Am I Bi Enough?

Content note: this post might be very confusing for straight people. Sorry, buddy, I can’t help you. This isn’t for you. 

Happy Bi Visibility Day, the one day of the year where we blink into the visible light spectrum, usually only existing somewhere between X-rays and gamma radiation.

Every September 23rd, I find myself wriggling around the same themes and asking myself, “is bi a label that fits me?” then concluding, “yeah, OK, I use it, screw everyone else.” I am afraid to say that little has changed, and I’m still bloody wondering.

In the last few years, I’ve found that my life has arranged itself so that I don’t really spend much time with men any more, and the men I do spend time with–friends’ boyfriends, and my dad–aren’t in any sort of sex or dating context. This wasn’t a move that I made on purpose; it just fell out that way. I can literally count the number of good male friends on one hand. While wearing a mitten. I’m cool with this, because I have much more in common with people who are not men. Women and non-binary folk are awesome, while most men are, frankly, rubbish. Due to a freedom from men in my day-to-day life, this has naturally affected my sexual and romantic life, also for the better: it’s been years since I’ve shagged a man, and longer still since I’ve been in a relationship with one.

And I feel good about this. Sometimes I find myself describing my sexuality as “lesbian”, because it’s simpler, and feels more accurate for the time being. A lot of the time, I use the delightfully vague “queer”. But yet, on top of a cabinet like a Nespresso machine that ran out of the free trial pods, sits the label “bisexual”. Actually, that’s a bad metaphor. I use “bisexual” occasionally, while that Nespresso machine just gathers dust.

When I think about it, I wonder if it fits me any more. Should I just give it up and be uncomplicatedly lesbian? Am I even bi enough to be bi? Am I bi when I kind of made a choice away from men? Should I be using different labels in different contexts; shouldn’t a label be stable, or wait, were they meant to be mutable? Fuck, I should probably read some queer theory, shouldn’t I? Do I need bi for myself? Am I appropriating?

If someone asked any of those questions of themselves to me, I would immediately say, “Honey, if you want to use bi, use bi. You are bi enough.”

Yet as it applies to myself, the questions are questions, open and persistently jabbing at me. I don’t know, and it feels a little bit appropriative calling myself bi, when I’m merely a dyke who would probably sit on Idris Elba’s face if he asked me to.

But perhaps this is exactly what makes me bi. Perhaps this is the grand unifying factor between we bisexuals, more than who we fuck and who we fall in love with. Perhaps what brings us together is us asking Am I Bi Enough?

Am I bi enough?

It’s a question I only ever hear from bi people, diverse, beautiful bi people. I have never heard a bi person not ask it. It is a label which fits so many people, but yet we all question whether it suits us. I tell everyone else that if that’s what you want to use, then use it.

And I am bisexual. I could “justify” myself here by talking about facing sapphophobia; how I fancy and fuck people of other genders as well as my own gender, still (it’s really only men that I’ve minimised from my life); how yes, labels are mutable, context-dependent and ever-changing and yes, you can be a lesbian bisexual queer. But I don’t need to. None of us need to. We are bi enough; the “bi” in bisexual stands for how we are constantly second guessing ourselves, and what is queerness but questions without simple answers?

So here’s to all of us out here, asking whether we’re bi enough. We are. And today, we’re visible.

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