American Institute of Bisexuality

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The American Institute of Bisexuality (AIB) is a controversial organization that is (supposedly?) dedicated to the defense and visibility of bisexuality and bisexuals. On the one hand, it helps fund valuable research on bisexual and bi+ people through its peer-reviewed Journal of Bisexuality, but on the other hand, it also funded very dubious research led by a notorious crackpot, and has ties to transphobic hate groups through some of its members and projects.

History

The AIB was founded by Fred "Fritz" Klein, a psychiatrist who wrote The Bisexual Option and helped advance understanding of sexuality through the Klein Grid, which, while certainly not perfect, was definitively an improvement over the simplistic Kinsey scale.

However, controversy arose when the AIB funded a study led by notorious biphobic/transphobic crank, J. Michael Bailey. Based on this small sample of bisexual participants, the study concluded:

“”Rather, most bisexual men appeared homosexual with respect to genital arousal, although some appeared heterosexual. In contrast, their subjective sexual arousal did conform to a bisexual pattern.

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force criticized The New York Times hyped-up coverage of the study, as well as criticizing the study's methodology:

• That it relies on the idea that sexual arousal is a function of sexual orientation, rather than sexual orientation being a combination of cognitive and physical responses.
• The reliance on a penile plethysmograph to measure genital arousal, which has been called into question as an unreliable instrument for scientific measurement.
• Small sample size (33 bisexual men out of a total of 104 participants), and more than a third of participants had no genital arousal at all during the experiment. There was non-random recruitment of participants.

Then, the AIB funded another study, which addressed some (including subjective as well as genital arousal) but not all (still a small sample size, still not-random) of the methodological problems of the first study. The second study instead concluded, "On average, the bisexual men in our sample had distinctly bisexual patterns of both genital and subjective arousal."

Bailey subsequently led a meta-analysis study (not funded by the AIB) that concluded that "These findings support the view that male sexual orientation contains a range, from heterosexuality, to bisexuality, to homosexuality."

Since the second study, and given Bailey's infamous track record, the Institute fell out of favor with social justice circles. However, the AIB retains relatively mainstream visibility, compared to other bisexual advocacy organizations.

The Journal of Bisexuality

The Journal of Bisexuality is the main scientific publication published by the Institute. Its Editorial Board includes respectable bisexual activists such as Robyn Ochs and Lani Ka'ahumanu, among others, and the journal publishes a number of quality articles on bisexual and bi+ people from a sociological perspective. However, the journal also publishes articles coming from a more bioessentialist perspective.

Bi.org

Bi.org can be seen as the outreach site of the AIB. Given its ranking, Bi.org will very likely be one of the first resources questioning people stumble upon if they wonder if they may be bisexual. However, it has several issues of its own.

Bi.org mainly focuses on matters of media representation, historical figures, and daily life/navigating relationships. It's not to say that these issues don't matter (of course they do!), but Bi.org's approach to them tends to be distinctly apolitical (aside from denouncing obvious bigotry). As shown below, there is good reason for that.

Unless you are already familiar with and aware of more modern understandings of gender and sexuality, Bi.org will not appear especially controversial at first glance; though, they use dated terminology to refer to those matters, and one of the more egregious issues of Bi.org is labelling celebrities and fictional characters as bisexual even when they explicitly reject that label, sometimes without even mentioning their preferred label. This is especially true of pansexuals.

Bi.org itself defines pansexuality as putting "a political emphasis on trans and non-binary identities", which is not the definition given by pansexuals themselves. One probably wouldn't have guessed it at first, but the writers very likely meant this as a pejorative, as the following section will show.

Queer Majority

In contrast to Bi.org, Queer Majority can be thought of as being the back room of the AIB, where members post stuff that is too controversial for the main site. It can also be seen as a pinkwashing platform for various persons aligned with classical liberalism/libertarianism, conservatism, or the Intellectual Dark Web. In fact, Queer Majority doesn't even try to hide that it's just Areo Magazine: Bisexual Edition (the so-called "Liberal/Critical Social Justice" distinction that previously appeared on their "about" page directly comes from Helen Pluckrose of grievance studies hoax fame), with many writers in common (including Helen Pluckrose herself, Chris Ferguson, and Kevin Hsu) and articles that are just reposts from Areo Magazine or vice versa. Other writers include:

• Colin Wright, a right-wing anti-transgender activist and Quillette writer.
• Richard Hanania, an (allegedly former) white supremacist (making his sole contribution to the site the ultimate example of pinkwashing).
• Christina Berry (pen name "Christina Buttons"), a former writer for The Post Millennial and The Daily Wire, before leaving the latter because it was too transphobic even by her standards (no shit).
• J. Michael Bailey himself.
• Phil Illy, an autogynephilia proponent (which he calls "autoheterosexuality").
• Wilfred Reilly, an anti-transgender activist and Quillette writer.
• Ben Appel, who wrote an article for Spiked railing at "Transgender ideology".
• Peter Tatchell, a token left-winger but also pedophilia apologist.
• Verity Ritchie, a panphobic Youtuber who wrote an article minimizing transphobic violence (though they seem to have disowned the article later, since their name doesn't appear on its current version).

Clearly, Queer Majority's claim that it is "focused on sexual and romantic liberty for all" can't be called accurate.

Reading Queer Majority means navigating through a sea of not only transphobia, but also homonationalism, bothsidesism, pinkwashing of various people and institutions (including explicit rainbow capitalism apology), and gatekeeping/exclusionism of the LGBTQ community's more marginal or "woke" elements. This is a combination that appears pretty typical of modern Western right-of-centre politicians when they try to appeal to queer (or, more accurately, cis LGB) people.

Despite being nominally the less controversial face of the AIB, Bi.org regularly retweets Queer Majority articles on their X account.

See also

Essay:My problem with Queer Majority

External links

• American Institute of Bisexuality
• Journal of Bisexuality
• Bi.org
• Queer Majority