Prior to Krafft-Ebing, "bisexual" usually meant having both female and male parts as in hermaphroditic or monoicous plants, or in the sense of mixed-sex education, meaning inclusive of both males and females.įrom the 1970s onwards, bisexuality as a distinct sexual orientation gained visibility in Western literature, academia and activism. In English the word was used in 1892 by Charles Gilbert Chaddock, an American neurologist, when he translated the 7th edition of Krafft-Ebing's book Psychopathia Sexualis. The first use of the word "bisexual" with the meaning of sexual attraction to both men and women dates back to the 19th century, when the German psychologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing used it to refer to the gender of individuals whom he believed exhibited both feminine and masculine behaviours. The term bisexual is defined later in the twentieth century (for example by Robin Ochs) as a person who is sexually and/or romantically attracted to both males and females, or as a person who is sexually and/or romantically attracted to people regardless of sex or gender identity, which is sometimes termed pansexuality. In modern Western culture, the term bisexual was first defined in a binary approach as a person with romantic or sexual attraction to both men and women. A modern definition of bisexuality began to take shape in the mid-nineteenth century within three interconnected domains of knowledge: biology, psychology and sexuality.
Ancient and medieval history of bisexuality, when the term did not exist as such, consists of anecdotes of sexual behaviour and relationships between people of the same and different sexes. The history of bisexuality concerns the history of the bisexual sexual orientation.