friction. And because many bisexual people are in different-gender relationships at any given time, they may feel they don’t “belong” in queer spaces, or may not seek them out at all. The result is a population that is large in number but socially fragmented.
Intimate Partner Violence
One of the starkest health disparities facing bisexual people involves intimate partner violence. A systematic scoping review found that every study it examined reported higher rates of IPV for bisexual victims compared with heterosexual people, and several found elevated rates compared with other sexual minorities as well.9PubMed Central. Risk and Protective Factors for Intimate Partner Violence Against Bisexual Victims: A Systematic Scoping Review Risk factors included internalized stigma, discrimination, negative childhood experiences, and partner gender. Self-identifying as bisexual, not just having partners of more than one gender, appeared to carry additional risk in some studies, suggesting that the social meaning of the identity itself matters.
Partner attitudes play a direct role. A study of bisexual people in China found that partner binegativity, hostility or prejudice from a romantic partner directed at bisexuality, was linked to IPV victimization, particularly among bisexual women. Different-gender heterosexual partners showed the highest levels of binegativity, and this negativity statistically explained part of the link between partner type and violence for bisexual women.10Journal of Marriage and Family. Partner Gender and Sexual Orientation, Partner Binegativity, and Intimate Partner Violence Victimization Among Chinese Bisexual Individuals
National crime data from the United States paint a similarly concerning picture. Bisexual women showed high rates of violent victimization across racial and ethnic groups. Hispanic and White bisexual women faced roughly eleven times the odds of violent victimization compared with their straight counterparts in that data.11PLOS ONE. Violent victimization at the intersections of sexual orientation, gender identity, and race: National Crime Victimization Survey, 2017–2019 These numbers are striking even in the context of sexual minority research, where elevated victimization rates are unfortunately common.
Substance Use Patterns
Bisexual people also show elevated rates of problematic alcohol and drug use. A meta-analysis of over 100 studies found that the prevalence of heavy episodic drinking was about 30% among bisexual people, compared with roughly 26% among gay and lesbian individuals and 21% among heterosexual people.12PubMed. Disparities in alcohol use and heavy episodic drinking among bisexual people: A systematic review, meta-analysis, and meta-regression Bisexual men, in particular, report higher rates of alcohol and drug use than both heterosexual and gay men.13PubMed Central. Bi+ Men’s Explanations for Substance Use Disparities in Their Community Among women, all sexual minority subgroups show higher rates of substance use disorders than heterosexual women, but bisexual women are consistently near the top of these rankings.14PubMed Central. Sexual Orientation Disparities in Substance Use: Investigating Social Stress Mechanisms in a National Sample
When researchers ask bisexual men why these disparities exist, the answers circle back to the same social stressors: isolation, the strain of managing an identity that is disbelieved or invisible, and the lack of community-specific support. Substance use, in this framing, is not mysterious. It tracks the same stress pathways that explain the mental health disparities.
Healthcare and the Workplace
Bisexual people report worse experiences in healthcare settings than you might expect. A qualitative study of lesbian and bisexual women found that providers frequently defaulted to heterosexual assumptions about patients’ sexual practices, which compromised care. Incorrect assumptions about who a patient sleeps with can lead to missed screenings, irrelevant advice, and a patient who doesn’t come back.15PubMed Central. Healthcare Experiences of Underrepresented Lesbian and Bisexual Women: A Focus Group Qualitative Study For bisexual people, the problem is compounded by the fact that disclosure itself can be awkward or unwelcome. A bisexual woman in a relationship with a man may reasonably wonder whether telling her doctor is worth the effort, given that it may invite confusion or irrelevant questions.
The workplace picture is similarly uneven. A national study found that sexual minorities overall reported lower job quality than straight workers across many measures, but bisexual people reported the lowest job quality of any group. They were more likely to report job insecurity (about 15% versus 8% for straight workers and 10% for gay and lesbian workers), overqualification, job mismatch, and a low sense of belonging at work. They also reported the highest levels of discrimination and humiliating behavior.16PubMed Central. Job quality and precarious employment among lesbian, gay, and bisexual workers: A national study These findings sit uneasily with the common perception that bisexual people, especially those in different-gender relationships, benefit from “passing privilege.” Whatever advantage comes from being perceived as straight in casual interactions, it doesn’t appear to translate into workplace wellbeing.
Bisexual Versus Pansexual
The growth in bisexual identification has happened alongside the emergence of newer labels like pansexual, queer, and fluid. The distinction between bisexual and pansexual is a frequent source of confusion and occasional tension. In general usage, “pansexual” emphasizes attraction regardless of gender, while “bisexual” historically implied attraction to two or more genders. In practice, many people use the terms interchangeably, and the boundaries are more cultural than clinical.
Research from New Zealand found that pansexual-identified participants were younger, more likely to be transgender or nonbinary, more likely to be from the indigenous Māori ethnic group, and more politically liberal than bisexual-identified participants. They also reported higher psychological distress.17PubMed. Comparing Pansexual- and Bisexual-Identified Participants on Demographics, Psychological Well-Being, and Political Ideology in a New Zealand National Sample These differences suggest that while the two identities overlap in their broad definition of multi-gender attraction, the communities that gravitate toward each label differ in meaningful ways. The umbrella term “bi+” has become common in research to capture the full range of plurisexual identities without forcing a distinction that many people don’t experience sharply.
How Intersecting Identities Shape the Experience
Bisexuality doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Race, gender identity, and cultural background all shape how a person’s bisexual identity is received and experienced. Research on sexual minority women found that the relationship between gender expression and minority stress differed dramatically by race. Among White sexual minority women, more masculine presentation was associated with higher levels of victimization and discrimination. Among Black and Latina sexual minority women, the pattern was reversed: masculinity was linked to lower levels of those same outcomes.18PubMed Central. Gender, Race, and Minority Stress Among Sexual Minority Women: An Intersectional Approach Findings like these make it clear that you can’t describe “the bisexual experience” as a single story.
People who hold multiple marginalized identities, such as being both biracial and bisexual, face overlapping forms of erasure. A qualitative study of biracial/multiracial bisexual adults identified recurring themes: the experience of “passing” in ways that made both identities invisible, pressure to simplify complex identities to fit into existing categories, and navigating queerphobia and racial prejudice simultaneously.19PubMed Central. Beyond the Boundaries: Exploring the Identity-Related Experiences of Biracial/Multiracial and Bisexual Adults For people in these intersections, the demand to “pick a side” applies to more than just their sexuality.
Fluidity and Stability of Attraction
A common misconception is that bisexuality is inherently unstable, a waypoint between straight and gay. Research tells a more nuanced story. A study that tracked both short-term and long-term patterns in sexual attraction found that bisexually attracted individuals did recollect larger changes in their attractions since adolescence and showed more day-to-day variation in attraction to their “less-preferred” gender, compared with people who were exclusively attracted to one sex. But the variation was in degree, not direction. Bisexual people didn’t “become” straight or gay over time. Women’s attractions showed less day-to-day stability than men’s across all orientations, consistent with the broader concept of female sexual fluidity. Both gender and bisexuality influenced fluidity independently.20PubMed. Stability of Sexual Attractions Across Different Timescales: The Roles of Bisexuality and Gender
What this means in plain terms: a bisexual person’s balance of attraction may shift over weeks, months, or years. Some days they may feel more drawn to one gender, and a year later the emphasis might tilt differently. This is not evidence of confusion or indecision. It’s a feature of how multi-gender attraction actually works in people’s lives. The stereotype that bisexuality is a phase confuses the variability within an orientation with the absence of one.
Bisexual Parents and Family Life
As bisexual identification has grown, so has research on bisexual people as parents. One emerging finding is that the salience of a bisexual identity often declines once a person is in a long-term relationship and raising children, particularly in different-gender relationships. Bisexual parents in those relationships may find it irrelevant or uncomfortable to “come out” amid the daily rhythms of parenthood, where conversations about orientation rarely arise naturally.21Current Opinion in Psychology. LGBTQ-parent families: Diversity, intersectionality, and social context This doesn’t mean their bisexuality has disappeared. It means the social context rewards silence, and the costs of visibility can feel higher when children are involved.
The result is a kind of paradox: bisexual parents may be among the most “invisible” members of the broader LGBTQ community at precisely the life stage when social support matters most. Their needs don’t map cleanly onto the parenting experiences of either heterosexual or same-sex couples, and LGBTQ family resources often focus on same-sex parent households. Building support networks that actually serve bisexual parents may require acknowledging that family structures don’t sort neatly into two categories any more than sexual orientation does.
Same-Sex Behavior Across the Animal Kingdom
Debates about whether bisexuality is “natural” sometimes invoke the animal kingdom, and the evidence there is extensive. A large-scale expert survey on mammals found that over three-quarters of the species studied by respondents showed same-sex sexual behavior, and for nearly 40% of those species, there were no prior published reports of the behavior.22PLoS ONE. Same-sex sexual behaviour among mammals is widely observed, yet seldomly reported: Evidence from an online expert survey The gap between observation and publication is itself revealing: researchers frequently witness the behavior but don’t collect data on it or write it up, suggesting a reporting bias in the scientific literature.
Among non-human primates specifically, a study covering nearly 500 species found same-sex sexual behavior documented in 59 of them. The behavior was more common in species with complex social structures and hierarchies, and environmental pressures like food scarcity and predation risk played an indirect role by shaping social complexity. The researchers concluded that same-sex behavior in primates is context-dependent and shaped by the interplay of ecological, life history, and social factors.23PubMed. Ecological and social pressures drive same-sex sexual behaviour in non-human primates None of this “explains” human bisexuality, which involves identity, culture, and self-concept in ways that animal behavior does not. But it does dismantle the notion that exclusive heterosexuality is some kind of biological default from which all other patterns are deviations.