This is the Guardian. According to a recent survey from the Office for National Statistics, more than one in

ten young women in the UK identifies lesbian, gay, bisexual or other, up from 3.1% in 2014.

This seems to show a positive move towards the destigmatization of non-heterosexualities.

But there's still a way to go. In her new book, psychologist Dr Julia Shaw looks at the realities of being by, from scientists trying to objectively prove the existence of bisexuality,

to the day-to-day experiences of bifobia and high rates of sexual assault.

Today I'm speaking to Julia about the hidden science of bisexuality

and why it's time we all started talking about it more.

From The Guardian, I'm Madeline's really important for us to get a working definition of what we mean when we say

bisexuality because early on in your book you point out that the term actually has quite

a broad application.

It can, but most researchers and individuals defined by sexuality

as the romantic and or sexual attraction to multiple genders.

And what's really important in that is that people sometimes mistakenly assume

that the buy in bisexual means men and women because we're so into this

conversation right now about the gender binary which is really important to

have but actually the bi- in bisexual refers to both heterosexual and homosexual attractions.

In other words, it's same and other genders and it is inclusive of all genders. So it's not transphobic, just to be clear,

because I think sometimes, unfortunately,

people use alternative words because they think

that bisexuality reinforces a gender binary which isn't true.

So actually I'd like to talk about science's attempts to objectively measure bisexuality and you can't see but I was doing air quotes there

because a very interesting study from 2020 came out which was covered quite widely in the media, often with headlines

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