Lived Experiences: Young Bi+ Women of Color

Content Warnings: biphobia, racism

Written by Emma Louise Constable

The lived experience of being bi+ holds a lot of difficulties, especially with the rampant rate of biphobia and bi-erasure surfacing. For young bi+ women of color, spaces are complex and sometimes impossible to navigate. I wanted to use this article to highlight the experiences of young bi+ women of color and to bring to light the fight they go through daily.

In the article "A Listening Guide Analysis of Lesbian and Bisexual Young Women of Color's Experiences of Sexual Objectification" by Jennifer F. Chmieleski, the experiences of these women are brought to the limelight. Take, for instance, the story of Michele (a fake name), a black bisexual+ high schooler. She recounts the times she was caught kissing her girlfriend in the hall, and her teachers asked her if she was out to her parents and reacted in a shock-filled way, treating her like a spectacle. However, when she got caught kissing her then-boyfriend, she was told not to do it again. Her teachers were then worried about her getting pregnant and projecting racist and classist ideologies onto her romantic life.

Michele also expresses the issues she experiences with her peers in school. While in the school locker room, her straight friends, who know that she is bisexual, fear that she will be attracted to them, so they avoid her in the locker room. She feels judged, but she feels like she cannot speak up about the judgment for fear that she will come across as angry and therefore confirm the racist stereotype of "...loud Black women...[which then] seems to shape how she feels she can respond to these sexualization experiences."

Many of the bisexual+ participants of this article expressed that they avoided or set boundaries with young cis straight men that did not take bisexuality seriously. These men also only showed interest in these participants because they fetishized bisexual women and only wanted to fulfill a fantasy. Lizbeth-Goying talked about only wanting to date young women or bi+ young men instead.

These experiences show that biphobia and lack of education about bi+ people affect people who know bi+ people. Teachers treating their students as spectacles and partners treating their bi+ significant others as objects of fetishization solidifies that young bi+ women of color are seen as objects by most people. Not only do these young women have to deal with biphobia, but also harmful stereotypes of hypersexuality and anger, and how these young women have to go through hoops to go through their daily lives.

Jennifer F. Chmieleski, https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-06189-001