By Chelsie Holmes
Content advisory: This article discusses intimate partner and sexual violence, including personal stories.
For eight years, I worked as an advocate with survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) and sexual assault. I was in an abusive relationship nearly the entire time. I did not recognize it was abusive until I was forced to flee the state for my safety.
When I first learned from the Center for Disease Control’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey that over 60% of bisexual+ women experience IPV in their lifetime, it did not shock me. It explained my life.
My abuser was a heterosexual cisgender man. I didn’t see the abuse because it was obscured by the fact that he and I were operating under very different cultural scripts around nonmonogamy. While not all bisexual+ women prefer nonmonogamous relationships, we are more likely to than monosexual people, noted across psychological and sociological research. For me, the informal unlabeled structure of the relationship was liberating. To him and the people around us, my acceptance of these terms was an act of self-degradation. They interpreted it as consent to mistreatment.
It’s considered an embarrassment to catch feelings in a situationship. I was involved with this man on and off for seven years, so I would hardly characterize it that way. But this taboo makes it humiliating to disclose when you are being harmed in a relationship that isn’t necessarily “official.” He explained away my trauma responses to his abuse by claiming I was upset that I was more invested in the relationship than he was. He frontloaded allegations by saying I might tell lies about him because I was mad that he “didn’t want to be my husband, or whatever.”
To the contrary, I never wanted a husband. And whenever I tried to end the relationship, he escalated to stalking me.
One evening, my friends watched my abuser pin me to the ground, leaving bruises on my wrists, but they did not intervene. I had a reputation for being kinky, and they assumed I wanted it. Bisexual+ women are stereotyped as being hypersexual and down for anything. I doubt people would write off a straight woman being pinned to the floor by her husband. But, because I am bisexual, and because the relationship wasn’t considered “real,” they assumed I was consenting to being physically overpowered by a man in front of others.
For bisexual+ women, passing as straight in a relationship reduces the threat of public harassment, but it dramatically increases the threat of violence behind closed doors. According to the CDC, nine in 10 bisexual women abused by an intimate partner report that the perpetrator was a cisgender man. Biphobia and monosexism are often written off as unserious and unworthy of centering under the premise that we have this privilege. But, particularly when it intersects with sexism, monosexism manifests in very real, pervasive, and sometimes deadly violence, especially in straight-passing relationships.
Intimate partner violence is characterized by one person using a variety of tactics to gain and maintain power and control over the other person in a romantic and/or sexual relationship. Physical violence does not need to be one of those tactics for the abuse to count. Abuse tactics that bisexual+ women are disproportionately targeted by are gaslighting, isolation, and sexual coercion.
Many people do not believe bisexuality+ exists. When someone is already trained not to trust their own reality, being told they are overreacting or confused is familiar. This conditions bisexual+ people to distrust their own internal sense of self. We often internalize the scripts that we are not reliable narrators of our own reality long before an abusive partner finds us. Abusers tend to seek victims who are easy to manipulate, and the cultural gaslighting we experience creates a faultline that is exploitable.
Bisexual+ women are vulnerable to isolation for a variety of reasons. We often experience discrimination both from mainstream culture and the LGBTQIA+ community. If we are isolated from our families because we are too gay, but we are isolated from queer community because we are too straight, we have no consistent support system. Bisexual+ women can be attracted to any gender, so abusers can use jealousy to justify isolating them from just about everyone.
Bisexual+ women embrace our capacity for attraction to multiple genders as fundamental to our identities. Women’s sexual autonomy is threatening to patriarchal order for a number of reasons. Whenever patriarchal power is threatened, sexual violence steps in to restore the old order. The CDC reports that an alarming 79% of bisexual women experience sexual violence in their lifetime, including disproportionately high rates of sexual abuse, specifically perpetrated by an intimate partner. My abuser used sexual coercion to punish me whenever I demonstrated that he was not the center of my universe. Bisexual+ women are often accused of centering men, but in reality, we are punished precisely because we do not, yet we remain in proximity to them.
I believe our power is found in the allegations against us. Rather than saying “We’re not sluts!,” perhaps we should ask “Even if we were, would that justify abuse?” Rather than saying “We want long-term committed relationships just like monosexual people do!”, perhaps we should ask “Even if we didn’t, would that justify abuse?” Rather than saying “We won’t leave you for another gender!”, perhaps we should ask “Does your fear of abandonment justify controlling and isolating your bisexual+ partner?”
If you see yourself in this story, I hope you feel a sense of relief that you are not alone. Please know that you are entitled to safety and respect in your relationships, and it is not your fault if you have been robbed of that. I implore bisexual+ women to take on intimate partner and sexual violence as key issues in our movement. While it feels personal because it is happening in the context of intimacy, IPV toward bisexual+ women is a primary enforcer of monosexism. Intimate partner violence is political violence, and we can end it together.
Chelsie Holmes (she/they) is a bisexual activist based in rural Colorado, in the U.S. She has a decade of experience in advocacy work with survivors of intimate partner and sexual violence. She is now the Director of an LGBTQIA+ resource center she founded called Queer Futures.