Christy Newman (they/them) is a Professor at the Centre for Social Research in Health, and Deputy Dean Research for UNSW Arts, Design, and Architecture in Sydney, Australia.
They are a qualitative sociologist with more than two decades’ experience contributing to collaborative research on social and cultural aspects of health, gender, and sexuality.
Bree Mountain (she/her) is a Social Worker, Sexologist, and Community Advocate, currently working as a counselor within a leading LGBTQ+ community health service in Australia.
Bree: I would love to start off by asking a little bit about your identity and the communities you align with. I’ll preface this by sharing that I always like to recognize that when discussing labels, not everyone identifies with labels significantly or might use different labels depending on which context we’re in. Are there some words that you would closely align with or some words that you might passionately embrace?
Christy: This is something I’ve thought a fair amount about, both personally, but also through my work. And sometimes I think that maybe I went into my area of research partly because I have always found this interesting personally.
Right now, I mainly describe myself as queer and nonbinary. In both cases, that’s partly because it’s complicated to explain exactly what that means to me, so it works like a holding place for both gender and sexuality and their intersections for me. But bisexual as an idea has given me so much through my life, and I’m grateful for it.
I’m 50, so when I was growing up in Western Australia pre-internet, access to ideas about gender and sexuality came from family, school, church, and the small pieces of popular media access I could get. Music videos, magazines or books, I read everything. I think that at that point, I mean, certainly in the 80s, queerness, if you use that term for how people were kind of presenting themselves, was all through popular culture. In music videos, everyone was genderqueer. And at some point I came to understand that there were people who didn’t identify as either straight or gay and the concept of bisexual was available to me.
That didn’t feel like it was available to me as a safe option; however it did give me personal solace that there was another option outside of heterosexual and lesbian.
It [bisexual] was a very complicated feeling and word for me at many points in my life, because it meant constantly disappointing everybody. The straight people in my life kind of also just wanted me to be a lesbian. I looked like a lesbian and I mostly was dating women. Then the lesbians were disappointed in me because I think some people genuinely felt I was betraying them by ever being attracted to, or having relationships with cis men.
I know what it’s like to feel not legitimate enough in queer or in straight spaces. I credit the 2019 Sydney Mardi Gras parade [which included the first bi+ float in over a decade], as a renaissance in my life. It was a return to a sense of possibility in connecting to community in ways that I didn’t even realize I had been grieving not having in my life. That there was a new generation [that] just didn’t have the same sense of shame or outsiderness with which I had historically really grappled was so inspiring.
The other realization for me at that point was understanding that you could be bi+, you could be committed to that kind of language and also be trans-inclusive.
Bree: I agree, and we are expanding language beyond the binary. However, I think there is still room for growth in this area, especially within our community when it comes to supporting trans and gender diverse people.
Christy: I agree. Gender, gender-affirming care, trans rights, and trans activism are what I’m most passionate about now.
So, for me, queer is political, it is a particular way of thinking about the world, a questioning of norms and a questioning of assumptions about how to live and conduct yourself in order to be a good person. Bisexual to me indicates the potential for me to have attraction to people of more than one gender.
Bree: Thanks for sharing so much, particularly around the different terms and their meaning for you. Even though we have so many words now, being asked how you identify can be very stressful; it is a question of “needing to fit within the boxes that are created.’” I think many of us in the bisexual+ community have been or are on that journey of trying to find different words, and seeing what fits nicely.
As a counselor, I did some recent training with an excellent counselor named Ari Heart, and one of the things that really stood out for me was to leave the label outside of the therapy room so we’re not talking about terminology and labels. If that’s something we want to get to, we can do that later on in the process, but we want to explore what feels right to you, what you want, what actions would feel authentic, what things you want to engage with. Often the label can come later, after these ideas and feelings have been explored.
And, like you say, there is such a push towards queer identity as it rejects the idea of needing to fit into a specific box. We see much online discourse between bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual—queer is such a lovely way of just saying “I don’t need to find the exact word you know, I am this expansive political being.”
You’ve recently led the largest, bi+ specific, sexual health study: the Bi+ Sexual Health and HIV (BiSHH) Study.
It’s so good to not just be the little addition to gay and/or lesbian, where all of the questions are geared towards those cohorts, and we’re lumped in.
But in discussing this research, I’m interested to learn how you find people to engage in bisexual+ specific studies, recognizing that many bisexual+ and multi-gender attracted people may not openly identify or have access to the more typical areas in which we seek LGBTQ+ research participants. They might not have any connection to the LGBTQ+ community, so how do we find them?
Christy Newman
Christy: As a sociologist who works in gender, sexuality, and health, this tension between identity and practice is never really resolved. It is very complicated, particularly in areas shaped by stigma.
Historically, particularly within the HIV sector, research very much was focused on “gay men.” So you had these two ideas in there, gay and man. Both of which we think about differently now. So what has been fascinating is that in the last few years we’ve started properly looking at how to bring our research tools and systems up to speed with our contemporary understandings of gender and sexuality. What do we mean by man and who is included in that? What about bi men, what do they need to feel included in our ways of asking about their sex lives? And what about the non-binary people who also participate in gay men’s sexual culture, who are on Grindr and so on?
So building on the work already happening, to collaborate with a group of amazing bi+ researchers and advocates and allies, it’s a bit of a life’s work outcome for me. And we did this from the ground up. It was built entirely from community knowledge and facing directly into those tough questions.
In this study, we decided to focus explicitly on people who identify with some part of the bi+ umbrella. And yet, out of more than 2,000 completed surveys, we found that only half of respondents were out to their families, and only 15% were out at work. So even though people had to opt into a bi+ study, a significant number are still very careful about who they tell in their lives. This reminds us that a lack of safety is not imagined. For many people, it is still a genuine, legitimate concern.
Bree: I’m really glad you named that. That’s another area I’m quite passionate about within my therapeutic work with the broader LGBTQ+ community. I think there’s often this narrative that when we come out, we’re going to declare it to the world, that we will post it on our socials and it’s going to be this amazing, proud, courageous moment. And the reality is that that can be dangerous. That it can have safety risks.
And there is risk of loss of connection, love and support that can come with it. It’s permission giving with some of my clients to say: you don’t owe coming out to anyone and you get to decide within all the many different facets of your life. It is okay if you decide, that’s not someone you want to bring in and there shouldn’t be shame attached to that. I think it’s a dialogue and a conversation we need to be continually having, and a message that so many community members would be very thankful to be hearing.
Christy: I have a huge amount of compassion for that experience. It’s super tough. And if you don’t feel like you have it in you, if you don’t have the resources or it’s not safe, we need to provide grace to those people and see how we can support them and continue to be there.
Bree: You’re so right. When we’re providing support to these community members, whether professionally or socially, if there are parts of our life where we can’t express that part of ourselves, often we’ll look at the spaces where we do feel that comfort. How do we amplify them? Where can we bring joy and facilitate connection when there are parts of our lives where we might not be able to experience them.
Would you be open to sharing a bit about your personal journey with your gender identity?
Christy: Nonbinary is the place I feel most comfortable today. I had a classic COVID lockdown realization, equal parts unbelievably exciting and absolutely mortifying. I had been around trans friends and worked in the field, but was clueless about it in myself until I was forced to stay at home for an extended period and sit with myself.
Gender is such a public version of something that is deeply private. Coming out at work in my 40s while in a leadership role was really challenging. There are very few nonbinary or trans people in senior leadership roles in higher education. But I was resourced with experience, employment security, and a very strong network, and I felt that I had a responsibility to approach that new coming out process with courage, so it would hopefully be easier for others in the future.
Coming to understand and express my gender differently felt like it was supported by my bisexuality. I wasn’t locked into a sense of “I am this gender and attracted to that gender.” And I have found that my bisexuality provides others with that room, too. If I’m attracted to you, I’m attracted to you; we can both change, and there is space for all possibilities.
I feel very strong in my trans identity now and have been fortunate to be able to access gender-affirming care, and to have medical leave periods supported in my workplace. Given how much these opportunities are now being threatened for others, I have become most deeply passionate about advocating for the rights of trans people, and for access to gender-affirming care for all those who desire it.
Bree: Thank you so much for sharing so much of your journey today. In discussing these important topics, what can the cisgender bi+ community do better to support, welcome, and advocate for trans and gender-diverse people at this time?
Christy: Bisexual people and trans people have always had the embodied knowledge that social norms around gender and sexuality constrain us in harmful ways.
Seeing the liberation of trans people as enmeshed with liberation for bi+ people is essential, I think.
There is no separation because wherever we see attacks happening that relate to gender, they are also going to be happening in ways that will impact the lives of bi+ people. Partly because the frameworks that are used to pathologize or stigmatize trans people create a kind of monstrous representations of trans lives, are entirely made-up constructs which are intended to control or even eliminate the natural diversity that exists in every society.
Bi+ people know all too well, if they’ve had the opportunity to reflect on the times their sexuality has been misunderstood, that it can feel terribly unsettling to be questioned about whether we really know our own needs: “Are you really sure?”, or, “Why can’t you just make things easier for yourself, and for us?” It’s the same social impulse that is happening now with trans people. It’s the same social impulse to control difference.
And it’s also very clearly a political matter right now. Trans people are being used as scapegoats because their presence, their existence, their joy demonstrates you can live outside of social norms, which is a threat to those who want communities to be compliant.
What I love at the heart of bisexuality is that it reminds us that something as profoundly important and almost universal as human attraction can exceed all efforts to make it predictable and easy to categorize. Both trans and bi+ people remind us of the expansiveness of human nature, and hold space for all of the possibilities in us. And so I believe we should explicitly welcome trans people into every bi+ space. And sometimes this needs to be stated explicitly, right? Because trans people, and for good reason, have to read for safety.
And bi+ women in particular have an important role to play in this, because trans women experience the most direct and harmful forms of violence, prejudice, and discrimination. Cis women can really help to create that safety.
One of the things that has been most satisfying to me through the BiSHH survey process is being part of creating a survey from the ground up where we thought really carefully about every single question. Are we being inclusive across gender? Are we thinking carefully about sexuality? Are we making room for different relationship types? How are we going to make sure everybody feels like they can answer these questions?
Having bi+ people of all genders, including trans people and particularly trans women, tell me that they’ve never experienced answering a survey that felt like it was written for them before was so satisfying.
Bree: You all should be so proud. I can’t wait to see the waves this research makes both in Australia and internationally.
Thank you so much for speaking with me, for all you do for community, and I can’t wait to see what you do next!
Bree Mountain