#monosexual

In the mid-1890s, French sexologists discussed indifférent(e)s—people whose sexual desires were equally or indifferently directed toward men and women. Individuals spoke of no strong preference or the ability to choose either sex freely. This encouraged into a developing theory that human sexuality might pass through an undifferentiated phase during adolescence, where sexual orientation wasn’t yet fixed.

Soon after German researchers developed terminology for those with balanced or alternating attractions, calling the phenomenon “mental hermaphroditism.” They debated whether bisexuality was innate or shaped by environment, and categorized sexual temperaments into hetero, homo, and bisexual types.

Around 1900, Magnus Hirschfeld (a German sexologist) began surveying sexual orientation empirically, finding bisexual attraction more common than homosexuality in groups. He identified bisexuals as a distinct “third group,” even though he never drew clear lines between bisexuality and other sexual types. This helped solidify bisexuality as a constitutional orientation, even though many people did not believe in it.

At the time, one of the leading theories of sexuality was “inversion.” According to inversion theory, gay men and lesbians were essentially the “opposite sex” on the inside—gay men were seen as inwardly feminine, lesbians as inwardly masculine. This theory didn’t separate gender identity from sexual orientation, and it helped create harmful ideas still around today: like the belief that all gay men are effeminate or that trans women are “really just gay men.”

Inversion also erased bisexuality. The idea of being attracted to more than one gender didn’t fit the model. When bisexuality was mentioned, it often referred to intersex anatomy (then called “hermaphroditism”), and bisexual desire was labeled “psychosexual hermaphroditism”—a theory that said the “male part” of a bisexual person liked women, while the “female part” liked men.

The logic was both binary and androgynous at the same time. It treated bisexuals as split in two, reinforcing the idea that desire had to come from a male or female “core,” and bisexual people just had both. Even though these theories were full of rigid gender roles and heteronormativity, they accidentally carved out a kind of “third space”—not a liberating one, but a space where the boundaries of gender and desire got blurry.

In this same period, intersex babies were being operated on to “correct” their genitals and force them into one of the binary sexes. Bisexual people weren’t physically altered, but we were (and are) socially pressured to choose sides—to stop being “confusing,” to commit to one gender, one label, one identity. Both intersex bodies and bisexual identities have been treated like medical emergencies that need resolving. (Edit: I should mention that intersex individuals are still medically abused and operated on, even today. When I wrote “in the same period” my sentence wasn’t meant to imply they were exclusive to that period—just that they were happening during that time, and that they were similar to the medical practices happening specifically in that time in concerns of bisexuality)

Freud (of course…) played a major role in how bisexuality got talked about in the 20th century. He believed everyone was born bisexual, desiring (…Freud bro please) both parents, and that “normal” development required repressing that and becoming heterosexual. If you failed to repress those desires “correctly,” you became homosexual. Bisexuality itself wasn’t seen as a lasting orientation—it was a temporary phase in early childhood, something to grow out of. This made ideas like: Everyone/nobody is bisexual, bisexuality is immature or greedy, bisexuality is a passing phase where someone hasn’t found their true sexuality.

In 1948, Alfred Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, introducing the Kinsey Scale—a 0 to 6 scale measuring how heterosexual or homosexual someone was. He said the midpoint was bisexual. Kinsey’s research showed that many people had experiences with more than one gender, which broke the idea of fixed categories. He was one of the first to treat bisexuality as a real ongoing sexual orientation, though his scale still only included men and women—it didn’t account for nonbinary people or different kinds of attraction (like romantic vs. sexual). Kinsey’s work helped people see sexuality as a spectrum. But it also created a problem: if everyone is on a scale between gay and straight, then bisexuality gets flattened—reduced to a statistical midpoint or erased as its own identity.

Bisexuality is often framed as being “half-gay, half-straight,” as though a bisexual person is split down the middle or only partly part of any community. This framing assumes that bisexuality is a diluted version of something else rather than its own full experience of desire. It implies that bisexual people are not “fully queer” unless they’re in a same-gender relationship, or not “really queer at all” if they’re dating someone of another gender.

This not only denies bisexual people autonomy over their own identity, it also feeds into the idea that who you’re with defines who you are—turning bisexuality into a transitional state between two “real” sexualities, rather than a real one itself.

For most of the 20th century, bisexual people were talked about but not listened to. White cishet male doctors and psychologists had the power to define what bisexuality was, while bisexual people were often just research subjects, not voices. For decades, official diagnostic manuals like the DSM failed to recognize bisexuality as a distinct orientation, omitting it or including it under broader categories of ‘sexual deviation.’

Medical attempts to “correct” bisexuality emerged, including experimental hormonal treatments and surgeries, with mixed success. Psychoanalysts, meanwhile, proposed that bisexuality was a fundamental human condition, with monosexuality seen as rare or neurotically suppressed. These perspectives influenced how bisexuality was perceived—as either a stage to overcome or an inherent dual attraction.

Our identities were created and theorized without our input. This happened to a lot of marginalized groups—especially people of color, women, intersex people, disabled people, etc.

But eventually, bisexual people began reclaiming the term. Inspired by the growing gay liberation movement in the 1970s, bisexual activists started organizing their own spaces.

Brenda Howard (a bisexual activist) organized the first Pride March in New York and is celebrated as the “Mother of Pride.” Groups like the San Francisco Bisexual Center and the Boston Bisexual Women’s Network were founded in the late 1970s and early ’80s, which made visible bi spaces. These groups pushed back against the idea that bisexuals were just “half gay” or “not gay enough.”

Still, even in queer spaces bisexuals faced skepticism. During the AIDS crisis in the 1980s bisexual men were unfairly scapegoated as vectors spreading HIV to the heterosexual population, which deepened stigma. Inside gay and lesbian communities bisexual people were treated with distrust—seen as flaky, privileged, or attention-seeking. Many bisexual people felt pressure to identify as gay or straight, depending on their current partner, just to be taken seriously and live as who they truly are. Legally, bisexual people were rarely recognized as a separate group and faced the same criminalization/discrimination as gay and lesbian people, yet their experiences were frequently erased in political advocacy and legal challenges.

In the 1990s the bisexual movement saw a resurgence. Books like Bi Any Other Name (1991) brought together personal stories and essays from bisexual people and widespread bisexuality in thought and visibility. Activists also began updating the language of bisexuality, expanding it beyond “both men and women” to include attraction to more than one gender (not necessarily equally, and not necessarily in the same way)—This shift helped make bisexuality more inclusive of non-binary trans people, and for fluidity in attraction.

In the early 2000s and beyond, bisexuality gained more visibility with the rise of the internet and social media, which created new platforms for bisexual people to share their stories, connect globally, and challenge stereotypes. Bisexual activism expanded to address unique issues faced by bisexual people, including bi erasure, biphobia, and the persistent stigma both within and outside queer spaces.

Medically and psychologically, bisexuality is no longer widely viewed as an immature phase or a transitional state as it was throughout much of the 20th century: modern sexology and psychology explore the spectrum of human sexuality. Researchers recognize that attraction can be multi-dimensional—encompassing sexual/romantic/emotional, and aesthetic elements that vary widely among individuals.

But all this is from a Western history perspective because it was mostly white, minority-world researchers (particularly in Europe and US) who documented, categorized, and theorized bisexuality. These understandings come out of Western medical, psychological, and scientific traditions.