It’s Bisexual Awareness Week, which seems like a good time to remember that there are millions of bisexual parents—and that no matter who they are parenting with, they are part of our community of LGBTQ parents!
For the U.S., the most recent numbers that I am aware of are from 2015, when demographer Dr. Gary Gates at UCLA’s Williams Institute told me via e-mail (my bold):
In the 2014 version of the General Social Survey [a nationally representative survey of adults in the U.S.], roughly half of bisexual adults say that they have ever had a child. I usually use about 9 million for the LGBT figure (based on current population estimates and assuming 4% LGBT), roughly half as Bisexual, so 4.5 million. If half of them have ever had a child, then that means about 2.25 million bisexual parents.
He noted that these parents may have children of any age, some of whom are already adults.
Most bisexual parents are raising children with different-sex partners, according to a 2014 Williams study on “LGB Families and Relationships”:
Among bisexual adults with children, 51% were married with a different-sex spouse, 11% had a different-sex unmarried partner, and 4% had a same-sex spouse or partner. Among adults who identified as gay or lesbian and were raising children, 18% had a different-sex married spouse and 4% had a different-sex unmarried partner.
A 2018 study from the Center for American Progress also found that “Bi+ women were nearly four times as likely to be caregivers for minor children compared with lesbians.” (I have not found parallel data for bi+ men.) At the same time, “Bi+ women and their families are more likely to depend on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid than their monosexual peers.”
And another Williams study earlier this year also found that, “There is a unique form of bias against people who have both same-sex and different-sex attractions and sexual relationships, and this may be why we see poorer mental health outcomes for bisexual parents.” Other studies have shown sexual minority women with male partners “reported less connection to the LGBT community and greater anxiety” and that many bisexual mothers experience binegativity and exclusion by lesbian communities. “Parenthood for bisexual mothers involved with male partners thus comes at a cost from both the general public and the LGBT community,” the Williams study concluded. In what could be a sign of hope, though, the youngest group of bisexual women reported more community connectedness than bisexual women of other age groups.
That’s a clear message to all of us lesbians and gay men to try harder to welcome and include the bi parents we know (and not to assume that a different-sex couple doesn’t include queer people in it). Yes, moving through the world as a different-sex couple and doing so as a same-sex couple are two different experiences, but so are moving through the world as a two-mom couple and a two-dad couple, or as a trans parent and a cis parent, or any other way we want to parse the LGBTQ spectrum. That doesn’t mean we can’t all support each other as we connect over our similarities and celebrate our differences under the big rainbow umbrella.