Instant Genius - Why bisexuality is everywhere

Episode Date: May 31, 2026

In June of every year, the LGBTQ+ community across the world comes together to celebrate Pride Month – an annual event that began in 1970 to promote awareness, visibility and equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer individuals. In this episode, to coincide with Pride Month, we’re joined by Dr Julia Shaw, a broadcaster, best-selling author and psychologist based at University College London, to talk about the science and history of bisexuality. She tells us about the fascinating historical and scientific origins of the term bisexuality, how studies have found that there are likely far more bisexual people than you may think, and how bisexuality isn’t unique to humans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. In June of every year, the LGBTQ plus community across the world comes together to celebrate Pride Month, an annual event that began in 1970 to promote awareness, visibility and equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, transgender, gender and queer individuals. In this episode, to coincide with Pride Month, we're joined by Dr. Julia Shaw, a broadcaster, best-selling author and psychologist

based at University College London to talk about the science and history of bisexuality. She tells us about the fascinating historical and scientific origins of the term bisexuality, how studies have found that there are likely far more bisexual people than you may think, and how bisexuality isn't unique to humans. So Dr. Julia Shaw, welcome to the show.

Hi. Thanks so much for joining us. Happy to be here. So today we're talking about bisexuality. So perhaps you're best known amongst other things anyway as a criminal psychologist. But over the last several years, you've become a prominent voice in bisexuality research. So what led you to take this on as it's quite a shift from studying crime and criminals? It is.

I am bisexual and I wanted to know about whether or not. or not bisexual had been studied empirically because I wanted to know what it was like for people like me and whether there are some issues that I have or concerns, thoughts that I have that are shared with other people.

And so I initially was hoping that I just sort of go to the bookstore and buy a book. And I realized quickly that that book didn't exist and that there are anthologies and there's some excellent anthologies. There's some excellent general research and writing on queer identities and queer people, but there wasn't anything specific

to bisexuality. And so I decided I wanted it to exist. And so I went back to university and did a master's in queer history at Goldsmiths University. And I founded the bisexual research group, which is now an organization that has an annual international conference. And there's about 500 people who usually come to the conference to share their ideas and research from various fields on bisexual. So let's first make it clear exactly what we mean by bisexual. So rather than simply meaning a person that's attracted romantically or sexually to a cis man or a cis woman, both, it's actually more of an umbrella term, right? Yeah, so by the way it was originally used. And this is where having that foundation history has become really useful for me. And going back

and reading up on some of the earliest scholars who wrote about bisexuality and used the term. And if you trace the term back to people like Havelock Ellis, who was one of the first people to use the term in writing, he used it to describe people who are both, as in bisexual, both homo and heterosexual. And so these terms homo and heterosexual had come up earlier when a, and this is one of my favorite facts is that the term homosexual, as in same attractions as same gender, was coined by a gay scholar who wanted to fight for the rights of gay people,

of gay men in particular. And he needed to create a word for homosexuality, but then he also needed to create a word for not homosexuality, right? And so he called people who were straight heterosexual, so people attracted to other, so hetero being other than. And I think it's really funny

that a gay man created heterosexuality. I think it's one of my favorite facts about queer history that I don't know why this isn't on slogans everywhere. But the other thing that happened then is because we had these two terms, quickly researchers were like, wait, but there's people who obviously are interested in men and women who are both homosexual and heterosexual. And so we are going to call these people bisexual. And just to be clear, it was both homo, so both same and other. And this is where it was never actually men and women technically. It was always same and other genders. And so as our concept of what gender means and how, you know, things like cis male, like that wasn't a term at the time, right?

And so how that has now changed, I think a lot of bisexual people find that that definition embraces that as well. So it's just, I'm attracted to people of multiple genders rather than I'm attracted to men and women. Yeah, so I think one of the things with bisexuality is that often people are, they're not necessarily hiding in plain sight, but they're not visible in a way that a lot of other queer people are. So do we have a sort of rough idea of the number of people that are bisexual, you know, maybe from census data or things like that? Yeah, so bisexuality has an invisibility problem in the sense that there is less of what's called a visual language. And so there's fewer ways to show that you're bisexual than being

queer in other ways often. And so when you ask by people, you know, how do you make yourself visible? And it's like seen as a bisexual person. They kind of go, well, I kind of like integrate elements of sort of what lesbian people might wear or what gay men might wear. Maybe I add a rainbow. Maybe I add a bisexual flag. But there isn't quite the same sort of obvious language. There can be. So I mean, septum piercings for a while, it came from me like, oh, there's one, there's one of us.

Before that, it was cuffed jeans, was a classic, not being able to sit in chairs was a stereotype for a while. I mean, there's definitely also lots of jokes

and biculture jokes, but even with me, like, unless I say I'm by, especially because I'm, my primary partner as a man, it reads as a straight relationship, and I read a straight.

And that's partly just because of who I happen to be in a relationship with. And of course, I continue to be bi, no matter who I date, or if I'm not dating anyone. And so that's something that a lot of bi people say they face is that they constantly need to be that person who either says it out loud, which feels annoying, and you're like coming out over and over and over again. Or you need to lean in, and then you might still get miscategorized as lesbian, in my case as a woman. And so you're still not seen as bi. And so that biarager can be an issue also psychologically because we know that bi people are less

likely to seek communities, queer communities, partly because they don't feel like they're queer enough, but then they also don't feel straight enough for the straight community. So you find that bi-people are compared to others least likely to be plugged into groups and so have more mental health concerns that come with being isolated from those communities. Yeah, so there's a lot of sort of certain stereotypes surrounding bisexuality, which I think we need to get out of the way, to be honest. So it's like some common ones are bisexual women, are easy or kinky, bisexual men are just actually homosexual. They just don't admit it to themselves, etc. So, you know, how can we get rid of these? Well, and that trans people can't be bi.

There's a lot of trans by people where it's like you can destabilize both gender and sexuality. Like you can, right? There's lots of mixes of things. Or that you can be, I mean, obviously there's people who are non-binary who are bisexual. So I mean, there's lots of versions of that. And so I think to destabilize the stereotypes, one of the things is visibility. That's why it's so important to, I think, to say that you're bisexual and to almost face that what still happens disproportionately compared to other sexualities is that bi people still get asked stupid questions. Like, is one person ever enough for you?

Or can you be monogamous? Are you going to be cheating? Are you going to want threesomes all the time? Right. Right? Like almost this like hypersexualized element. And as you say for men, it's more of a, there's a bit of that hypersexualization potentially. But there's more of the, no, it's probably a stepping stone to gay.

Like you're probably actually gay. And so making it visible and talking about it more and just making it more normal, I think, is going to be quite a lot of the success that comes from visibility. But we're seeing that already. I mean, even since my book came out in 2020. there's been so many TV shows now that have a bi character. And I think that will make a huge difference going forward. Yeah, so that would sort of cue in my next question quite nicely.

Sort of a lot of people use the narrative that just doesn't seem to go away, which is that bisexuality is a trend or, you know, perhaps even worse, a phase. So why do these myths persist? The myths are, I think, mostly because we have in our minds something from childhood and beyond. The idea of the nuclear family, really, and it's a man and a woman and some kids. And at some point, some people accepted that, okay, maybe it can be a man and a man or a man and a woman. But the idea that it could be any other constellation continues to evade people. And so bisexuality is, and if you look at the history of this again and like how bisexuality is sat in various political movements, you see that we've been seen as the enemy from all sides.

And so even queer people in the fight for equal marriage, for example, and for gay rights have at various points. There's some really interesting correspondence in archives that I was going through as part of my master's. And you can see how the correspondence is like, we need the bisexuals to leave. and out of four especially out of women's spaces actually and so there's this the political lesbians and there were lesbians and women loving women spaces and the idea was that if the biwomen are here they are the traitors they will go home and tell the men

which I think is really funny like even if they're dating one of us right now they will leave and they could be traitors and that's it is a thing that I think still sort of sticks a bit where it continues to be a bit of like iffy, I don't really date by women. I mean, I've met people

recently who still say, oh, I don't really do buy women. And I go, well, that's a horrible thing to say, especially in a queer space. And so I think until those stereotypes continue to soften, I think we saw it quite a long way to go.

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So, are you ready to talk to fans? Spotify advertising. You're among fans. So sort of another idea that you often hear, which is not quite as pervasive as those other ones. is that, and I don't know where this comes from, is that we're all born bisexual, and then somehow we sort of develop or grow out of it. Where does that idea come from?

It comes from Sigmid Freud. Oh, okay. Yeah, the source of most of my, the things I don't like about psychology, they're basically always back to Freud. Yeah, no, Freud said that everyone's born bisexual and that you mature out of it into, usually homosexuality first and then you're straight.

And so obviously straight is the goal, right? The goal. And that is, again, a horrible way of thinking about it, even though sometimes it's misquoted as sort of Freud was a friend of the bias. And it's like, I mean, that's not how I, he said as a regressive sexuality. I'm not sure I would see that as positive. But, but if you look at the animal kingdom and you look at queerness and bisexuality specifically in the animal kingdom, there has been a real destabilizing.

of the idea that sort of animals have sex to reproduce, and that is sort of that biological imperative, that main thing that animals are using sex for is reproduction. And that is a thing that most animals use sex for, but lots of them also, just like humans, use it for other things. And those other things can be joy, affection. They can be making a nest together, sharing responsibilities over, for example, child, you know, rearing children.

And they're already in the 1940s and 1950s, a scholar called Alfred Kinsey, who famously wrote about human sexuality as well, he said that all of these people who are going into nature. So he was a biologist. And he was saying people who are going into nature and saying that all they can see is heterosexual behavior and everything else is dominance or something else are wrong. They're just imposing societies, human values onto animals rather than. actually describing what they're seeing in nature. And he was saying that in the 40s and 50s. Now, fast forward to today, and if you speak to anyone who works in a zoo and you say, are there bi-animals?

They're like, well, obviously. And the idea behind that if you then go even deeper is that, well, you could say that actually bisexuality is the most flexible strategy. Like if you were to choose a sexuality that is the most likely to sort of lead to reproductive success, if that's what you're aiming for, then bisexuality is pretty great because actually you're flexible. And so if there's a lot of men one year, a lot of woman one year, a lot of boys or girls, if we're talking about like other species, then you can adjust and survive. And hopefully your species can better survive as well.

So I think I'm not saying that this means that bisexuality is better than heterosexuality. It's just that I think we need to de-center heterosexuality and ask the same questions that we ask of queer lives, and queer ways of living, and we need to ask the same questions of heterosexuality. And I think that changes a great deal about how we think we understand the world. So sort of having said that, you know, would you say that our sexual identities are fixed throughout our lives, or are they a bit more mutable? You know, you often hear of, you know, you say you've got an uncle or whatever who's happily married, then it's suddenly like, oh, no, he's gay.

Is that a common thing? you know, can our sexual orientations, identities, maybe they don't change. Maybe our expression of them does? I don't know. What do you think about that? I think sexuality is fluid. So I think that across our lifespans,

and even in our own way of thinking about it, even day by day, we can have a different interpretation of who we think or know we are attracted to and also how that interacts with how we want to live our lives. because it's one thing to be queer in London in my group right now, where I can be by and I can live a polyamorous life. And I have other friends who also do that. And it's accepted and I don't face any violence. But if I was somewhere else in the world, then I might very well try actively not to be queer and to just live what looks like a heterosexual life, even though that's not what I would choose. And so that's me also having grown up in a society where bisexuality was an option.

Now, if I didn't even realize that that was an option, or I always thought that it was sort of evil, if in quote unquote, then I might go, well, obviously I'm straight because I'm attracted to men and that's enough. I would never second guess it. And so I might never even develop this idea that I could be by or that I am by. So I think we need to, it means a lot of different things, right? And I think there is something to be said for if you are surrounded by people and stories that allow you to think about how you yourself want to structure your love life, I think that gives you the potential to really like open up to lots of possibilities. But if you're never given those narratives, it can, it just changes how you're shaped in the first place. And then it could be that later on if you go into a different place or you're suddenly exposed to different ways of talking. like we've seen language evolve. We've seen stories around homosexuality and queerness evolve

dramatically over my lifetime. And, you know, maybe you get divorced after 40 years and you go, actually I am interested in men or actually I am interested in women. And, you know, I think that's where there's so many factors that almost like obviously people need to be able to, I don't know, understand in themselves that that's possibility. That's often where I want to take it. It's not that I think everyone's sexuality can change at any time. It's more that I would like people to be open to, especially the idea of being able to fall in love with people of any gender, because love is so hard to find anyway.

That I like the idea that you could just be like, maybe it doesn't matter which gender this person has. But that's a very bi thing to say. Sure. So let's have a look at some of the sort of big name researchers. So you mentioned that Alfred Kinsey. So can you give us a sort of cliff notes of the kind of work that he did? Because it was quite a few years ago now.

Yes, it was right in the post-war period, well, pre-World War period, actually, pre-World War II and then post-World War II. And Alfred Kinsey was doing research initially on gall wasps, which are an insect. And he was asked in the post-war period to study sexuality and families. And he realized that in this, in the 1940s, that he didn't really have the answers to the questions his students had. So they're like, Alfred Kinsey, you're a scientist, go teach, go teach about sex. And so he started doing research on what it means for humans to engage in sexual activities. And he interviewed thousands of people. So one of the things about Kinsey that's special is he had a research team, but he also personally interviewed thousands of people.

And he created something called the Kinsey Scale. And the reason he created it is because very quickly into his research, he realized that when you ask people questions about who they're attracted to and whom they've had sexual encounters with or fantasized about or fallen in love with or had relationships with, that the idea that it was just heterosexual and homosexual that didn't make any sense at all. And so he created the Kinsey scale, which is from zero to six, from zero. being exclusively heterosexual attraction to six being exclusively same-sex attraction and everything in the middle. So everything from 0.1 again, he's that kind of scientist, so he allowed for decimals. You could be 0.15. So just tiny, tiny little bit. Just a little whisper of queerness.

But you could also be like a three or four, right? Right, somewhere in the middle. and more classically buy and that you're more equally attracted to men and women or to people of same and other genders. And I think that that really shifted the conversation because he then using the scale found that about half of men are not exclusively heterosexual or homosexual. They're somewhere on the by spectrum.

Half. Half of men. Large number. There's so many people. The majority, in fact. Yeah, well, yes. Oh, and about a quarter of women is what he found in his research. So he did sexual behavior in the human male, was one of the books he wrote where he summarized all this,

and then he wrote sexual behavior in the human female, along with the research team. The sexual behavior in the human female specifically also involved quite a lot of women, none of whom were listed on the cover, which frustrates me to this day. But so when you look at it initially, it's just like sexual behavior in the human female, and it's just like all these male names, which, yeah, not a good look, but, I mean, science, right? Science in the 50s, not a good look. But he did, in fact, have women on the team as well. But he was finding that, so 25% and 50%, and he didn't mean that people identified this way, just that he classified them that way based on the lengthy conversations he had that were structured

interviews. And those books, sexual behavior in the human male, which came out, I think, in 1948 or 49, and then in the early 1950s, sexual behavior in the human female, they were both bestsellers. And this is something that is remarkable is that Kinsey sold out stadiums. Like people really wanted to hear what this guy was saying. And this guy was saying, most of you are by. Basically. And that is not what we think about when we think about the history of bisexuality. We think of like, you know, maybe the hippies and the 70s. Maybe that was the beginning. Or maybe it's like now. Like, I feel like everyone's buying now. This is the kind of, you still hear that, right?

Everyone's buying out. Yeah, yeah. What does that mean? And according to Kinsey, he's like, well, I mean, in the 40s and 50s, everyone was also already by. So I think it's really important to have that context. Yeah, so sort of another researcher a little bit later that sort of took the ball and run with it was Fritz Klein.

Mm-hmm. So, you know, what can we say about his sort of important insights? One of the reasons why Fritz Klein took the ball and ran with it is also because Kinsey died tragically young. So he died in his 50s. And so he would have definitely kept researching and we probably would have had many, many more insights. But he died quite young of a heart attack. Fritz Klein was doing therapy in the United States. And he was particularly interested in helping people who were struggling with their sexuality.

And he found as a bi-man, so he was bisexual himself. And he found that there was really not enough conversation about bisexual men, and there wasn't anywhere to go. And so people would be sent to therapy to, like, not be gay or not be bisexual, to get rid of their homosexual urges. And he wanted to create a space where people could talk about their bisexuality in particular and not be shut down. And so he created talking groups, like therapy groups, particularly for men at the beginning.

And they would talk about, you know, their relationship with, you know, how they were expressing their attraction to men and women and what that meant for them and how they were struggling through it or not. And he came up with the Klein Grid. The Klein Grid is an adaptation from the Kinsey Scale where he still uses, although he does one to seven. I think so. He uses the same scale anyway, and he just shifts it up slightly. but he measures things in past, present, and future, and he measures it in different categories.

So, for example, in the past, has your lifestyle been one where it's mostly same sex or mostly other sex? So, I mean, you could picture it in this way, sort of, am I going to mostly male or female spaces? Or, in more of a culture sense, am I going to gay bars, or not? am I not going to queer spaces? So am I living more of a heterosexual-looking lifestyle? Or am I living more of a homosexual living lifestyle? And then if you take that in the past, the present, and the future, or ideal, you can sort of differentiate it up a lot more. And so basically what he was trying to do is to look holistically at people's identity, at their sexual attraction, at their romance, at how they live their lives.

and to rate everything to show here are some issues where you are actually not living what you think is your own ideal and here are maybe ways in which we can align the ideal and what's actually happening. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. So just like out of interest, if anyone listening thinks, oh, you know, I'd like to see where I lie on that scale, can we do it online? Yeah, there's, you can go client grid, the Fritz-clin grid online. There's the Client Institute, which continues to exist, even though Fritz Klein also has since passed away. But there's lots of ways of doing it, but I would encourage you to the Klein Grid over the Kinsey scale, partly because the client grid asks you so many different questions.

And for me, one of the things I realized when I was doing it is that initially, I think I was having some frustrations in not being in enough queer spaces. So I was live, I was by, and I was happy with my bisexuality, but I wasn't living it in a, a queer enough way. And so I felt like I was almost like masquerading in these heterosexual places and that it was affecting me psychologically. And so by doing this, I identified that as actually I want to go to more queer spaces. And so then I did. And I mean, that's also what happened with the book, right? The book has taken me to so many different queer spaces now. And it's so good for me as a person in my identity to feel seen

and to feel like, you know, there's a place. And I think lots of people have that experience when they do the clangard. And the other thing that's fun about it is because it's not just like the Kinsey scale where it's like where are you on the scale now, it's past, present, and ideal. What you also have, if you give this to anybody, because this isn't just for queer people,

this is for anybody. If you give us to anybody, I've had quite a few friends coming back with the ideal being by, but they're actually straight. And I think that again is an important conversation to have that it's not just straight that people think of,

us the ideal. It can be other things and that straight people can also be unhappy or frustrated with their sexuality, not just queer people. And so again, introducing nuance into that conversation. So what things can we all do, whether we're, you know, I don't know, bisexual, gay, straight, asexual to, like, improve by inclusion. Ooh, the best ways to improve by inclusion is to occasionally use the word. I mean, I feel like now there's more conversations around trans people, which is great. but it's also great if you occasionally use the word bye. So you could say this person is, like if you see someone in this same-sex relationship,

for example, as well, you could say this person is gay or bi, if you're not sure. And I think even just introducing that, I mean, they might correct you, but even just introducing that as an option, I think, goes a long way. And it opens up that possibility for people to go, yeah, no, I am bi, and not just defined by the partner I'm currently dating. The other ways in which we can increase by inclusion is by having buy people visible on panels, for example. So again, if we're thinking about like pride celebrations,

making sure that as part of the visible representation on stages, on panels, on posters, on whatever it is we're doing, that we don't forget bisexual because it is almost always still forgotten. And the problem is if it's never visible, is it reinforces that idea that we're not really queer. And we don't fit. This isn't actually for us. And that is something that desperately needs to change

because we know that the mental health risks for bisexual people are higher, partly because they don't have that. And so opening up the community and being overtly, overtly inclusive is really important. And if someone, if you're straight and someone comes out to you as by, don't start with, does that mean that you need to be polyamorous? That is, I mean, you can ask that question in a separate context in general of all your friends if you want. Because, I mean, sure, straight people can also be polyamorous.

But don't assume that just because someone is bi, that they are more sexually promiscuous or more likely to be polyamorous because they aren't necessarily and that is a separate conversation. So one thing that a lot of people probably don't know is that bisexuals have always been involved in the Pride movement.

Yeah. Actually, if you think of the history of Pride, so Pride marches, you can actually see that one of the key organizers of the very first Pride March, which was called Christopher Street Day, the Christopher Street Day Parade. That was someone called Brenda Howard.

And Brenda Howard was an openly bisexual woman in the United States. And I think it's really important to remember that from the beginning, bi people weren't just sort of around, but they were actively involved in queer liberation in the fight for gay rights, even though it took till the 90s to include the B in LGBT. Right, yeah, yeah. So if you look at some of the history of where the letters all fit together, there was a dispute around the bi and that you could have lesbian,

but you couldn't have lesbian and bisexual because I didn't want the word sexual in there, which I think is really funny. And gay was okay, but homosexual was also bad. And so we settled on bi. And so, yeah, it was in the 90s that it really officially got added, even though bisexuals have been there from the beginning. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus.

That was Dr. Julia Shaw. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then why not check out our YouTube channel at ScienceFocus. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com.