It is, unfortunately, not uncommon to hear about discrimination against members of the LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual) community by the larger society. Yet, what those within the community will tell you is the way that discrimination often exists within the community itself. A prominent example is the way biphobia (prejudice against bisexuals; Mulick & Wright, 2002) is perpetuated within the community. Multiple empirical studies have been done on this phenomenon, showing that members of the community are for the most part mildly biphobic (Mulick & Wright, 2002) and tend to express negative stereotypes towards bisexuals (Dyar & Lytle, 2017).
Yet, how is this possible? How can someone discriminate against a member of their own community, especially one which itself is constantly discriminated against? The answer perhaps lies in the fundamental human fear of the "in-between." Social Identity Theory (SIT) states that we divide our social world into ingroups (those to which we belong) and outgroups (those that we are not a part of; Stangor et al., 2022). To someone who identifies as a lesbian, for instance, their ingroup may be "those who are attracted to their same gender" and their outgroups may be "those who are attracted to the opposite gender." In a way, bisexuals represent a group of people that cannot easily be placed into either of those categories. The theory of Personal Need for Structure (PNS) claims that humans have a desire to think about the world in simple terms (Burke & LaFrance, 2016). Here, bisexuality is seen to threaten the simplified model of sexuality where one is either homosexual or heterosexual. Indeed, Burke and LaFrance (2016) found that there was a positive relationship between PNS levels of participants of multiple demographics and how negatively they perceived bisexuals, which the authors claim to have stemmed from a preference for a binary model of sexuality.
Similarly, the theory of Need for Closure (NFC) claims that humans have a desire to avoid ambiguity in their mental representations, and has been associated generally with negative outgroup views (Burke et al., 2017). NFC has been associated with general discrimination against minorities. Yet, a study found that it predicted negative evaluations of bisexuals even after accounting for that of homosexuals, showing that it is more than that. Here, it was claimed that intermediate groups cause an even greater disturbance to one's simplistic mental categories (Burke et al., 2017). Given that neither of these discomforts are exclusive to heterosexuals, they serve to explain how biphobia is able to exist within the LGBTQIA+ community.
Hence, human tendencies to simplify their mental representations of the world may be one factor that leads to discriminations against bisexuals, as they represent an extremely ambiguous and unclear social category.
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