The word bisexual began in a Victorian medical catalogue of sexuality
The term first appeared in German in Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, a nineteenth-century sexology text, and reached English through an 1892 translation. Only in the 1960s did bisexual people reclaim it as a label for themselves, and they have argued happily over its exact definition ever since.
At its broadest, bisexuality means romantic or sexual attraction, or sexual behaviour, directed at more than one gender, or attraction not limited by sex or gender. Charles Gilbert Chaddock brought the word into English when he translated Krafft-Ebing. Community definitions range from attraction regardless of gender, to attraction to people of the same and different genders, to attraction in which gender simply does not matter. The activist Robyn Ochs stresses that such attraction need not happen at the same time, in the same way or to the same degree.
Alfred Kinsey's scale from the 1940s placed people from 0, exclusively heterosexual, to 6, exclusively homosexual, and those scoring 2 to 4 are often considered bisexual. That picture of bisexuality as a midpoint has been severely challenged since Weinberg and Bell published Homosexualities in 1978. Critics note that the scale assumes that more attraction to one gender means less to the other, which some studies contradict, and alternatives such as the Klein grid measure attraction, behaviour, fantasies, emotional and social preference, and self-identification separately.
Is bisexuality a stage on the way to something else? Studies disagree. Rosario and colleagues found that 60 to 70 percent of young people who identified only as bisexual kept that label, while 30 to 40 percent later identified as gay or lesbian. Lisa Diamond's ten-year study of women found the opposite drift, with more adopting bisexual or unlabeled identities than dropping them, and she notes survey data showing nearly as many men moving from gay to bisexual as the reverse.
Scientists do not know exactly what determines orientation. They suspect a mix of genetic, hormonal and environmental influences, do not regard it as a choice, and find more support for biological than social causes, especially in men. Bisexual behaviour has been recorded across human societies and in other animals throughout history.
Source: Bisexuality
