Post submitted by Helen Parshall, HRC Diversity & Inclusion Assistant

Bisexual Health Awareness Month is dedicated to raising awareness about the startling disparities that the bisexual community faces in terms of both physical and mental health. When compared against statistics for both heterosexual populations and their lesbian and gay peers, startling trends emerge in both social, economic, and health inequities.  

Here are seven things you probably didn’t know about bisexual health:

1. HRC’s 2014 report, Supporting and Caring for Our Bisexual Youth, found that when compared to their lesbian and gay peers, bisexual, queer and pansexual youth were more likely to experience being excluded and harassed, less likely to have caring adults to turn to if they felt sad and less likely to report feeling happy.
2. The Movement Advancement Project’s 2016 report, Invisible Majority: The Disparities Facing Bisexual People and How To Remedy Them, found significantly lower rates of graduation and college attendance among bisexual students. Bisexual-identified people were approximately 47 percent less likely to enroll in college than respondents who identified as straight.
3. Pew Research Center found in its 2013 Survey of LGBT Americans that while 77 percent of gay men and 71 percent of lesbians say that “most or all of the important people in their lives know of their sexual orientation” only 28 percent of bisexual people report being out.  
4. According to the Bisexual Resource Center (BRC), 45 percent of bisexual women have considered or attempted suicide, followed by bisexual men (35 percent), lesbians (30 percent), gay men (25 percent), and much lower rates for straight women and men.
5. At the historic first White House Roundtable on Bisexual Issues in 2013, the Bisexual Resource Center shared that bisexual women are twice as likely to have an eating disorder than lesbians.
6. In partnership with BRC, BiNetUSA and the Bisexual Organizing Project, HRC Foundation’s issue brief, Health Disparities Among Bisexual People, highlighted these disparities, which include higher rates of cancer, heart disease and obesity, and higher rates of HPV and other sexual health issues, likely stemming from a lack of access to preventative care and not being out to medical providers.
7. The Williams Institute found that 39 percent of bisexual men and 33 percent of bisexual women reported not disclosing their sexual orientation to any medical provider, compared to only 13 percent of gay men and 10 percent of lesbians who chose not to disclose.