Once again, a very happy day to the millions of bi parents out there! Read on to learn more about and find resources for this biggest segment of our LGBTQ parent population.
How Many Bi Parents Are There?
First, let’s run the numbers: Approximately two-thirds (64 percent) of LGB parents are bi: 59 percent of bi women and 32 percent of bi men have had children, versus 31 percent of lesbians and 16 percent of gay men, according to calculations from a 2013 study from Pew Research and a 2014 report from UCLA’s Williams Institute. If we combine that with 2013 estimates from UCLA’s Williams Institute that approximately 3 million LGBT Americans have had a child (both minors and grown), we get almost 2 million bi parents. And since the number of Americans identifying as LGBT has gone up since then, with an increasing percentage of bisexuals among younger generations, the number is likely higher.
There’s a little bit of fuzziness because the populations of the two studies are slightly different (one explicitly includes trans people), but the number generally accords with what demographer Dr. Gary Gates of the Williams Institute told me via e-mail in 2015 (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.
More recently, a 2018 study from the Center for American Progress (CAP) 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.)
Furthermore, most bi parents in the U.S. are raising children with different-sex partners, according to a 2014 Williams Study:
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.
Canada looks to be similar to the U.S. in terms of the proportion of bi parents. A 2021 study based on the Canadian Community Health Survey found that bi people were more than twice as likely as gay and lesbian people to be parents living with at least one child under the age of 18. Additionally, bi women were the most likely of the LGB population to be parents living with young children, 13.3% versus 7.7% of bisexual men, 7.8% of lesbian/gay women, and 2.1% of gay men.
The Experiences of Bi Parents
Despite the vastly greater numbers of bi parents, however, they face specific disparities. The CAP study also found, for example, that “Bi+ women and their families are more likely to depend on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid than their monosexual peers.” (See also this 2016 study from the Movement Advancement Project about the disparities facing bi people in general.)
Additionally, a 2021 Williams study of LBQ parents who identified as female found that bi parents reported more psychological distress and lower life satisfaction and happiness than lesbian parents, something the researchers found surprising, “because the overwhelming majority of bisexual parents are in relationships with male partners and thus would likely be viewed as heterosexual by the general public.”
They speculate, “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 that 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. The youngest group of bisexual women, however, reported more community connectedness than bisexual women of other age groups, which is a hopeful sign.
Lessons for Us All
As I’ve said before, all of us lesbians and gay men need 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. Throw in our intersectional identities (race/ethnicity, socioeconomic class, religion, disability, etc.) and the picture becomes even more complex. 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.
Resources
- If you’re on the path to parenthood (or considering it) as a bi person in a different-sex relationship, check out this guide from Family Equality.
- Lewis Oakley’s “Ask a Bi Dad” column at Bi.org sometimes covers topics specific to parents, such as “When Should I Come Out to My Child?“
- If you’re looking for kids’ books with bi representation, have a look at my Database of LGBTQ Family Books, filtered by the various “Bisexual [+gender]” tags—start typing “bisexual” into the Tags box and the options will appear. You can filter further by the age categories. There are very few picture books with clear bi representation (this biography of Freddie Mercury, which mentions both a former girlfriend and Mercury’s partner Jim, is a rare exception, though it never uses the term “bisexual”), but there are a happily increasing number of middle-grade titles with young bi protagonists and/or their bi parents.