I suppose if I wanted to be very boring then I would say that I am bisexual and a girl. But that wouldn’t give you much to read would it?
There was a girl I sat next to in French when I was at secondary school and I fancied the pants off her. later I got a much more serious crush on a girl with a long term boyfriend who had cool hair and did weird things with her makeup and who came out as gay after I had guilted hugely for having a crush on her when she was ‘straight’ – I think she’s married now, to a woman on the west coast of the States.
I was the epitome of the confused teenager for a long while, in the midst of Section 28 I couldn’t ask any of the questions I wanted to and the Usbourne Books my Mum provided had precisely one illustration in the corner of a page stating that some people liked the same sex. Not one mention of those of us who like both. I got there eventually, I’ve written before about Freddy Mercury being described as bisexual really having helped this girl out.
Over the course of the pandemic I really did question whether I could still identify as bisexual given I had two girlfriends and was finding men increasingly unattractive. Last year confirmed to me that I am definitely bisexual but my standards have just increased a fucktonne. I’m pretty happy with that. I can’t imagine having a boyfriend again to be honest, male lovers, maybe, but they’d need to be pretty awesome.
My sexual orientation is still bisexual despite the appearence of the term pansexual (definitely one I didn’t know when I was a teenager). The thing is, I relate to men and women and enbies in different ways, I wrote the other day about the way I understand the world being relational, that is that I understand things by triangulating myself in relation to others and the place that we’re in and when it is and all the contexts. I absolutely respond to masculine and feminine energies and I don’t mean that in the cis-sexual I like manly men and womanly women way, I do like people who perform/relate to their gender in their own way but I like them to have a relationship with their gender. I have yet to find someone agender attractive, that’s not true, but I generally have a problem with enbies in that if I find them attractive its always been because I am misreading their gender and imposing my own assumptions on them, when that’s corrected I’ve found the attraction goes away. I suspect that this is likely always going to be the case when it comes to those people who don’t have a relationship with their gender or who don’t have a gender. I don’t know if I could find someone who identifies as all genders attractive, I know I haven’t yet, I suspect it is more likely than my finding someone agender hot because gender identity does play a part in how I find people attractive.
Trying to figure this out over the years has been complicated to do and I strongly suspect that twenty years ago I was likely coming out with some astoundingly transphobic (or at least it now reads as transphobic) stuff in trying to work this out.
My gender is I suppose a little more interesting. If I had been aware of the term enbie, then I suspect I may well have spent some time in my early twenties figuting out if I was an enbie or not. Sometimes it does feel that in some ways I settled on identifying as a woman because it’s a political identity. I went to rep for the feminist cause. That’s not totally right, I am a ciswoman and I don’t feel like a man. I don’t like the external gender roles that are thrown at me by other people’s assumptions. I am very comfortable in my body, I very much enjoy being a woman and when someone explained to me what gender euphoria was I absolutely think that I have felt that whilst being a woman in my way. Albeit I do enjoy playing with male gender roles, at it’s most vanilla that’s been buying men drinks in pubs and it has also gotten not so vanilla at all. If you think I’m talking about pegging then you’re thinking far too obviously.
I don’t know how long identifying as an enbie would have lasted. But I think I am very comfortable and confident as a woman, I get annoyed by the idea of being confined by social expectations and in some ways throughout my life it’s been easier to confound expectations of the feminine than I think a lot of men feel able to do with the masculine.
So there you go, bisexual girl, that’s me.
