Why bisexual Christians still feel unseen in affirming congregations

In the course of my work, I am often invited to speak at churches and Christian events on the topic of sexuality, gender, and faith. A few years ago, I was invited to speak as the keynote at a Christian conference. The host warmly introduced me as a bisexual Christian author and pastor, then added: “And he is in a straight marriage.” Nothing hostile was intended. The introduction was meant to be inclusive. But I remember how that small phrase landed. In the same breath my identity was acknowledged, it was also explained away. It was a welcome that flattened even as it included.

I was able to explain to the group why such an introduction was problematic, and we moved forward together. But the experience is familiar to many bisexual Christians in affirming spaces. Over the past two decades, many Canadian congregations have done difficult and meaningful work around 2SLGBTQIA+ inclusion. Yet much of that work still quietly assumes that people are ultimately either gay or straight, with bisexuality folded into the acronym without being understood on its own terms. This assumption is sometimes described as a monosexual framework, meaning a view of sexuality that treats attraction to only one gender (whether heterosexual or gay/lesbian) as the norm. As a result, bisexual Christians are often welcomed rhetorically while being misread practically. Our relationships, disclosures, and identities are filtered through assumptions about marriage, leadership, testimony, and belonging that remain largely unexamined. Sometimes the misreading even moves in the opposite direction, with bisexual people in straight-presumed relationships treated as “not queer enough” to speak for or represent the community at all.

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This invisibility is also demographic. According to Statistics Canada, bisexual people make up the largest subgroup within the LGB population in Canada. A 2018 meta-analysis in the Journal of Sex Research found bisexual people consistently report higher or equivalent rates of depression and anxiety compared with gay and lesbian people, and substantially higher rates than heterosexual people. Canadian research has likewise documented elevated rates of suicidal thoughts and behaviours and intimate partner violence among bisexual populations. Invisibility within affirming spaces does not always feel like overt exclusion. Often it feels more like a steady pressure toward becoming easier to categorize than you actually are. That is what makes it hard to name and hard to leave.

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Affirming work in churches is often framed as expanding the circle. The assumption is that the centre remains largely intact while more people are welcomed in. But genuine affirmation requires something more demanding than a wider welcome. It requires interrogating the assumptions that shaped the exclusion in the first place. Monosexism, the quiet assumption that authentic desire must be oriented toward only one gender, remains deeply embedded in how many churches imagine identity, partnership, and family.

Straight people are assumed straight unless proven otherwise. Gay and lesbian people are assumed to be permanently and legibly queer. Bisexuality fits neither script. It exposes how much of what churches call inclusion still depends on the binary underneath.

What bisexual Christians often reveal is not simply the need for more inclusion, but the limits of the church’s imagination around belonging itself. A church capable of welcoming people without demanding that their complexity resolve into something more familiar is a healthier church for everyone.

What churches gain is a more honest community: one capable of holding lives that exceed inherited categories, relationships that do not fit expected scripts, and people who do not become less real simply because others struggle to understand them clearly. Bisexual Christians are not a test case for the church’s inclusion. We are, quietly and often unseen, already showing the church what belonging without simplification looks like.

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Jamie Arpin-Ricci is a queer, Winnipeg-based author, pastor, and community activist working at the intersection of faith, justice, and 2SLGBTQIA+ inclusion. He is the founder of The Rainbow Well and a pastoral leader of Little Flowers Community, a Mennonite congregation in inner-city Winnipeg.