The Bisexuality is a more common sexual orientation than homosexuality, despite being much less visible. In fact, studies show that Rates of distress, depression and anxiety among bisexual people are higher than between homosexuals. The denial, invisibility or the lack of support from the community affect the mental health of these people.
This orientation has also received less attention from the academy. Are few tools that allow the evaluation of discrimination against bisexual people due to their sexual orientation. And in the Spanish context, even more limited. That is why a team from the Department of Psychology of the University of Cordoba has translated into Spanish and validated a scale used in the Anglo-Saxon world to evaluate negative attitudes towards bisexuality: The Gender-SpecificBinegativity Scale (Yost & Thomas, 2012).
With the validation work of the team formed by the researchers Rosario Castillo, Carmen Tabernero, Sandra Santiago, Laura Onieva and Bárbara Luque, and the researchers Sebastián Vivas and Francisco García, this instrument can be used in the Spanish context. Furthermore, “a value added of this scale is that it allows attitudes towards bisexual women and men to be measured separately, making it a very valuable measuring instrument because it allows us to take into account the gender perspective“explains the main author of the work Rosario Castillo.
Thus the scale is composed of 30 items to evaluate women and 30 to evaluate men such as: “I think bisexual women (or men) should not work with children”, “I think bisexual women (or men) should not get married” or “I avoid bisexual women (or men).
To overcome the inconvenience of the length of the instrument, which implies having to complete 30 items referring to bisexual women and 30 to bisexual men, the team has validated a shorter version with only 8 parallel items for each gender.
Validation results
495 students from the Faculty of Sciences of the Education and Psychology participated in the development of this scale, completing it along with other variables of interest, such as sexism or social dominance. “We chose this sample because They are young people who in the future will be professionals who will work with people of different ages and they have the responsibility to treat equally to everyone” says the researcher. The results confirmed the validity of the instrument and, in addition, allow us to deepen our view of bisexuality.
He Rejection towards bisexual people was very low, but negative attitudes were related to sexism, homophobia and social dominance orientation, which is a variable that evaluates discrimination in general and support for social hierarchies. That is to say, those who had negative attitudes toward bisexual people were also more sexist and they had greater attachment to the hierarchy.
“According to the results, Bisexual men are seen worse than bisexual women. “These bisexual men, in addition, are seen worse by the men themselves,” explains researcher Sebastián Vivas. This has a lot to do with gender stereotypes since, although there are negative attitudes towards both women and bisexual men, in the case of Women are more related to promiscuity or eroticization on the part of men and “they are seen as a confused heterosexual woman, while in the case of men they are made invisible and identified as confused homosexuals.”
This work advances the visibility of bisexuality, providing an instrument that opens the possibility of investigating attitudes towards bisexual people on a larger scale, developing strategies to promote equal treatment, such as training for people who work for the service. public or equality education at all educational levels and then be able to evaluate the effects of these programs. In short, moving towards a better and more egalitarian society.