In the words of my friend Joe Garden’s creation Jim Anchower, “Hola amigos. I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya,” but, well, life got in the way! I had to go to San Francisco for my cousin’s daughter’s baby naming, and then it was Pesach, and then my alma mater (and the school a different cousin is currently a student at) basically declared martial law in response to pro-Palestine protests so, uh, my brain has not been so good at writing.
But there is a recent JAMA paper that has been sitting in my tabs that finally gave me a bit of inspiration — though sadly, only because it is so utterly bleak that I could not hold myself back from writing about it.
If you are a regular reader of the B+ Squad, you have undoubtedly heard me say — repeatedly — that there are reams of research that show, again and again and again, that the bisexuals (and, in many cases, bisexual women in particular) are not doing well. Rather than being a midway point between gays/lesbians and straights, bisexuals are often much worse off than any of our monosexual peers. In studies that include trans people as a separate category from Ls, Gs, and Bs; bisexuals and trans people are often comparably disadvantaged. In studies that are granular enough to consider both sexuality and gender identity, it is trans bisexuals who tend to fare the worst of any group.
So it is against that backdrop that I share this latest finding, one that is equal parts depressing and unsurprising:
Bisexual women are more likely to die an early death.
This particular study was just looking at women — specifically female nurses born between 1945 and 1964 who were recruited in 1989 for the Nurses’ Health Study II — and, as with all studies, had limitations. Of the 116k participants in the Nurses’ Health Study, only about 91k revealed their sexual orientation to researchers; of that 91k, the vast majority were straight, with only about 700 lesbians and 300 bisexuals. So it is, of course, worth taking what I am about to say with a grain of salt.
Nevertheless, I think it should give all of us pause that, over the course of the thirty-three years that the study ran, while 4.6% of the heterosexual participants and 7% of the lesbian participants died, 10.1% of the bisexual participants passed away. To put it more dramatically: bisexual women were 37% more likely to die a premature death than our heterosexual peers. (Lesbians are 20% more likely.)
As I said earlier, this isn’t surprising. Bi women are more likely to get some forms of cancer, more likely to experience mental illness, more likely to live in poverty, more likely to have high blood pressure, more likely to experience suicidality, more likely to be the victims of intimate partner violence — and all those things are known to shorten a person’s lifespan. At a certain point, this is the inevitable outcome of a world where biphobia runs rampant: you simply do not get to stay in the world for as long.
And — even as I have seen monosexuals shrug off the data about cancer and mental illness and poverty and abuse and suicide — there is a part of me that wonders if this will be the stat that finally breaks through. We are literally dying younger because of biphobia. What more proof do you need that it is actually real?
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