After the 200-year-old dictionary company named the nonbinary pronoun “they” its 2019 Word of the Year, Ochs said she wrote a letter in collaboration with the LGBTQ media advocacy organization GLAAD asking for an update to the word “bisexual,” because the expanded definition of “they” created “a contradiction in your binary definition of bisexuality.” Robyn Ochs. The definition has changed and expanded many times over the centuries - including this year.īisexual+ advocate Robyn Ochs, 61, said she accidentally noticed that Merriam-Webster changed its definition of “bisexual” during a recent Google search.

The first known use of the word 'bisexual' was in 1793, though it meant 'possessing characters of both sexes” at the time, according to its Merriam-Webster entry. Beyond attraction to ‘both men and women’ 23, activists and bisexual-identified people told NBC News that this is a pervasive stereotype, despite published documents dating to the 1990s that clarify the term’s expansive meaning and Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s update to its definition this past spring.

Amid this year’s Bisexual Awareness Week, which culminates with Bi Visibility Day on Sept. Kelley Clementsĭecades after coming out as bisexual, Rawlings-Fein said he and other advocates still face the misconception that the term bisexual means their attraction is restricted to the gender binary - meaning those who identify as exclusively male or female. I was like, ‘Wow, this is something I have to rethink and look at, reframe it.’” Martin Rawlings-Fein. “I started looking at all of those people who were bi at that time. “At first I was like, ‘bi, binary, well duh,’ but then I started looking at all of those people who were bi at that time, and a lot of them were trans or genderqueer, or in some way they were against the binary in their life, in their expression,” Rawlings-Fein, the former lead organizer for the Bay Area Bisexual+ & Pansexual Network, told NBC News. Rawlings-Fein, a trans man, said at the time people were “really confused” that a transgender person could be anything other than straight and that a bisexual person could be anything other than cisgender. It wasn’t until he met bi people who also identify as transgender and/or outside the gender binary that he realized this perception was something he needed to rethink. When Martin Rawlings-Fein, 43, first thought he might be bisexual in the 1990s, he saw the label as limiting.

Getting Bi by Robyn Ochs