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In honour of pride month, the full 4-part podcast series “Bi People” is now available on 大象传媒 Sounds. Here is a roundup of some of the most important things we have covered that I think everyone should know about bisexuality.

Bisexuality was a term first coined in the late 1800s to describe people who have both homosexual and heterosexual attractions. It was created shortly after a gay rights activist, Karl-Maria Kertbeny, first came up with the terms heterosexual and homosexual.

The Kinsey Scale allows people to describe their sexuality as a number from 0, exclusively heterosexual, to 6, exclusively homosexual."

Already in the late 1890s, an English medical researcher called Havelock Ellis studied bisexuality alongside other sexual variations. Because he said positive things about people seen as sexual deviants, for example he wrote that he believed bisexuals made great leaders, his book was banned in England for violating obscenity laws. Despite this, his book was later published.

Still, most people continued to see sexuality as binary, to the annoyance of American sexuality researcher Alfred Kinsey. In 1941 he wrote that sorting the world in heterosexual or homosexual didn’t describe “behaviour as it actually occurs in the human being”. Instead, he wrote, “the picture is one of endless intergradation between every combination of homosexuality and heterosexuality.” To capture this nuance, he created a tool to help with his research, the Kinsey Scale.

The Kinsey Scale allows people to describe their sexuality as a number from 0, exclusively heterosexual, to 6, exclusively homosexual. Kinsey also included X for people with no sexual attractions. Most of the options, from 1 to 5, are on the bisexual spectrum because they include attraction to multiple genders. This normalises the idea that many people, Kinsey often talked about half, have bisexual desires. The Kinsey scale is still one of the most popular tools used today to measure sexuality.

Today, bisexuality is defined as the sexual and/or romantic attraction to multiple genders. It is considered the umbrella term for other labels, including pansexual, omnisexual, and plurisexual.

Research has found that people who want to be visibly bisexual often mix clothing and norms from various genders. Like pairing a feminine summer dress with rugged boots and colourful hair, or a masculine shirt with nail polish. But these signs can still be hard to spot. If that’s too discrete, to be out and proud (for example at pride) there are at least two big bisexual symbols people can wear.

The most famous is symbol is the bisexual pride flag, created in 1998. It includes three horizontal stripes, a bright pink one, a bright purple one, and a bright blue one. The purple stripe is thinner than the other two. People often incorrectly think that the pink represents women and the blue represents men, much like people often think the “bi” in bisexual means men and women. Neither is true.

The colour choice was based on the 1980s bi-visibility symbol, the biangles. The biangles consists of an inverted pink triangle and an inverted blue triangle that overlap a bit to create a small purple section. It references the pink triangle, a symbol used by the Nazis to identify homosexual men, which was reclaimed by the queer community. The blue represents heterosexuality. The overlapping section symbolises the mixing of both to create bisexuality.

Biangles were also a symbol favoured by Brenda Howard, an American bisexual rights activist who was responsible for helping to organise the first pride marches in the world. This earned her the nickname, “the mother of pride”.

Any country that criminalises homosexual behaviour, or makes it illegal to talk about queer lives, endangers bisexual people. This can result in discrimination, persecution, human rights abuses and sometimes even death.

Depressingly, when bisexual people try to flee oppressive or dangerous environments they are incredibly unlikely to be granted asylum. A study published in 2009 which analysed refugee claims on the grounds of bisexuality in the US, Canada, and Australia, found that bisexual people are significantly less likely to obtain refugee status than other sexual minority groups.

Bi-invisibility and negative stereotypes held by decision-makers play an important role. One of the main toxic assumptions is that bisexual people can just choose to live heterosexual lives, by being only romantically involved with the “opposite” sex. But you can’t just tell your heart whom to love. Another problem is that once you’re out of the closet as bisexual it can be impossible to go back in, so returning to your home community can be life-threatening.

Dangers don’t just lurk abroad. Statistics show that most bisexual people in the UK are in the closet, hidden at work and from their loved ones. They show increased rates sexual assault and stalking against bisexual people. They show double-discrimination from heterosexual and homosexual people, who hypersexualise bisexuality, see it as a phase, or think it is not a real experience or valid identity. We need to be careful that the shiny rainbows at home don’t distract us from the fact that there is still much to do in our own communities to make them bi-inclusive.

But I don’t want to end on a low. Despite the negative societal issues, research has found that most bisexual people love being bi. Bisexuality is the capacity to love beyond gender, which is an incredible gift and is described by many bisexual people as a form of freedom.

If you want to learn more about the culture, history, and science of bisexuality, you can now listen to all four episodes of “Bi People” on 大象传媒 Sounds.

Dr Julia Shaw is a research associate at University College London and the co-host of the Bad People podcast, and the mini-series Bi People, on 大象传媒 Sounds.

She is an expert on bisexuality and criminal psychology, and the author of “Bi: The hidden culture, history, and science of bisexuality”. Her website: , and twitter