Upon accepting the award for Best Actor for his lead role in the film Marty Supreme at the 2026 Critics’ Choice Awards, Timothée Chalamet specifically thanked his “partner of three years.” What would normally be a routine acknowledgment in an acceptance speech received a huge amount of attention on social media and the online rumor mills. Part of the excitement was over the fact that Chalamet had finally publicly acknowledged the not-so-well-kept secret that he and Kylie Jenner were a couple. Another part of the online frenzy fiercely debated Chalamet’s choice of using a gender-neutral term, partner, to describe their relationship. Some commented that a heterosexual relationship shouldn’t be described using gender-neutral terminology, while others applauded Chalamet for using the term. While on the surface this debate may seem to be an issue of semantics, it is actually one of tremendous impact for the LGBTQIA+ community. The increased usage of gender-neutral terminology to describe one’s relationship by both LGBTQIA+ and heterosexual individuals may actually help to address an important issue that often goes unnoticed.
Bisexual erasure is when the existence of bisexuality (and pansexuality) as a sexual orientation is either questioned, ignored, de-legitimized, or presumed not be a possibility. It has occurred throughout LGBTQ history and is perpetuated in the media, in academia, and in popular culture. One of the most common occurrences is when the perceived gender of a couple (or any relationship arrangement) is used to make assumptions about the sexual orientation of each individual, such as assuming that two married women are lesbians or that two men who are dating must be gay. This assumption not only erases the existence of bisexuality/pansexuality, but also conflates gender (or perceived gender) with sexual orientation. The lack of recognition of bisexuality has historically reinforced a binary perspective of sexuality as either heterosexual or gay/lesbian, which in turn negatively reinforces stereotypes about bisexual individuals (e.g., that all bisexual men are actually gay and will eventually come out as such). The historic erasure of a spectrum of sexual orientation has had measurable negative impacts for bisexual and pansexual individuals including related to self-esteem, mental health, and health outcomes.
The experience of having your sexual orientation defined by your peers’ perception of your relationship and the gender of your partner is a far too common experience for bisexual and pansexual individuals. One of my former patients, a 17-year-old who identifies as pansexual and non-binary (they/them pronouns), recounted to me a story of how they struggled to figure out their own identity due to this very experience. Whenever they were dating someone of the same sex, their friends assumed they were gay; when they dated someone whose gender identity differed from theirs, they were dismissed by their peers as someone who was still gay and just trying to “act straight.” The possibility that they were bisexual or pansexual wasn’t even an option in a world that tries to reinforce a binary and put everyone into boxes as quickly as possible. This same patient experienced a parallel struggle when exploring their gender identity. As someone who exhibited both stereotypically male and female physical characteristics, they would often be perceived as male by strangers due to their deeper voice and short hair but gendered as female by those who were aware that they were assigned female at birth. This contributed to a great deal of confusion for them in middle school when they were first exploring their gender identity.
A male colleague of mine, who also identifies as non-binary, relayed a similar story to me about how the tendency for others to perceive him as male would result in assuming that he would perform aspects of his job that are stereotypically reserved for men such as being asked to help intervene when a male patient was agitated and behaving aggressively toward staff on an inpatient psychiatric unit. Not only does this reinforce gendered stereotypes but it also others gender non-conforming individuals and reinforces a gender binary that does not exist.
Like my 17-year-old former patient, I have witnessed firsthand the tendency for both heterosexual and LGBTQIA+ communities to reinforce bisexual erasure and invisibility. In my freshman year of college when I started dating another guy, my dorm mates seemed almost relieved to confirm (in their minds) that I was gay. Presumably this was because they were struggling to label my sexual orientation and finally thought they had figured it out. Yet at no point had I actually come out as gay or used that label to describe myself. A year later when one of my platonic relationships with a female friend became more serious, the rumor (from my straight peers) was that I had been lying about being gay the entire time (which isn’t exactly false since I never said I was gay…) and was only pretending to be gay in order to get close to women so that I could date them. Meanwhile, my gay friends assumed that dating women was a phase or a rejection of my homosexuality (some internalized homophobia) and that I would go back to dating men shortly. The possibility that I was bisexual (which I am) wasn’t even an option in anyone’s minds. For me, this led to a certain amount of internalized biphobia and uncertainty if my bisexual identity would be accepted by others if they had bothered to just ask. For many bisexuals, the experience of bisexual erasure leads to a decentralized insecurity of not being queer enough within the LGBTQIA+ community, given that we are just as likely to be invisible to gays and lesbians as we are to heterosexuals. To this day, I find myself apprehensive when entering new social or professional settings and I can sense that others want to determine the nature of my sexual orientation by trying to determine the gender of my spouse.
Just like Chalamet, my spouse and I use the term partner to describe our relationship to others. We find that it best depicts the nature of our relationship and we prefer not to center gender or reinforce a gender binary or reinforce gender stereotypes when describing our marriage. We do so when introducing each other in-person but also when the other isn’t present. I see no issue with the use of non-gendered relationship terminology being used by heterosexual couples like Chalamet and Jenner. Why gatekeep the term ‘partner’ and limit it to only those within the LGBTQIA+ community? If anything, I believe that its increased use could actually combat bisexual erasure, call attention to our internalized biases, and push us as a society to question whether knowing the gender identities of a relationship really does tell us anything about the sexual orientation of either individual or should be so central when describing the relationship.