[LINK] "Bisexual Erasure"

[rfmcdonald]

The Volokh Conspiracy is, as Wikipedia puts it, "a weblog which mostly covers United States legal and political issues, generally from a libertarian or conservative perspective." That's the reason why I'm a bit surprised--but only a bit; the blog's overall tone is libertarian--to see Eugene Volokh's own take on the "Is Elena Kagan a lesbian?" debate. Why can't she be bi?

As I understand it, the great majority of women who are not purely heterosexual are actually to some degree bisexual. For instance, Laumann et al., The Social Organization of Sexuality 311 (1994), reports that 3.7% of all women report having had both male and female partners since age 18 and only 0.4% report having had only female partners since age 18. Even looking at just the last five years, 1.4% of women report both male and female partners, and only 0.8% report only female partners. When asked about current sexual attraction, 2.7% of all women report mostly opposite gender, 0.8% report both genders, 0.6% report mostly same gender, and only 0.3% report only same gender. And my sense is that many women quite sensibly call themselves “lesbian” or “gay” based on their current or recent partners, or currently or recently felt preferences, even though they have had male partners in the past as well. (Thus, when asked to report their sexual identity, 0.5% of all women in the Laumann report said bisexual, 0.9% said homosexual, and 98.6% said heterosexual.)

Now I stress again: Whether Elena Kagan is straight, lesbian, bisexual, or asexual doesn’t matter to me. Moreover, to the extent a number of her close friends, who are likely to know her recent love life, say that she’s straight rather than lesbian or bisexual — and that seems to be something that one of her friends quoted in the Politico article I linked to above is saying — that should be pretty reliable evidence for those who care about the subject. Among other things, if she understandably concludes that it’s beneath her dignity to discuss her love life in public, evidence from a number of friends is the most that can be provided: “[C]ontrast the ease of proving one is straight or gay in a world in which bisexuals are not acknowledged to exist with the difficulty of proving the same thing in a world in which bisexuals are recognized.”

But the sort of bisexual erasure that takes place when we say “X can’t be lesbian, she’s dated men” (or “X can’t be gay, he’s dated women”) strikes me as pretty unsound, and not fair to a group that makes up a pretty big chunk of the non-straight population.

I've found this sort of thing so annoying in my personal life; I'm just glad Volokh enunciated this point.