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Melissa Harris-Perry: It's The Takeaway and I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. This week marks bisexual awareness week. A week to celebrate the bi-plus community and bring light to issues that bi-plus individuals and communities face. For the first time, the Biden administration hosted a bisexual health equity roundtable.

Yesterday, 15 bi-plus healthcare policy experts and advocates met with federal agency officials of the Department of Health and Human Services. One of those advocates is Kierra Johnson, Executive Director of the National LGBTQ Task Force and Kierra is here with me now. Welcome to The Takeaway, Kierra.

Kierra Johnson: Thank you so much. It's good to be here with you.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Map out for me, what are some of the specific health challenges facing bi-plus communities.

Kierra Johnson: Bisexual and pansexual people face specific disparities and mental and physical health, intimate partner violence, and monkeypox prevention treatment and care. We really are looking to work with the administration to address where there are funding and information gaps, and how we fill those.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Yes, talk to me a little bit about the funding piece and about the data piece. In one way, I said, tell me about the issues and you very confidently answer, but I'm wondering if you fully know what they are, if anyone can, based on some of these data inequities.

Kierra Johnson: That's a really, really important point. There is data collection that is happening, that has been funded in various ways across the country, but there is a real lack of federal research and dollars going into funding research. This is where we've got to ramp up. Some of the recommendations we've made specifically to the administration are about increasing the amount of data collection disaggregating so that we can really identify what the unique needs are and impacts are on bi-plus people.

Funding training for healthcare providers who are on the front lines of giving care to patients, and preparing researchers to do this kind of work. Even anecdotally, but also in the research that has come from the community, we're seeing percentages and numbers that are devastating. For example in 2013, there was a finding that 61% of bisexual women, 37% of bisexual men reported experiencing rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner compared to 43% of lesbian women and 26% of gay men. There's some real work for us to do here.

Melissa Harris-Perry: There's also some data around mental health disparities and emotional health disparities. I'm wondering how concerns that we might call bi-erasure or bi-antagonism, basically, the belief that many have that, oh, bisexual doesn't even exist. It's not even real. These are communities we don't even talk about, how those questions of erasure and antagonism might in fact be implicated in these mental and emotional health questions.

Kierra Johnson: Absolutely. We've seen data that even came out recently that has said young people just need one adult. One place where they can go to be affirmed and it can be the difference between life and death, whether they attempt suicide or not. The reality is, is that bi-erasure is real. There's a lot of stigma around people want you to choose. They want you to get in a box and they want you to stay in it.

You get that at home. You get that from friends, but you also get that from the medical field. Bisexual Black man attempted to receive a monkeypox vaccine in Georgia and was denied because he's currently in a relationship with a woman. There was no acknowledgment of the fluidity, or the complexity of relationships, or even just believing the patient in front of them who said, "I'm bisexual and I need and would like this vaccine." To have to repeat yourself over and over again, and champion your own identity as you're seeking care is just-- that's just asinine.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Kierra, you're talking about people want you to get in a box and stay there. I love that imagery. It helps us to understand what's happening here. Not only in a box, but also, oftentimes, we don't talk about the realities of intersectional identity. How are these issues of physical and mental health also crosscut with class and gender, gender identity, and of course, race?

Kierra Johnson: One of the things I'm really excited about that the administration is already paying attention to is the high rates of removals of children from queer women, and in particular queer women of color. When you look at foster care, when you're looking at childcare, bisexual women, lesbian women, and when they are of color and when they are of low income, you see a higher percentage of their children being taken away and put into the foster care system.

When we're talking about intersectionality, we know that as we have an interweaving of identities, so as people of color, as women, as bisexual people, we see an even higher disproportionate negative impact on families and on individuals in the community.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You mentioned monkeypox, can you talk to me a little bit about COVID as well? Are there indications that bisexual communities were particularly affected by the pandemic?

Kierra Johnson: Both in the stigma and in receiving attention for prevention and care, absolutely, we saw an impact. One, which is a continuing issue, it's a trend that you're going to hear over and over again, is just the lack of data, the lack of aggregated data for us to be able to get a sense of who was getting, or who is getting COVID, who is getting monkeypox, but then also how are these viruses interacting and interplaying with the pre-existing medical conditions that folks in the LGBTQ community may have?

How are we tracking and looking at the long-term effects, and how are we making sure dollars are getting into the community? How are we making sure they're getting into low-income communities, which disproportionately have high populations of LGBTQ people? When you look at, for example, transgender communities, we're talking about the median income or the average income being at $10,000 a year. We definitely have seen impact, and my guess is we would see more if we had more data.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, you say if we saw this, so what are some of the key recommendations that you and the other advocates made yesterday in your conversation with administration officials?

Kierra Johnson: Two of the top-line recommendations were for the federal government to create a federal interagency bisexual liaison, and a bisexual working group. We know that capacity matters. That if you have somebody tasked who is the bottom liner, the work is more likely to get done. It really is a recommendation to put their money where their mouth is.

Let's get some people who are dedicated to doing this work into the game, into HHS doing this work, training materials to educate the National Institute of health their personnel, their grant reviewers, funding intersectional community research so that we're looking at race and sexuality and gender when we're collecting data about impact and disparities, training for frontline healthcare professionals who receive federal funding for intimate partner violence. Those are a few of the recommendations. It really is about getting real data and making sure adequate funding is going into prevention and care services on the ground.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Kierra Johnson is the Executive Director of the National LGBTQ Task Force. Kierra, thank you so much for being here.

Kierra Johnson: Thank you for having me. Take care.

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