rubyfruitgirl:

I know a lot of lesbians that used to identify as bi who worried that coming out as a lesbian would contribute to invalidating bisexuality in some way, by making it seem like a “stepping stone” to coming out as gay. I’ve also known bi women who identified as lesbians and changed their labels later, and worried that they were contributing to some kind of idea about how men can ~turn lesbians. I just wanted to say that it’s no individual lesbian or bi women’s responsibility to fix straight people’s perception of us. Like, it’s not your duty to serve as a political symbol! It’s your duty to find happiness even if that means changing ur label at some points.

Thank you! I was really worried about coming out as bi, even after I was married to my husband. I had run gay groups, put on pride events, etc for years. Sexuality can be fluid or one’s understanding of it can deepen. 

This pride month here is a reminder of my story: I identified as a lesbian for probably a decade. Even after getting together with my husband I thought he was just a unique individual and somehow genitalia didn’t matter. Turns out I now have the words and deeper understanding of sexuality and gender to articulate that I’m demisexual and at the time I identified as a lesbian I only had deep enough relationships with women to experience sexual attraction to them. Once I formed deeper relationships with men when I was in college, I determined that I was occasionally attracted men, but that pansexual was a better word for my attraction, since a person’s body is something I grow to be attracted to, enjoy, and find pleasure with only after only after the deep spiritual/friendship connection is forged. I had adopted the language of attraction, saying people were hot when I found them aesthetically pleasing, etc, because I thought everyone was exaggerating their “attraction” to celebrities and even people they knew.  Now I am poly and actively in relationships with men and women, but I should not serve as a represenation of pansexuality. Many, many pan and bi individuals are successfully monogamous and the “greedy” or “slut” archetype dismisses/hurts a lot of people