BI VISIBILITY DAY: ON BEING SEEN AS YOU ACTUALLY ARE

LOS ANGELES — Today is Bisexual Visibility Day (September 23), and your correspondent wants to use it to talk about a specific, oddly persistent problem: the way mainstream dating apps have long struggled to actually see bisexual and other non-binary-orientation people, forcing a beautifully varied reality into rigid either/or boxes that fit almost no one who lives in the middle. Visibility is the theme of the day, and dating tech has a genuine visibility problem worth naming.

The erasure is both social and structural. Socially, bi+ people face a well-documented double dismissal — treated as "actually straight" or "actually gay," their orientation waved off as a phase, a stopover, or an indecision — which is exhausting and invalidating in equal measure. And dating apps have historically encoded that erasure into their architecture: rigid orientation categories, binary gender-interest toggles, matching logic that assumes everyone sorts cleanly into one box or its opposite. When the software itself can't represent who you are, it delivers a small, daily message that you don't quite fit — that your reality is an edge case the system didn't bother to model. That's erasure by data structure, and it's its own quiet harm.

The fix is not a marketing gesture; it's a data-model decision. To actually see people across the spectrum, a platform has to represent orientation and attraction as they actually are — a spectrum, self-positioned, not a pair of mutually exclusive boxes.

Which is precisely how MOOD's LGBTQ+ Community MOOD is built. Rather than forcing rigid categories, it uses an interest-scale self-positioning model — you place yourself where you actually are, along a spectrum, on your own terms — paired with a reciprocal-visibility rule that governs who sees whom on mutual terms. The point of that design is exactly the point of today: to let people be seen as they actually are, in their own words, rather than flattened into a box that was never built with them in mind. Visibility, in the end, is an architecture question as much as a social one. You cannot be seen by a system that has no way to represent you — so you build the system to represent the full spectrum, and then, at last, people can show up as themselves. Happy Bi Visibility Day. This paper sees you, and thinks the software should too.