Author Archives: Stella-Jehan

Stella-Jehan

About Stella-Jehan

A genderfluid pansexual activist who lives in Paris with their children: a beagle puppy and a non-binary feline demon. Philosophy and history student. Also writes pretentious poetry, cries a good deal about TV and book characters, pretends they live in an aesthetically pleasing videoclip, and dyes almost everything mint green.

10 Things To Keep In Mind If You’re Questioning Your Sexuality And/Or Gender

LGBTQ+ voices, communities and public dialogue, often focus on issues that concern specific identities (the more widely accepted and talked about the identity, the better).

This is absolutely necessary, but what we need to remember sometimes is that not all the people who have reached that point of sharing their experiences with others, giving useful advice about coming out, relationships, advocacy and support, had their identities, preferences and desires figured from the very beginning. In fact, most LGBTQ+ youth go through a questioning process.

That happens not only because it is absolutely normal for people to reevaluate their choices as they go through different things or to experience situations in their lives fluidly, but also because we live in a hetero-cis/normative society that sets heterosexual, cisgender existences as the default, so that everyone else might first have to go through a process of doubting, shaming and dismissing themselves and their feelings as if they’re something that “can’t be”, that doesn’t make sense, something that’s just in their minds, or something they can’t easily validate just yet. But that’s alright.

Think of that: have you often heard people around you worrying whether they might be straight, or questioning their sexuality because it occurred to them that heterosexuality may be a possibility? I don’t think so.

Society’s standards for us to initially be heterosexual (and sexual, for that matter), make it evident that people are most likely to question this given sexuality when they feel it doesn’t explain their feelings and experiences. A paper published in the Journal of Sex Research shows that in a survey answered by women who identified as heterosexual, most of them were deliberate in their answers and had come to a conscious conclusion about their heterosexuality “after contemplating alternative possibilities”.

Such effects are even more visible in questioning our gender. Our society is strongly gendered, aligning bodies with preferences with behaviors, and limiting us within a binary system of only male and female that we are assigned at birth without even having a concept of what gender might be. We grow up all our lives being taught that we should do X things, behave a Y way and make Z choices based on our genitals and these lines can truly be drawn very strictly around us.

That makes it even harder for us to question whether the gender we have been assigned at birth does not feel entirely right for us, since questioning even gender norms, let alone gender identities, is not something that society encourages.

For non-binary questioning people things get a lot more complicated, since genders that fall outside the gender binary are outright invalidated by public discourse.

So what should a young person expect when they’re questioning? What should you keep in mind when you’re unsure, or experimenting about your sexuality and/or gender identity?

What should you ideally be demanding other people around you to do in order to make you feel more comfortable and at home during this process – that might either lead to concrete results, or may never end up doing so?

1. Define in your own words.

I can hardly remember questioning my sexuality though I’m sure it kind of happened – the thing is that it did happen but I accepted the change too quickly, so my questioning period wasn’t that long. I identified as straight until, during my adolescence, I started getting strong crushes on female celebrities. The explanation was pretty simple: having grown up in a homophobic and biphobic environment, I was homophobic myself… until I wasn’t.

Reading gay fanfiction about my favorite characters was what actually helped me stop being a bigot, and that was the solid and concrete turning point where I woke up and realized that my crushes on women were actually crushes, and not simply fangirling on celebrities I admired. I came to accept that I might, after all, have experienced a crush or two for girls in real life as well, and boom! There was even a pre-existing word for it: I was bisexual.

Soon, after I heard about non-binary identities and met non-binary people, I shifted more towards identifying as pansexual, as I realized that there weren’t only two genders and that people’s gender was not a determining factor for me to feel attracted to them.

It was not that simple, however, when I recently started questioning my gender, and I will say more about it later. When this started taking shape in my mind, the first thing that helped me was to try and put into words whatever messy raw material I possessed at that moment; the very fresh, blurry feelings that you might not yet be able to distinguish, but you can say a thing or two about them.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t know exactly how to describe everything that you’re feeling, or if you’ve never heard of people with similar experiences to yours before, or even if you have – but the experiences you’ve heard of are slightly different than your own, or were dealt with differently. No one else can tell you how to feel, or experience things, simply because no one else feels and experiences things for you, without you. Only you know what’s valid for you, and even if you don’t know for sure what works and what doesn’t.

Do this for you: take your time to define yourself and not let anyone tell you that “you’re not gay enough, trans enough, – something – enough”, that “it’s all in your mind” or that “it doesn’t work this way”.

2. Put a label on it – or don’t.

Honestly, in this whole questioning process this is the only rule: do shit your way. I’m all for labels and yet I feel like things are still too fresh for me to grasp everything around the term “trans”, even though I might not be as cis as I always thought, even though trans is an umbrella term used to describe everyone whose gender and the way they experience it doesn’t entirely match what they were assigned at birth. When something is new for you, you might need time to feel like you’re in clothes that fit without it all being too disorientating.

Labels are really important if, by naming your identity helps in reminding you that it’s valid, that it exists, and that you can be included in communities. Labels, however, can also feel limiting if you see them as definitions that don’t quite define you. You don’t have to use them if they tend to limit you even more, or if they end up turning this into a competition of constantly having to prove yourself and people around you that you are what you are.

And if you use them, remember that they’re not books that you borrow from a library or DVDs that you have to return to the video club in excellent condition and pay for them. They’re not a checklist, or something that you have the privilege – or the gained right – to appropriate, and need to treat cautiously. Instead they’re something that you need to own, rephrase, adapt and transform in the way that feels right for you.

The main point of labels (and what makes them very useful) is not to make you feel like a mass-produced tin of soup, but to help and empower you, to give you the sense of community and solidarity with other people with similar experiences.

Don’t try to meet up to other people’s standards for your identity. Don’t follow behaviors that don’t fit your personality, or habits you don’t feel comfortable with, just to prove something that cannot be proven with a super market receipt or a college degree. The purpose of labels is not to dictate what you should or shouldn’t do or conform with to identify the way you do, so try not to think in terms of “I can’t be X because I don’t fit Y requirement”.

Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not trans enough if you don’t experience dysphoria, if you don’t try to pass, if you don’t fully transition or if you decide to not transition at all – whether it be socially, legally or medically. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not asexual because you’ve had sex in the past. Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re not a lesbian or bisexual because you haven’t had sexual relations with girls yet.

You are something if you say you are. You may feel like one concrete thing or many things at once.

4. Be open.

Accept all possibilities. It’s not always that easy, especially when you’ve learnt that you’re something you whole life and then suddenly something starts feeling off – or, hell, if it’s been feeling off all along but this shit is not the easiest to deal with. If something has always been different but you haven’t yet figured it out, it’s okay. If something changes oh so suddenly, it’s not the end of the world. Both your gender and your sexuality may be fluidly changing during your life (and at this point remember to distinguish bisexuality from sexual fluidity, or questioning processes phases from sexual fluidity). Just because you identify as one – or ten – things now, it doesn’t mean that you’ll continue to feel that way for the rest of your life.

People (even from within the LGBT community) may try to invalidate the way you identify because, to them, it’s just a way of transitioning to another identity. For example, many people dismiss bisexual identities or experiences because they think it’s just a process of you accepting that you’re truly gay, or they may dismiss non-binary genders because they may assume that it’s just a phase, before coming to terms with being a binary trans person.

You’re not going through a phase: you’re going through a process. Everything that has to do with self-discovery is changeable, and everything is a process. Being bisexual, asexual and/or genderfluid, agender or whatever else is not a phase, but your true identity as long as you feel like it describes you.

And even if you stop identifying as bisexual and start feeling attraction only towards women, or if you decide that a binary gender identity suits you best, it doesn’t mean that the ways in which you used to identify were just phases. Imagine being in university until you become twenty four, and then getting a job as a lawyer.

Just because you’re a lawyer now and you’re not a student anymore, it doesn’t mean that you were never actually a student, or that this period of your life was any less real or valid than your lawyer period. You were a toddler once. Just because you’re an adult now, it doesn’t mean that your toddler period never existed. Your identity at a specific period of time is valid and it affects you and it is what matters, whether it’s going to change in the future or never change at all.

As Adrian Ballou writes about social transition in their article I think I might be trans: “You have the right to change [your name, pronouns, and/or gender expression] […] as often as you want or need.”

4. Ask, talk, read, research, participate…

Thankfully, even if our societies may sometimes not even acknowledge, let alone represent, sufficiently research, or talk about our identities, LGBTQ+ individuals and communities have started developing huge pools where you can fish knowledge and resources, available either online, in LGBTQ+ media, or in local communities.

Tumblr was a great space for me to start and meet people like me even before joining the LGBTQ+ group in my area. That being said, the latter was the best thing I ever did to myself. Reach for people with similar experiences to yours. Ask them how it was for them. You’re gonna discover that, even those who seem so sure about their identities now and you imagine them being born that way, did go through a questioning period when everything felt confusing as fuck.

The Internet is your friend. Search for online support groups. Tumblr is a space where you can find people willing to share their experiences with you and help you find what you’re looking for without having to come out to your surroundings just yet. The Asexual Visibility and Education Network is the widest online asexual community and can tremendously help you.

Here you can read why it’s important to value trans or trans-questioning identities that come without experiences of dysphoria and in this article that I quoted before you can find an amazing guide with resources useful if you think you might not be cis. This is a guide to non-binary identities, which are usually so hard to see represented and sufficiently talked about and this is an article (all of this writer’s articles, actually), that helped me tremendously when I recently started considering being non-binary and had absolutely no idea of where to start.

Also, gradually more books, articles and movies about LGBTQ+ issues are being brought to the public eye. Here is a book list as well as a movie list to read and watch if you’re questioning your sexuality, and you can find numerous TV series and websites – such as, of course, Kitschmix and Everyday Feminism – that represent you and share advice and experiences that you may relate to.

5. …but even if you do so, don’t expect others’ experiences to echo yours.

It’s most likely that someone, somewhere, has experienced things the exact same way that you do, and they can make you heave in relief when they affirm “I can relate!”

If you meet people with similar experiences, then that’s grand! But if you don’t, it doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you, or that your identity is not valid. There are countless ways to be gay, bi or trans (there are limitless ways to be a binary trans person, and limitless ways to be a non-binary trans person).

There’s no wrong or right way to be who you are – unless that something is hurting others and, in the case of your gender and/or sexuality, it shouldn’t be hurting anybody, given that they don’t hold homophobic, biphobic or transphobic views.

Also, don’t listen to people who clearly don’t understand. Demand from others to respect your feelings. When I first decided to share my concerns about the fixity of my gender with some of my childhood friends.

Since I wasn’t yet ready to discuss it with people of my LGBTQ+ community (for reasons I’ll share below) they insisted on discussing the whole issue as solely a gender expression issue (eg. it’s okay to want to dress with all kinds of clothes or to have sexual fantasies like that, you never had a “typically female” behavior and that doesn’t mean you’re not a women) which is all absolutely right, but the point was that I wanted to discuss things I felt were happening with my gender identity, and not things that had to do with my dressing style (which most of the time is, by the way, pretty femme), or my (un-)ladylike attitude.

I was heavily disappointed and that led me to avoid discussing this again for a while. When I shared my thoughts with a friend who doesn’t identify with a binary gender though, the response was much more helpful and made things look much simpler and easier to deal with.

And that brings us to:

6. Coming out

Coming out is great, but you are not obliged to do it if you’re not ready. No one is waiting behind a desk, staring at their watch and tapping their foot impatiently for you to declare Name, Surname, ID number, Pronouns, a fixed gender and sexuality all at once.

Keep in mind that people around you may also react in problematic ways that may affect you if you come out. First of all you need to protect yourself and do what feels right and necessary.

Ask yourself: is it important for you that the people around you know everything about you? What do you need them to know and what do you prefer to keep for yourself? Are you going to have problems with your family or colleagues if you come out? Are you going to have problems with yourself if you don’t come out?

Put your priorities straight (no pun intended) and don’t feel pressured by anyone to do anything. Questioning is hard enough without the possible homophobia, biphobia, acephobia and transphobia that you may encounter and have your process halted by. In the end, the people who care are those who will make an effort to understand, even if they’ve never been in your shoes before.

7. Don’t shame yourself.

I’m a guilty person by nature. You might find me apologizing for global warming, for the arrival of your period cramps, and for other things I shouldn’t normally feel guilty about. That usually comes with the feeling that I’m taking up too much space. I’m also a talkative person by nature, and an overly dramatic person by nature, so all that clashes a bit destructively: when something happens I’ll feel like it’s the end of the world, I’ll tell everyone and take all the time whining about it, and then I’ll feel too bad for whining too much and making a big fuss about myself.

Sometimes when I advocate bi/pan-sexual issues, or when I demand that my identity be respected, I might momentarily feel like I’m taking too much space from gay and bi people who are currently facing discrimination because they are in a relationship with a person of the same gender, while I’m in a so-called straight-passing privileged relationship. That’s all total bullshit, but it does feel like that when I’m in the mood of shaming myself.

This was all much more intense when I started questioning my gender. According to Natalie Reed:

Internalized cisnormativity leads us to assume that we need to prove that we’re trans to ourselves, but that being cis is simply taken as a given.”

Having spent my whole life thinking I was cis, I immediately tried to shut my feelings down because “they must be fake and un-true since they haven’t been here all along/since I haven’t been experiencing dysphoria the way I’ve heard other people describe”, “it must all be in my mind”, “I might be doing it for attention”, “maybe I’m  appropriating lives that are not mine and issues I don’t share with other people”.

And, most importantly: “maybe I’m gonna take up too much space that I don’t deserve since for some people their gender and its connotations affects and shapes their lives to a great extent, while for me the way I’ll be gendered on the street might not make that much of a difference”.

Then I talked more, with people who’ve gone through the same things and it was incredibly helpful. I found out that these are thoughts some of them have had in the past, or continue to have now that their identity makes more sense. Or I found out that their identity never ended up making perfect sense but hey, it doesn’t always have to.

They told me to stop shaming myself for what I was feeling and to give value to the way that my needs present themselves to me.  This made a huge difference to other advice such as “don’t give it much thought, you get easily influenced anyway”, which made me feel like a fake gender-copycat lil’ piece of shit. Spoiler alert: no one benefited from that thought. Neither me, nor my trans loved-ones the space of whom I was scared I’d steal.

Experimenting can be tricky since, following the previous point you might feel like you’re appropriating something that belongs to other people. But here’s the thing: gender and sexuality don’t solely belong to other people, and just because you do something that other people do doesn’t mean that you share all parts of their identities.

If you want to sleep with boys to check whether you’re bisexual, do it. You might end up loving sex with boys as much as you love sex with girls. You might end up in a relationship with a boy. You might find out that you’re still only attracted to girls and that you identify as a lesbian. If you want to put makeup on, pack your bra, bind or tuck, do it. Ask yourself what pronouns would make you feel comfortable. Play it all in your head over and over again.

Create an online roleplay account or dress up or shave off your entire head if that makes you feel comfortable. Some things you’ll end up sticking with, some you’ll realize that they’re making you feel uncomfortable.

It’s normal if it all feels overwhelming in the beginning. You don’t have to do everything or anything at all to figure out your identity, but teasing your limits can always help consider things and cross out others. After all your identity is not about a single term, but about choosing who you want to be perceived as, how you wish to express yourself, what practices you want to follow in your everyday life, and how to speak about what you’re feeling.

9. Take your time.

It’s only normal that, when you start questioning something it might be overwhelming and make you anxious with the need to figure all out at once. But it’s amazing how clear things may become if you take some time to let it all unravel.

10. Remember that it’s okay to be confused.

Confusion is not something to have your feelings invalidated over. People usually say you are confused to make you feel like what you’re going through isn’t real, but you can be confused without that meaning that what you’re experiencing is not actually life-changing, significant, or very truly real. Being confused is the most normal thing you should expect. Hell, we are confused over what’s our favorite movie and about the mixed feelings that salt and vinegar chips or too many gummy bears give us. Gender and sexuality are things just as complex (or more complex, depending on how you see it), as picking between The Smiths or The Magnetic Fields, or digestive reactions and neurons reacting to pineapple flavor supplements.

Questioning things around – and inside – us has been part of the human condition since (almost) forever. The point is to learn how to give these questioning processes the value and attention they need, instead of dismissing them just because they may be transitional periods, or periods of confusion.

Female Black Dandies, And Redefining Masculinities

The notion of “black dandyism” has started growing into a vast, worldwide phenomenon, aiming to represent different perceptions of black fashion and expression, and throw light on the social connotations that choices in clothing and presenting the intersections of individuals’ identities (such as race, gender, age, sexuality etc.) expose and communicate to the public.

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The projects promoting the trend are of remarkable artistic and social value. Such projects are the Black Dandy documentary created by Ariel Wizman and Laurent Lunetta.

dandy-queens-dandy-groupe-blackattitude-priscamonnier-catiamotadacruzThe exhibition Dandy Lion: (Re)Articulating Black Masculine Identity that took place last July in Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography, redefining the meaning of “Black Masculinity” while questioning the norms and stereotypes that surround it.

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This project set some questions: What makes a dandy? Who can be really called a dandy? Is it a certain rebellious attitude against said norms itself? Can a black woman be a dandy?

French magazine Blackattitude presented, last year, a collection of female dandies, a collaboration work of Prisca M. Monnier and Nadeem Mateky that had the models dress up as important characters, such as Calamity Jane and American abolitionist Dr. Mary Walker Chirurgienne. With this initiative, sartorialists, models and photographers put the norm and expectation in question.

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As Kashmira Gander’s article on Independent  points out, the whole idea behind the dandy identity and expression has initially been one of rebellion and, historically speaking, questioning norms (those of gender and class, at most), shifting from the Romantic gendered clothing of nineteenth century writers and artists to the flamboyant suits of lower-middle class dandies in the following century. To get a wider picture, think Oscar Wilde and Charles Baudelaire.

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According to Dr. Royce Mahawatte, dandyism has to do with “empowering dressing” while, for Dr. Sunday Swift, the movement has to do not entirely with clothes, but with attitude, with a combination of appearing in control and having a strong ego, witty originality, aiming for maximum visual impact while not focusing on interior substance.

But why is it important that photographic and fashion projects that depict black people as dandies? According to Shantrelle Lewis, curator of the Dandy Lion Project, the need that comes up as the most important as it comes not exclusively to black men, but to black masculinity in general, is to distinguish between what is often perceived – and created by public discourse and racist misrepresentations – to be black masculinity (mostly caricatures of violent masculinity promoted by hip-hop), and the humanity and heterogeneity of black masculine people.

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This is the key to overcoming prejudice, in times when being a black man or even boy in the US signifies being dangerous and is an excuse for the police to brutally attack you, and everyday racism significantly affects the life of black people in general. In this train of thought, Lewis decided to include black women and, in the future, trans men, in order to offer a multi-dimensional, inclusive and actually representative picture of the extremely diverse Black community.

Because of the ways in which black masculinity has been demonized in racist discourse, black masculine women and non-binary people are affected by a similar kind of discrimination as well. Black butches have been reporting for decades that they get harassed (often by police) not only because they deviate from a socially acceptable norm of sexuality and expression, but also, significantly so, because they are sometimes perceived as black men.

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The pictures displayed in the exhibition are really diverse depictions of female dandyism and masculinity and possibly the most groundbreaking of them are the ‘granny dandies’, shot by Osborne Macharia. They are older women in sharp suits, elegant ties, brogues and cigars, posing with vintage airplanes on the background. The project had, according to Macharia, the sole purpose of entertainment, “…no political socio-economic or cultural agenda…”, even though it makes much sense how raising visibility of older black women with masculine expressions can have social connotations in the popular dialogue.

An older example is Sophia Wallace’s project, with clean, sharp-looking photographs of modern black dandies that go beyond gender norms and express in typically masculine, elegant attire, while redefining beauty norms.

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Such initiatives are extremely important, not only because they can be empowering for the individuals participating in the projects while changing the popular views on black identities, expressions and masculinities, but also because of this exact effort, to fight back against problematic, homogenous interpretations of a diverse community of people.

Lane Moore And Queering The Mainstream

Criticizing mainstream media and the ways they’ve contributed and affected the shaping and policing of women’s identities, choices, bodies and appearances, is an important step in the process of altering the popular discourse around – and for – women and their lives. However, assigning new features in the mainstream media and working actively to rebalance their priorities is even more crucial, when it comes to offering all women – and people of other genders – representation, inclusion and coverage of their issues.

Imagine how the Ellen Degeneres’ show contributed to mainstreaming LGBT+ identities, issues and acceptance. She set a revolutionary path, managing to raise awareness for issues not discussed enough up to that point. Making all accessible media representative for our identities, whether it be TV shows, books, films, music videos, can reshape our entire viewpoints of a world that seemed to reject us up to that point.

Remember sneaking Cosmopolitan into your room as a teenager, in order to feel rebellious, and how it kind of lost its charm over the years when your friends could relate to it but you failed to? One of my friends recently told me that watching the t.A.T.u. videoclip for All the Things She Said for the first time as a kid, was the ‘aha moment’ that made her realize and accept her sexuality.

This is why we should acknowledge the work of people who make steps to that change – even if those steps may feel tivial at first, when they most clearly are not.

Lane Moore is a New York based stand-up comedian, writer and musician, who started helping to queer Cosmopolitan last year. It’s a monumental thing, a magazine that once addressed limited women’s issues, such as straight relationship and sex tips, now aiming to speak to people of different genders and sexualities, and approach their lifestyle and concerns.

Moore identifies as queer and had always loved challenging gender norms and stereotypes. She applied for the Sex & Relationships editor position at Cosmpolitan.com and noticed some steps towards feminist politics and queer inclusion already being made on the website. As she said last year on AfterEllen.com, she took up the opportunity to address issues of consent, gender, queerness and body positivity, in ways that the readers could relate and feel benefited from.

Moore said:

Cosmopolitan is a women’s brand, so I write for all women—straight, lesbian, bisexual, or any variation of gender or sexual identity. All of them. As someone who doesn’t identify as straight or cis, I’m excited that I get to bring different viewpoints to Cosmopolitan.com. I hope I can reach some of the women who may be questioning their sexuality or their gender identity, or have a crush on a female friend and don’t know what to do about it. I can’t imagine how invaluable it would’ve been for me as a teenager to read about genderqueerness or what to do if you have a crush on your female best friend in a massive women’s publication. That would’ve changed my whole life.”

At first, queer people reading Cosmo were skeptical at the possibility that these articles might have been written by a straight person, but in the end many of them found a voice to strongly relate to, or even to use as support and guidance for several of their issues.

This year, Moore has made another remarkable step towards normalizing queer identities in the media. Moore’s band, It Was Romance, launched a remake of Fiona Apple’s 1996 Criminal video for the song Hooking Up With Girls, where a slighter, non cis-male pair of feet surround her face in a bathtub, while in the original video a presumably male foot grazes Apple’s neck while having a bath.

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Moore is really keen on challenging the gender and sexuality expectations of the public, and she actively pursues this goal in her music and artistic expression in general.

According to her, the new videoclip is a remake of Criminal but with queer women instead, and what makes it even more special is that, when this is done with allusions to two decades ago, it enhances the power of how timeless these feelings can be.

She tells Vogue that her music is genderless, referencing to love without complexities set by norms and social expectations.

She admits that Fiona Apple has been an artist she always looked up to and that, singing a cover of one of her songs, Please Send Me Someone to Love was the moment when she realized she could actually sing, and found the confidence to work on it. Since then she’s sung along to her songs numerous times, forming a special kind of bond to Apple’s art.

The feedback the video has gotten has been unexpectedly positive, even enthusiastic, coming both from queer people who feel that their identities are finally represented and celebrated, and from cis-straight people who appreciate its artistic quality.

Moore finishes her Vogue interview, referencing to her social media work:

I’ve always felt like a super-weird person and I’m not very social outside of small groups, so my friends on social media really have become like my friends and family. I genuinely want to make everyone laugh or feel things they couldn’t feel previously or feel more powerful or more loved or connected.”

The Importance Of Doing Things Alone

A couple of days ago I visited my parents. Now, I realize that I’ve written a great lot about my mother, mostly criticizing things she’s said, done, or believes and, probably still sentimental from the last visit, I need to make myself clear: I love my mother, and I do so unconditionally, the way I believe parents and children should love each other. Of course terms and conditions apply significantly often and, being a queer kid with queer friends, I’ve seen it lead to toxicity numerous times. But the thing is, I do love my mother, very much, and at the same time I recognize that she can, at times, despite being overly caring in her way, hold views that I find extremely problematic.

After that short disclaimer, I now plan to get to our issue: I told her that my best friend has visited Berlin, and she asked me whether she did on her own. After I replied positively, a prolonged silence was followed by: “is she currently in a relationship?” I replied positively again, and my mother’s disapproving response was: “I don’t understand these things. I really don’t see why anyone who is in a relationship would choose to travel all by themselves”.

Now, this is not really shocking, coming from my mother. In fact I could see many of my peers with more or less different approaches to relationships than mine phrase that concern. I’m not going to discuss relationships here, or the way my mother feels about them. What actually felt more limiting to me, than the idea that I’m supposed – according to some people – to do absolutely everything together with my significant other, was the instant impression that the habit of traveling alone can actually be perceived as wrong. “But there are few things that can be wonderful as traveling alone!” I immediately blurted out, and I deemed traveling with other people one of these few other things, but this is not the point here. “At a completely foreign city?” she asked disbelievingly, and I felt so absurd at the realization that she didn’t understand.

Some of the memories I treasure the most are those of myself discovering new places completely alone. They weren’t always 100% happy at their original moment, but they were all rich, and gave me all those cliché things that are actually great chances to get important shit discussed with yourself. I contemplated on age, generations and growing old, while celebrating my birthday alone on a bench at York, reading Romeo and Juliet, crying over an 1₤ donut, and desperately trying to catch someone from home on the phone. I learned the most about art in these moments I stole roaming around the Louvre alone, and actually appreciated the sun on my skin even while being a person from Greece, for that single time in years, that morning I spent lying on the grass of Regent’s park underneath a cherry tree. That was the part where I asked myself why I wasn’t happy, what else I might want from my life to feel completed. Scribbling pretentious poetry on the tram in Budapest before the months that followed of not having the time or the mindset to write anything, casting passers-by for my fanfiction and scrapbooking the day away.

Not all these moments were happy – in fact I was crying during most of them since crying is one of the things I’m truly good at – nor did I discover the universe’s biggest secrets while walking around famous dead people in Paris. But there is a reason I still remember them today, hoping for many other similar moments to come.

Maybe it’s just that I’m one of those people that romanticize everything, and make a big deal about dressing up like a pumpkin in October and spending that cherished day alone in a cute little coffee shop while sipping pumpkin spiced shit and generally smelling like pumpkin a lot. I’m full of clichés, and at some point I realized that maybe that’s okay. The thing is that I can get the full satisfaction out of such things if I do them fully, and if I do them my way. I want to spend as many hours in the art gallery as I want, and skip things I find little interest in, and then walk around a city searching for the Harry Potter spots or photographing ridiculous details that make me the pretentious person that I’ve accepted I am.

That’s why I remember these solitary trips – or solitary parts of trips I made with company – with such pleasure. It’s because all of my sense were more alerted than they can normally get in any other part of my life. I still remember the scents, I still remember the flowers, the piercing cold or the warmth of the sun on my face. I still remember the journey back to the hostel, as I played these games where I pretended that I was returning to my new home in this city I now lived. What’s more, as an extremely anxious person who wants to get everything done their way, I remember freaking out when I couldn’t see all the museums I wanted in one day of my trip, because I ended up spending it with someone else who had different traveling priorities.

That’s not to say that I don’t adore trips I have with my friends, the studying we do together in coffee shops, or our shared activities. In fact I tend to romanticize most of those as well.

I’m leaving on a trip this weekend with my best friends and my partner, to visit my beloved pen pal in Ireland. It is the first trip I’ll go with my partner as well, and this is getting me excited to no end. I’m not trying to compare company to being alone. But the thing is I’m trying to defend the latter, since enjoying yourself while with company is already a thing that makes sense to most people.

I’ve also started becoming convinced that, for women and fem people, it’s even less acceptable to do things alone. Most of the time I go to the beach, for drink or for a walk alone, there will be that dude – or pack of them – that offers me to join them, or offers to buy me coffee if I don’t have anything to do. Some of them can be entitled, insistant and annoying – I don’t need a knight on a white Prius to buy me coffee. But even those who are really nice don’t seem to get one thing: I’ve chosen to spend this time alone. I don’t doubt that the intentions of some of them can be truly good, but when it’s done repeatedly it really tends to ignore that I’m actually occupied at that moment: occupied spending time avec moi-même.

I also know that, for some people, being alone with themselves can induce much anxiety. Hell, 92% of the times I spend the day on my own, I get filled with bad thoughts and all my fears act up. Especially last year, when it was a hard time for me, I couldn’t possibly stay on my own for more than a couple of hours. I completely lost my mind when staying at home, getting all sorts of depressive thoughts, and felt superbly lonely when doing things outside the house without company. I spent a year seeking friends to be with me about almost everything, and most of the time I needed to sleep with someone as well in order to be able to deal both with the night and with the possibility of not being able to get out of bed the next morning. I was incredibly blessed with wonderful friends who practically saved my life. Seeking company is just as important and healthy for you, and being alone is not suitable for all periods in your life.

Different periods in life work differently. When I went away for five days in the summer, while my relationship was still fresh, and both my partner and I extremely anxious about it, it was actual hell. We spent all day on the phone, trying to deal with a flood of anxious, negative thoughts. A couple of months later he had to go away for four days, and even though I missed him terribly, we had both worked on some issues, so that these days apart gave me some profitable time for myself, and made me yearn for him even more. When the time comes for solitary time to actually work for you, you’ll know. Even if it doesn’t, it’s still important to work on dealing with these moments.

The thing is, you don’t have to do everything alone. What’s important is simply to allow yourself to have this alone thing, if you suddenly feel the need for it, whether it be traveling alone, studying alone, going to the theater without any company, taking time at home to watch movies, stare at the ceiling, binge-watch Orange is the New Black, masturbate or stress-bake, if that’s what you’ve missed doing.

Sometimes doing something aside from groceries on your own is demonized, and you may feel like people are staring at you with pity for eating out with no one but your salad and your thoughts to chit chat. But that’s okay, and you need it. Just in the same way you need to do things with other people in order to bond with them, you also need to bond with yourself. Walk around the city, go have a swim pretending you’re a freaking mermaid, take pictures, sit on a bench and write down your thoughts, take the time to fill that scrapbook. Let your creativity flow, organize thoughts and information that otherwise flood you when you socialize. Get to know your weaknesses, even. Embrace the bad thoughts that come when you’re alone, and then seek company to discuss them and feel better. But get a bit closer to yourself. Recharge.

Things An Asexual Ally Should Know

Selena Seraphin, an 18 year old model based in Australia, recently talked about being asexual, a thing she knew even before she learnt the word to describe it in her early adolescence.

Asexual people don’t experience sexual attraction towards other people. Selena Seraphin says that she’s described her identity as ‘simply not having an interest in sex or relationships, or being attracted to neither males nor females’.

However, many asexual people may choose to form romantic relationships, since they may experience romantic, but not sexual attraction towards other people. The young model also notes how uncomfortable it is when people assume she’s just picky and insist on flirting with her.

We live in a highly sexualized society where sex is present almost everywhere, from TV ads, movies and series, to most references in popular culture, and whoever decides not to have it – or to want it – is deemed as deviating from a default. Asexual representation may be horribly inadequate, almost absent from the public dialogue, but that doesn’t mean that asexual people do not exist, or that we should not acknowledge their experiences.

As efforts are constantly being made to raise awareness around LGBTQ+ issues, or at least some of them more than others, for asexual people this is not always the case, even within LGBTQ+ communities, as their identities are rarely understood and the problems they face not deemed important enough.

On the contrary, they might even be pushed into believing that their experiences are not valid, that they’re going through a phase or that they’re simply prudes, wasting their lives away, not having found the right person yet.

So here are some things we should all keep in mind about asexual people:

They don’t need fixing

We often assume that people belong to other people, that our bodies exist for someone to touch them or entitle themselves in any way upon them. I have heard of incidents of queer people asking asexual people whether no one is gonna savor them one day and what a pity that is. This is simply offensive and creepy. It’s the same thing as when people ask a lesbian why she denies herself from the guys’ population. But here is the thing: people are not treats for anyone to earn.

Asexuals are often dismissed as people who simply have not found the right person yet, but the thing is, people who identify as asexual know their needs and limits better than you, and they’re not confused people waiting for you to change them just in the same way a guy thinks he can make a lesbian straight with his magic sexy-time powers.

What’s more, asexuality is not a disease. Loss of sex drive can be caused, or can be a symptom of several health issues, but that’s not what asexuality is. In fact it is an identity, and society should not try to cure the way each person experiences their sexuality when it is different than what is considered to be the norm.

Asexuality is also not necessarily caused by a bad sexual experience, even though some asexual people may have had negative sexual experiences in the past.

They can have romantic relationships

Some asexual people may also be aromantic – these are two different things. Asexuality has to do with lack of sexual attraction, while aromanticism has to do with lack of romantic attraction towards other people. An asexual, aromantic person, like Selena Seraphin, might not want to have sexual or romantic relationships of any kind with other people.

Although aromantic people exist as well, and their identities and experiences should be recognized, not all asexual people are aromantic. Many asexual people do want, in fact, to form romantic bonds with other people. They may seek for closeness and intimacy, they may want to kiss or cuddle, to marry or have children. Sometimes when you are an asexual person who does experience romantic attraction, it can be even harder and asexual people may be pushed to do things they aren’t comfortable with just to please their partner. They may also feel the pressure to come out and explain their identity very early when they meet someone, because they feel like they owe it to them.

They are not obliged to do something just to please someone else

Nobody owes anybody sex, and if someone needs things from a relationship that the other person is not willing to give, then this should be discussed from the beginning. No one should be pressured when entering a relationship, and since people often have different needs and desires, it’s always best to talk these things out, in search for something that may work for everyone.

An asexual person is not obliged to have sex with you just because you’re together. Any person who doesn’t want to have sex, doesn’t have to have sex; period. Same as in point 1, it’s not your challenge to make an asexual person sexual. Keep in mind that corrective rape is a horrible thing that actually happens and is unfortunately quite common for LGBTQ and A people to fall its victims.

Asexuality is a spectrum.

Asexuality is itself a spectrum. A person may not experience sexual attraction at all, or may experience it in several occasions or less than (allo)sexual people. A grey asexual – or grey-sexual – falls somewhere between asexual and sexual people in the spectrum. A demisexual person is someone who experiences sexual attraction only after they have formed a strong emotional bond with another person. Grey asexual and demisexual people are also members of the asexual community.

Asexual people are not celibate due to religious/age reasons or beliefs.

Asexuality is not celibacy. Asexual people don’t say ‘no’ to sex because they’re made to by religious or moral reasons, or because of they’re too old or too young.

Asexual people may have sex or jerk off – they’re still asexual.

Asexual people may have a sex drive or, they may not. They may jerk off or not, to pornography or to thoughts of other people. That doesn’t mean that in reality they’d decide to have sex with these people. Them being asexual doesn’t also give you the right to demand all personal details about what they do or don’t do with their bodies.

They may also be repulsed by sex or just indifferent to it. Some of them may have had sex in the past, some may never want to have sex, and some others may decide that they don’t mind having sex in order to please their partners, for the closeness, or to have kids. In all these cases, if they identify somewhere within the asexual spectrum, they are still asexua

Asexual people don’t have heterosexual privilege.

Asexual people don’t necessarily have it easier than other LGBTQ+ people because they can “pass as straight” or whatever similar kind of privilege we may assume they have. In fact, asexual people may be homoromantic, biromantic or panromantic, and many of them are also not cis.

Other than that, asexuality is still one of the less understood and validated identities by society. Wanting to have sex is presented as natural in most parts of our lives and every other choice is demonized and considered abnormal. Asexual identities and experiences and ignored, erased and invalidated most of the time with other people’s assumptions. Aces can face discrimination and difficulties in many parts of their lives, from their relationships to the acceptance of family and friends, and the pressure to always fit in somewhere you don’t want to by doing things you’re not comfortable with. They usually have much difficulty recognizing their identity represented in the media, the medical community might try to pathologize it, there often isn’t enough accessible information surrounding it as there is for other LGBTQ+ identities and asexual people may feel like they have to explain themselves all the time.

All this is not privilege and finding a community which understands that, is extremely important for all of us. I’ve seen (allo)sexual people within the community dismiss a group meeting to discuss asexual issues with the argument that it’s a nice sunny day outside, and for some reason at that point asexuality seemed to them like something unfit for a sunny day.

In our communities we need to learn how to be intersectional and try to support each other actively, considering that we all face discrimination and have to overcome obstacles set by the rest of society, obstacles young people shouldn’t have to worry about.

The first step towards mutual support though, is understanding. Asexuality is not yet another joke for you to make yourself feel better, or something to dismiss on a sunny day. All of our experiences matter the same, so sit back and listen to the experiences of asexual people around us instead of continuing to make harmful assumptions.

The Love Of Political Correctness

In Greece where I live, there is a Facebook group called ‘Ancient Memes’, which has grown really popular during the last years, since it started off as particularly funny.

Its point is to write ridiculous meme phrases on historic pieces of art, something like ‘Classical Art Memes’, with usually absurdly hilarious results.

That until lately, when their submissions have started getting wildly problematic, many of them with sexist, homophobic, with transphobic content that makes me cringe.

Here is the translation of a letter I had to write them recently, due to the extreme discomfort they’ve started causing, as well as a response to a debate that has risen on the ever so discussed issue of political correctness:

I used to love Ancient Memes, I truly did. I have spent hours scrolling down on their page and just laugh on my own. My Facebook wall was used to delirious binge-sharing. Ancient Memes are – or used to be – my favorite kind of humour because they achieved something majestic: to show that we can just as easily die laughing at a silly, absurd joke, without being macho twenty-something dudebros whose mom still brings them a glass of water, while jerking off to rape jokes.

I used to love Ancient Memes. Although some of their posts had started becoming disgusting, I kept giving the page second chances with the thought that the submissions are made by different people, and that some of them are still funny. Until a post two days ago that made me feel physically sick and I immediately reported it not to punish or to take revenge as the Black Widow of Social Justice, but mostly in case it gets deleted by Facebook so that people close to me don’t have to see it and have their day instantly ruined.

I won’t repeat the exact content of the post. The point was that, for yet another time, trans people became the butt of the joke, with the use of the T word that I refuse to write here, not because I’m scared of saying Voldemort’s name, or because ‘political correctness’ is controlling my life, but because I’ve learnt that with our language we confirm, deny or erase the very existence of a group of people, and we’re not even talking about dignity here, about mental balance, or the right to demand everything that you already have as a given in order to be laid back and make jokes on Ancient Memes, like that where a sculpture of Zeus threatens Hera with death because she hasn’t cooked yet, like every female who is inferior to your Neatherdal self should, amen.

To be more precise, Facebook deleted that post, and Ancient Memes uploaded a toddler-like “mum-the-mean-teacher-scolded-me-for-calling-my-classmate-racist-slurs” reply. They sarcastically called my report a “love attack”, they called people who “ridiculously screech for respect without being able to respect themselves” idiots, they said that people like me report things because our little brain can’t understand shit, and that memes and comedy will die because of people like us and our political correctness, that will lead us to even censor ourselves.

And at this point I’ve got to admit that I’ve never been a prouder receiver of internetic flame. You can barf in your bib all you want, I don’t give a damn, the thing continues to be as follows: my report was exactly a “love attack”. You couldn’t have fallen more to the point even if you tripped into it. And for this “love” attack you can chase me with your medieval pitchforks, for all I care. My report was an attack of even problematically overprotecting love for all the trans people I know, have into my life, and associate with every day. What you call political correctness and feel so oppressed by it, is not simple respect of some odd abstract idea. For me it has a name – names – and it might not be the case, but it could potentially have my name as well apart from those of my friends’. Some of my most beloved people in the world could have seen this meme and lock themselves into the bathroom with a panic attack, cry themselves to sleep, or think for their wonderful selves things I wouldn’t even want to know.

I don’t vouch for all these because they’re not things they’ll let me witness, but I can imagine them because they are pretty plausible reactions when someone shows you for one more time with their language and behavior that they don’t even consider you enough of a person, that they don’t give two shits for your life and existence.

And do you know what’s the most interesting thing in this equation? That the trans people I know are a hundred times cooler than you, pitiful transphobic person. Some of the cleverest people I can think of are trans, some of the sweetest and kindest and most tender and funniest (more than you and your oppressed sense of humour) are trans, activists with organizational and management abilities you’d be jealous of, students with remarkable performances and persistence who will one day become your professors at the university and your kids will nervously bite their nails about whether they’ll pass their class, musicians, artists, fashionistas, life partners of cats and dogs, people surrounded by people who love them like nothing in this world, and people so multi-dimensional that in fact it seems utterly ridiculous to me that I am still trying to explain to someone like you that they are multi-dimensional.

And maybe at this point you’d like to step back and wonder what the actual hell is going so wrong with you when your lament for your First Amendment Right that is somehow threatened because it’s not ok anymore to contribute so obviously actively in the oppression of a person who might already have been kicked out of their home, beat up on the street, have the police called when they went to get the order of their last Harry Potter book from the mail because the data on their ID doesn’t match their appearance, a person whose degree will have the wrong name on it and they’ll probably have a really hard time finding a job, a person who – to make their lives slightly easier in some occasions – allows people around them to refer to them wrongly, to talk to them wrongly, to offend – deliberately or not – every inch of their being and identity, to ask questions about their body we wouldn’t even ask our pets and to demand answers that they think they deserve, making the other person feel like garbage.

So if you have some soul left and not all of it is dedicated to the noble cause against political correctness – aka in favor of your right to make someone feel like a piece of shit whenever you want – imagine how you would feel, a cis man who whom they called with the wrong pronouns on the phone once because your life happens to be a little high-pitched, and you spent an entire day measuring your fragile masculinity on the mirror. Imagine how you would feel with this post if your life was already founded on draining fights to be accepted by a hostile shitty society, to which you offer things in any case. Think how tragically funny you considered this post, and weigh the immense loss of the internetz after it got taken down, with a less horrible day for a trans person who has already faced problems you were lucky enough to not even need to ever imagine. Do you still feel like a noble avenger of the freedom of speech – the way you define it – and a true descendant of John Stuart Mill – who probably turns in his grave with the thought of your post?

If yes, then I pity you, and I wish for you to never feel this kind of love, the love that makes you want to render the day of a person that you care off slightly easier, slightly more painless. The love that teaches you how to get in the other person’s shoes step by step, in the shoes of a person who didn’t have everything as easy as you do, the love that teaches you to acknowledge your privilege and apologize every time that you fuck up. I wish for you to never love a person so much that you shudder at the possibility of them seeing something triggering online without ever letting you know because they don’t want to ruin your day.

I wish for you to always stay such an antisocial, individualist misanthrope, so that you won’t ever need to feel the love of political correctness.”

Things I Have Learned And Gained From LGBTQ+ activism

I first started getting educated on social justice online, and I found all the first-hand information, and advice I found on sites like Tumblr really useful. They helped me understand, and gave me impeccable value, as most of it came from people who were educating, talking about and fighting against the very oppression they were facing.

This is why I always deemed online activism extremely important. Phrases like “get off your couch and do something useful” always pissed me off, since online activists do many useful things, the most important of which is educating people they don’t always have to educate, which – trust me – can at times be really hard.

That brings us to:

1 – Online activism is real activism. In fact, everything that everyone can offer may be necessary in  a movement.

This is something that joining “physical” – which means actually taking the metro downtown and attending general assemblies in some basement – activism has taught me, especially when I realized how much online activists had contributed to my debut.

To be an activist you don’t only have to march and make illegal graffiti. By all means yes, this is vital in some parts of a movement, but so is every other small task a member of that movement works hard to complete. Protesting outside enterprises is vital, preparing powerpoint presentations from the safety of your room to share knowledge with other people is vital, raising your voice online and stirring the waters of convention at an injustice is vital, managing the finances or keeping the files of an organization which is already offering plenty to LGBTQ+ youth is just as vital. Every task completes another and no initiative can stand on its own without a multi-dimensional plan that requires all sorts of skills to reach all sorts of people and make all sorts of change.

Besides, keep in mind that not all people are able to march. Which brings us to:

2 – Activism should be inclusive

People with mental illnesses, disabilities, poor people, homeless people, should all have a place in an activism that cannot be elitist, ageist, ableist or racist. Some activist groups end up being too closed and clique-ish, denying people who want to offer the chance to do so. It’s one thing – and a very important one at that – calling out someone on something problematic they said or did, and a completely different one completely denying them the space for mistakes, or the space to voice their identity, needs and priorities differently.

3 – I now know for sure that I have rights and that I can demand their recognition and respect firmly.

When you feel all alone in something, when your identity or parts of it are not always understood or respected, even the most given facts about it, such as that you must demand that people respect your self-identification and don’t say offensive things about it, may end up seeming like a luxury, like something you don’t really deserve and you just think you do because you believe you’re a special little snowflake. Ignorant people will make you think that you have no right to ask what you’re asking for, but getting into activism is sometimes important to validate that you deserve the things that other people already have as given in their lives.

Things/Skills I have gained from LGBTQ+ activism.

1 – The motivation to actually work for something and dedicate my whole self in it.

Working voluntarily is weird. You may not be able to bring yourself to work hard for an essay that’s actually gonna give you a good mark, or for a job that gives you actual money, but with volunteering and activism it somehow still works, and  it’s different. Of course you get tired and burned out and there are times that you want to give up or just lay on the couch with a bucket of ice cream and Carmilla, and turn off all notifications in the world ever, but you still know that you’ve chosen this yourself, and it’s something extremely important for you to do, without waiting for something in return. You finally know how to push yourself to do something that you know is more important than many other things in your life. The chance to apply what you’re best at to what you love the most is a truly amazing feeling.

2 – Responsibility when it comes to deadlines, courage when it comes to phone calls I wouldn’t otherwise make or emails I wouldn’t otherwise reply to.

Which, not really. Emails still scare me. But you get the point. Apart from the occasional pro(cat)stination incident, of course. Which is very rare an occurrence and all. Ahem.

3 – Practical life skills.

Presentation skills, project management skills, time management skills, a knowledge of how to share knowledge with other people.

4 – A community.

Wonderful friends who, like few others, formed a family-like circle around me. Nothing is better than meeting people who have been through similar things to your own experiences, people who understand and you know that with the first words and smiles, a place where you can feel safe to freely express yourself. Most of anything else, we’re a community, and what brings us together is often much bigger than our differences.

5 – The actual chance to make a change that will alter my life and the lives of people I care for, for the better.

Activism is not impersonal. What I fight for is not just an abstract idea; it has names. Names of my loved ones, of people I care for the most and of parts of my own identity, experiences and everyday life. The things that truly matter are finally something I can cater to, something I can give my best to shelter. And that’s not something I could achieve on my own.

+1:

6 – Cats.

No, really. That’s a real pro. I’ve met so many furry allies during this journey. Everyone – or nearly everyone – who is into LGBTQ+ activism has cats and/or adores cats and/or is an actual cat.

And if they don’t, they’re dogs.

Why Do We Hold On To Misogynistic Ideas Even Though We Are Women?

One of the first and most important things I learnt when I got into feminism was to give a name to one of its enemies, and find out that many of my own behaviours were linked to it: this enemy is internalized misogyny and it means the way we have been taught by society to think of our own gender as inferior.

Internalized misogyny can be demonstrated through ‘girl hate’ (the bitter feelings we may often have for other women – jealousy, antagonism, a tendency to undermine them or differentiate ourselves from their group), prejudices that concern stereotypically ‘female traits’, or even feelings of inferiority about our own selves because of our gender.

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The point is that we can hold unintentionally misogynistic ideas even though we are women. Most of us, especially as we become more aware, start recognizing behaviours and opinions that we used to hold and are caused by internalized misogyny. That doesn’t mean we can’t grow out of them and mature. It happens partly because that’s how we’ve been taught to perceive most accomplished women around us, and it’s something that I’ve drastically changed the way I see it nowadays.

But which are the most common behaviours, ideas, and perceptions for ourselves and for the women around us that are caused by internalized misogyny?

Trying to exclude/differentiate myself from (groups of) other women.

One of the most common ways internalized misogyny can be demonstrated, is through our constant effort to exclude ourselves from the wider concept of our gender and of society’s perception of it, in order to feel superior than what we’re taught a woman is. Throughout my childhood and adolescence girls were my best friends who supported my through everything and boys were my bullies. However, I still prided myself to be ‘not like other girls’ (sometimes including my friends who I deemed as cool and intelligent in this special ‘different’ troupe) and I remember boasting that I thought and acted like a boy. I saw most women as the enemy, being too anxious to diminish their worth in my head because they put on too much makeup or they stuffed their bras, things that I undoubtedly did myself.

I wrote Harry Potter fanfiction my entire life – and no one has yet declared this period over. I always wrote male voices (mostly Sirius and Remus’), even though Tonks – a brave, strong, colourful warrior, lover, and mother who broke the gender norms – was my favorite character. The reason I didn’t choose to write her point of view that often, even though she was that cool of a role model, is because I remember boasting how hard it was for me to capture the voice of a woman – although I identified as one – and how I can work with the way a man thinks best. My best friend had affirmed that, sure, my mind worked more like a man’s than like a woman’s. Both of us, for what is called internalized misogyny, thought at that point that this was the best compliment she could pay me ever.

All that makes sense: The mass-media with which millenials have grown up, even in their progressive versions, have been showing us caricatures of women, telling them that they should know their place in life. We’re told that women are too sensitive, functioning more with feelings than with logic and common sense (actually that bit has strategically been built up for centuries), that we’re too hard to understand, that we’re too much ‘bitchiness’ and drama, but maybe it just looks this way because our ideas, needs and demands to be treated as equals are rarely even heard. Not to mention trans women, who are 90% of the time depicted horribly stereotypically, and are the butts of the joke in most movies. Nothing can be more harmful than that. These are stereotypes that completely ignore the fact that women are not, after all, a homogenous group. Apart from some exceptions, women are taught by society that they’re worthless and that, as a result, the only way to achieve something in life, is to prove that they’re the least worthless of their group.

Degrading others to climb up somewhere yourself comes like a survival plan, and this is just horrible, because girls are awesome. When I took off my internalized misogyny glasses, I started realizing that brilliant, interesting, diverse girls are not the exceptions, but they’re everywhere around me, they’re often better than me, and I should learn to take them as role models and cherish their friendship instead of making a competition out of it.

Blaming other women for my oppression.

So what happens is that we as women are taught that, with all those horrible traits society thinks we possess, other women are to blame for the bad things that happen to us. When the girl or the boy we fancy in high school fancies another girl, it’s her fault for being too promiscuous or ‘fake’, and when our boss is a woman she’s not ‘strong and determined’, but ‘bossy and a bitch’. We slut shame, we grow hostile, jealous and competent of each other, denying ourselves friendship and comradeship, because you can’t be friends with the person you subconsciously think you are competing with.

Projecting those ideas of inferiority on myself.

Even after we realize how strange it was to be so hostile towards Kirsten Stewart as we grew up (plus after getting a crush on her), there are some things that are caused by internalized misogyny and are still too hard to brush off. We often fail to recognize our value, or how good we are in things we do, sometimes even getting the feeling that we don’t deserve the recognition we get about them, that we didn’t achieve anything that important, or that we achieved it by mistake, by luck, or by fooling each other. I have felt guilty for being congratulated for my work many times. That is called imposter syndrome, and it sucks, because men are taught by a young age to know their worth, while we may even feel the need to apologize to our professors or co-workers for potentially having fooled them into thinking they’re better than we are.

Convincing myself that I don’t deserve every good thing I get because I’m a woman…

That can go to great extents. I mean, it can even be demonstrated as the underlying assumption that I don’t deserve my partner giving effort to please me during sex, that they’re doing me a favour when, for example, I take too much time.

…or that I deserve the unpleasant things that can occur if I don’t meet up to the expectations set up for women by our society.

When I was in high school I had a fashion blog that my bully classmates found and sent me comments which were awful, disgusting and definitely things that a boy wouldn’t hear that easily. I didn’t have the choice to pose wearing my DIY shirts and owl bags with my slightly pretentious sixteen year-old ‘model’ face in my personal blog, without being slut-shamed, ridiculed and harassed online, only to have the professor I went to in shock, to tell me that I had practically signed up for my harassment the moment I made these pictures public.

Last year I decided that I liked hair on me. Not necessarily to make a statement – even though I don’t regret making one. I just happened to start preferring my body with its natural hair – everywhere. So I stopped shaving. Since then, most shocked and patronizing comments have come from my family, but the fact that friends, classmates and strangers on the street may have, until recently, been silent about it, doesn’t mean that I don’t get weird, even offended looks all the time. I’m more used to it now, and I laughed when I realized these girls on the bus were discussing my leg hair with horror, but I used to be much more self-conscious about it.

A couple of weeks ago I learnt from a guy from school, that his sister – to whom I haven’t talked in about five years – knows and has discussed my leg hair from another classmate that goes to my university. We don’t communicate with that girl at all, we barely say hi once every semester, yet she thought that my leg hair was that big of a deal that she should discuss it with people who probably don’t even remember what my face looks like. Why do they have to make me feel bad about a choice that has to do with my body, just because that choice doesn’t meet up with what a woman is supposed to do to meet society’s unrealistic, problematic beauty standards? Why does every family member and passer-by on the street feel they have the right to stare at me, an already self-conscious person, with eyes wide open in surprise? What made it okay for them to stare until I feel like I have done something bad?

People have learnt that they have been given the holy right to police personal choices that have to do with my body or my appearance just because I’m a woman, and that I am to blame if I think that sucks.

Internalized misogyny, homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia, are mechanisms of self-blame and degradation caused by the social discourse that labels some identities as inferior to others.

It surely takes time and effort, but we need to actively fight against those mechanisms, in order to be able to support, not only others against the oppression they face because of their identity, but also ourselves.

Why Labels And Language Matter In LGBTQ Activism

Language -its fluidity, its use, and the relativity of its importance- is one of the biggest debates in social justice.

However, one of the first – and apparently most common – arguments I found myself surprised to hear when I got into activism, was that language is just language: harmless; that the way you use it doesn’t really matter when your actions speak for the quality of your intentions; and that it becomes truly harmful when you use it to categorize people, to put them into boxes and stick labels on them as if they were different brands of cereal.

Now, all these opinions make enough sense, so why would anyone who believes in freedom of expression – including me – feel uncomfortable at their phrasing? Let’s have a closer look at those statements, at what people might mean with them, and at how things may be slightly different after all.

Words matter as much as actions do

Of course no one can doubt that actions must be taken into consideration as much as words, if not more, and no one should be condemned just for a slip of their tongue when all of their actions show that they care, that they try to learn and make the world friendlier to people who are affected by discrimination. But at the same time, we must remember that people who belong in social groups that are discriminated against in most sections of their lives, and certainly have already had enough, are still affected by harmful, problematic language, and could definitely live without its use.

When, for example, you misgender a trans person (= use, accidentally or purposefully, the wrong name or pronouns, implying that they are a different gender than their own), you invalidate not just a choice of words, but the entire experience connected to their gender and the battles they’ve had to fight for it.

When you hear something directed to you that invalidates or erases your experience, offends your personality and attacks parts of your identity, you don’t really care to stop and check whether the other person’s intentions were good. You were hurt and that’s what matters and people don’t deserve to be hurt for who they are.

Language is a living organism

The language we use is not something stable. Its purpose is to serve our needs. The needs of a society change, and so should our language. Just because a word didn’t exist up to this point or because certain pronouns weren’t used, doesn’t mean that we can’t alter the way we use our language to include them.

Language doesn’t impose limits – it surpasses them

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”. That means that I cannot know anything in my world that cannot be phrased in my language.

The labels that you use in your language don’t have to limit you – they are there for you to describe yourself in a way that this self finally belongs. Of course, you are in no way obligated to use a strict label to describe the complex experiences that come with your identity, to put yourself in boxes and have them dictate what you like, who you are and how you act. If you identify as a lesbian but happen to fall in love with a man, then the way you label your sexuality should in no way be limiting. After all, sexuality and gender are fluid and people can question them all along their journey, without even having to come up to a solid realization in the end.

But at the same time, labels for some people are the way to expand the limits that a language made by other people, with different priorities, interests, and perceptions of the world, has posed for them, without their consent. I have seen on Facebook conversations cis people and, once, even a trans woman, invalidate the existence of non-binary and genderfluid people. They claimed that since we already have two pronouns in our language, remembering pronouns other than those of the binary genders (female and male) is hard and unnecessary, and that they don’t believe in the “politically correct theory” of the existence of more than two genders.

That, of course, is problematic, because there are many people whose gender falls in a spectrum outside the gender binary. That is, they identify neither as male nor as female. Non binary people shouldn’t have to debate their identities and use arguments to justify their existence to you. You just have to do so because their identities are valid as long as they experience them, and in order for you to respect them and show that you recognize their existence, you must at first use their correct pronouns. None of this is for the sake of political correctness alone; it’s about respect of their rights and their dignity instead.

That brings us to that: developing our language to make it more inclusive doesn’t limit us, but expands the limits others have set for us. You speak against the barriers people have set for you, without you. Non binary people are an example, and I use it because it’s the violation I’ve encountered more often. They have to rebuild a world where their existence is accepted, within a binary system that denies it. Changing our language is the first step to achieve that.

And remember: not all of us feel the same about our identities, labels, language, and the way we experience things. Just because you choose to identify as just human, it doesn’t mean that’s enough for everybody around you. When people need to speak for specific parts of their identities, just human is not exactly descriptive. For some people, having words – “labels” – to describe themselves, is much more important than you deem. No identity deserves more or less respect than another, so if you care not to offend the identity of a lesbian, or of a binary trans person, then you must be equally respectful towards the identity of a non-binary person.

Correct language validates people’s existence, as well as their experience. It’s much more than the ever so debated “political correctness”. It’s about accepting me as an individual, and allowing me to speak for my experiences before you do so in my place.

The diversity of language expresses the diversity of our identities

The first thing you learn when you get more into social justice, is that people are diverse. As Sian Ferguson points out in her article “Labels: Empowering, Harmful, or Both?”, people are different, and that difference is not the cause of systemic inequality, that is sometimes enforced by pre-existing language itself. People’s differences must have the correct language to be described by. A more diverse language can express a diverse culture much more effectively.

I’m pansexual. That means I’m not a lesbian. I’m not straight either, and I can’t be successfully included in each of these categories. I have different experiences than both straight and gay women, and have, on occasions, heard things from both categories of women that show lack of understanding to my own experiences. In order to have my experiences accepted, respected and understood, I need to have a word – a specific label – to properly describe them. So, when people speak of queer women, I don’t want them to limit the meaning of the word to gay. I need them to acknowledge bisexual and pansexual identities, in order to create a space for me, and for every other woman with my experiences, to speak. Same goes for all identities.

Words are the tools to build a space for our actions to matter

When you show that it’s vital to be careful with your words in order to respect a group of people, you simultaneously show that it’s vital to be careful with your actions in order to be respectful to people. When you realize how bad a racist slur is, and that you are -under no circumstances- allowed to use it, you also understand how unacceptable it is to hurt a victim of racial discrimination in any other way.

So how can homophobic actions be prevented, how can violence and abuse against trans people be perceived to be as horrible as they are, if we don’t first denaturalize and abolish homophobic and transphobic language?

Words are not just an embellishment to our actions and ourselves; they are the tools with which we build the world around us, and the way we perceive everyone and everything in it. When a person uses a label for themselves, they give life, shape and clothes to an identity that the world has, up to that moment, ignored and erased. Labels are not just labels, words are not just words: they form the space in our minds for new ideas and thoughts to grow.

 

Growing Up And Carrying Your Home With You

Home is where the cats are, or where the heart is, or, according to the great popular philosophers, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, home is wherever I’m with you.

Despite the limiting, for people who decide they’re better on their own, nature of a song of an otherwise high artistic and sentimental value – with the bonus brownie points of making you feel like the queer protagonist of a domestic fanfiction in a brightly lit kitchen in a New York apartment, with kittens purring around your ankles – this song succeeds in making one thing perfectly clear: the sense of home is many things, and stable is not one of them.

The word ‘home’ is largely overused, posing in inspirational quotes written in aesthetically pleasing fonts on doormats, coffee mugs and phone power-banks.

It is a passe-partout, referring to origins, culture, family, a cottage with ditsy floral curtains, afternoon naps and jasmines, company and isolation and all the feelings of peace and quiet and lack thereof. It is bricks and cement and steady incomes, and struggling and panting after bills and self-discovery and just clouds.

At least that was where I had always found my sense of home: in a frozen airplane descending in various pretentious stages of the sky, sunrises and sunsets where pastel watercolors melted into solid ground, a new city with tiny ants that turned to cooler people than those I knew, with legos that turned to prettier houses than those of my hometown. Home for me was partly, until recently, where my dog was, and other than that, anywhere but here.

I was that kid in the indie movie who wanted to run away. I hated school and everyone in it – with a few bright exceptions. I hated the opportunities my city seemed to give me and the lack of understanding I seemed to receive. Its appearance, its architecture, how mean people could get, how the streets were not clean and the bookshops not old enough, how we didn’t have a river, or cherry blossoms in the spring.

I thought that, somehow, all this was interconnected with the fact that I didn’t exactly have a community, a sense of belonging. I surely did have friends, wonderful ones at that, but the narrow-mindedness of other people I knew suffocated me and made me feel as an outsider in the very streets I had grown up. One thing was sure: I needed to leave. It felt as if I had nothing to hold me back. Well, except from the puppy, but I would figure that out.

I found home at an Airbnb flat in Belleville, the neighborhood with the uncountable florist shops, and bookshops, and sometimes both of them.

As much as I loved my own family, I found another one in Ireland: an Internet penpal who became my diary and then my therapist and, to this day, sister-by-choice, as well as her wonderful Molly Weasley kind of mother with a supportive attitude towards all things LGBT. I was adopted by their little cottage and their genderfluid cats.

Then I found myself lost in London, wondered how I had never appreciated this noise before, how one could have grown up without all that theater. I left my heart in John Keats’ house at Hampstead Heath, wondering how anyone could have ever wanted to live anywhere else. Then I came back.

With my head desperately stuck somewhere between the West End and the Lion King lyrics, the marvel of Glendalough, the LGBT bookshop, and Fanny Brawne’s lines, I wandered in the subway dizzy and lost, with my eyes shut in dangerous denial.

That was how that day started.

Back in Athens last September, I visited our local LGBT youth organization and became a member. Suddenly those streets I had deemed so ugly grew dear to me when embellished with steps of new friends and loved-ones. Drunk nights out, a community, things to do, places to go, a sense of purpose, people like me, jokes like those I cherished the most, holding oblivious hands at 2AM and running between the cars like children.

It wasn’t only one of them: being active, having something I was interested in that made me want to work for, the new friends, the new places I discovered or the love I happened to fall in.

It was a combination of all of them, and the gut-punching shock that life can be good even outside the dream I had built to keep it going. It was tears, regret, disarray, dirty alleys and always almost throwing up, and it was horrible, and it made me never want to leave again. It was growing up; and it was messy and exactly how I had dreamt it and it was finally happening to me.

After that change took place, I also moved out of my parents’ house. Having a place which I could call /my/ home, with records on walls I would have painted the colour of Squidward from Spongebob, my friends able to come over whenever, and my cat uninterrupted in a kingdom without anyone to give a shit about scratches in the sheets, had been my hugest dream, and continues to be while I’m sitting amongst unpacked boxes that are soon to become cat forts.

Yet, I still completely freaked out the first night I stayed there, just because I realized the change that was about to happen. Me, the person who wanted to live all over the world, freaking out at the idea of change, even when this change is desirable and towards better circumstances, even though I wouldn’t even move away from the city and would be just 40′ by car away from my dog.

I also keep freaking out (because that’s what I do) when I take a step back and inspect the work I’m putting in this tiny home that means so much to me, and then I realize that I might leave again soon, to continue my studies abroad, or for whichever reason.

Is my home – THE home – going to stop being such? And what is the point in printing posters and putting fairy lights everywhere and colour coding my books all over again, if it’s to be for a limited period of time? Doesn’t it go a bit like relationships? Don’t get too invested when you know that something is going to end?

At that point, with the quarter life crisis starting a bit early, I stumbled upon an article that reflected my feelings and was written, as I found out with pleasant surprise, by a school classmate of mine, a wonderfully kind and talented person who I was always fond of. It made me incredibly happy to find out that she wrote, to read something that was hers, and to realize her thoughts were echoing mine.

And that made me think of all the places I’ve called home at different points: the house where my mother grew up in an island much more than the actual house I grew up in. That (the family) house, but after our dog came. That hotel room when I visited Crete with my dad. Parks and bookshops around Europe. Some places I had stayed at for less than five days, and that made me want to  agree and, as the person who stayed back, after all, rephrase: it’s important to lose your very rigid sense of home as you grow up, because change happens, but it’s also important to carry the fluidity of home with you, to transfer and convert it. So be a turtle. You can have multiple homes, all serving a different purpose, all creating different memories that make you you.

Somewhere in the process, the only certainty is that some places will fail to make a home. Some people will, too. But some others won’t.

Our life is made up from hundreds of tiny lives, defined by huge and by smaller things, such as the fandoms you change. Don’t beat yourself up for being reborn. Carry your photos with you, visit but don’t lament, change the wallpaper into constellations, even if you had once sworn faith to florals.

How To Let Go Of Your Fear Of Abandonment

Have you ever caught yourself irrationally fearing that your partner will fall in love with every stranger they see on their street? That they haven’t texted you for an hour because they’re bored of you and all the magic between you has been lost since that morning when you ate pancakes together? That you’ll never be as important as their exes?

If your answer is positive, you also probably find yourself surrounded by an ugly shameful feeling, because you might see yourself as the text-reading, facebook-stalking caricature character from that rom-com you watched the other day.

Now, behaviors such as these are indeed manipulative and possessive, and you should never fall into their pit or, if you already have, you seriously need to work on that. Still, fear of abandonment and the relationship anxiety that it’s causing is a primal fear, valid and torturous, and it most definitely is not something to be guilty or ashamed for.

Most of the times this fear is irrational. You might try to find an excuse for it but fail miserably: your partner might have not given you any ground to believe that they’re going to cheat on you, any sign that they’re not as much in love with you anymore as they used to be,  that you’re not enough for them, or that they’re gonna wake up tomorrow morning with the urge to leave you. These fears just exist and come without a warning. And that’s just horrible. You may have a beautiful, healthy relationship, and yet constantly feel like you’re poisoning it because you can’t trust enough, you can’t rationalize enough, you can’t relax enough. Especially when both (or more than both, in the case of a polyamorous relationship) of you work that way, finding some peace of mind might seem impossible.

Generally, try to remember that this is how people generally function: with their insecurities, their missteps and exaggerations. All of these are a hundred percent valid human responses to love and investment and insecurity, and they don’t make you a burden, or hard to love. You can just start building this, step by step, in order to start feeling more comfortable in your own skin and with the people who are important to you.

Discussing everything with your partner is a wonderful start, and good communication might make it so much easier, but sometimes even when you assure each other that you’re okay, it’s not enough for the noise in your head to buzz out.

I might be the last person allowed to give advice on such an issue, since I still freak out about everything and ruin several dinner dates and sleepovers. However, you can let me share my experience – not about something I’m over with, but about something that’s still pretty relevant in my life. It might help just letting you know you’re not alone, since that was the first step I made to feel better myself: ask whether I was the only person on Earth that poisoned my own relationship with my phobias, and feeling oddly reassured when I found out there was nothing unusual about me. It might also help if I share with you my coping techniques: not what solves the problem, but what I have found out makes it more viable.

1 – Take some distance from your thoughts

Sometimes it comes and it’s so harsh that you can’t go on without discussing it and overanalyzing it.

Some others, though, it briefly brushes over the surface of your mind amidst a thousand other thoughts. Something along the lines of of “oh yeah, I acknowledge that fear, it’s something that exists and can possibly affect my evening and remind me that I can never actually lay back and be happy in this relationship”. In these cases it’s better if you try to distract yourself. I’ve found out that this fear, when it remains on this relatively harmless stage, can pass and let me enjoy my trip, my daydreaming or my evening at the playground, without demanding to be set upon the surgical table and be exhaustively peeled and chopped to its ingredients.

2 – If it doesn’t go away, talk

If you see that your thoughts insist, don’t let them prevent you from sleeping at night. It’s vital that you discuss such things with your partner. Don’t ever feel like you’re being ridiculous or clingy for asking questions, but remember: There’s a huge difference between asking your partner, for example, about their feelings towards a friend that causes you jealousy, and demanding that they actually stop seeing that person or talking to them, just because you feel that their relationship is taking up space from yours.

3 – If you ask, believe

Trusting someone and knowing it’s safe to do so is a process. People often deny themselves their feelings or the possibility of a relationship in order to not feel vulnerable for placing their trust on someone else. But sometimes, even when the other person has given you every reason to trust them, you find yourself incapable of believing them. That’s one of my biggest problems, and I still have to fight with it, but then I try to remember that my partner does his best to prove his love to me everyday with his actions, therefore, there lies some effort to me in order to learn to give credibility to what he says, and not assume things on my own.

4 – When you learn how to believe, let the other in

Sometimes the worst thing that can do to your communication is to translate your partner’s point of view in your own language, instead of trying to grow familiar with theirs.

For example: When I’m supposed to fall in love, I do it almost instantly and with the first sparks of attraction. My partner functions in the completely opposite way: he needs to take his time, get to know the other person as friends first, form an intimate bond with them, before he can start experiencing romantic feelings. The fact that I refused to believe that a person can work in a different way than I do, made me freak out for months. I convinced myself that we were doomed and that we’d never feel the same way (spoiler alert: eventually, we did). We had to work hard in order to start understanding how the other thinks and feels, but for the work to start, we first had to realize that it’s a thing that actually happens: people think differently, feel differently, fall and stay in love through different processes, and that’s okay.

So let your partner know what it feels like to be in your mind. It will solve many misunderstandings and help them know you better.

5 – It’s not us, it’s me

Try to check whether it’s your own insecurities acting up when your relationship doesn’t face any other challenges. I don’t mean ‘stop whining, it’s all in your mind’. Sorry to break it to you, but most things are in our mind and yet, that doesn’t make them any less real. No. What I’m saying is, once you realize that there’s nothing wrong with your relationship per se, or at least that less things are wrong than what you think, it’s a first step in the process of rationalizing things a bit easier.

When I took a step back and wondered why I’m always incapable of believing my partner when he says he truly wants me, is happy with me, and won’t turn to other people, I found out that it’s not caused by anything he does wrong. Instead, it’s induced by the fact that I can’t really imagine how I could ever want me, or be satisfied by me, if I was another person, because of my own low self-esteem.

That doesn’t mean that you can magically solve all of your problems because you acknowledge them: I don’t believe that anyone can learn to love themselves overnight just because someone told them to. Self-acceptance and self-love is a long and bumpy road. But figuring that out was at least the start of accepting that the problem wasn’t caused by the lack of my partner’s appreciation, or his potential dishonesty when he comforted me.

Here is another important detail: when your fear is there, making your life harder, but you acknowledge that it’s caused by your own insecurities and that your partner has done nothing wrong to trigger it, let them know: it’s important to assure them that you’re not blaming them when it would be unfair to do so and when, you actually, are not.

Fear escalates to worse fear, even when you discuss things and feel temporarily better: it can seem like a relationship dementor: sucking all the happiness from the room, making you believe that you’ll never relax and enjoy, or even that this relationship is doomed, if not by its ingredients, then by your overthinking itself.

6 – Analyze wisely

Discussing things with your partner is vital, but you can always talk to your friends as well, to people who’ve probably been through that before, who care for you but inspect the dynamics of your relationship more soberly, from a more detached, distanced point of view. Overanalyzing is paralyzing, some say, but when it’s inevitably what you (and I, trust me!) have learnt to do best, sometimes you need to figure out how to use it productively for your own profit.

Talk openly and deeply. Respect what you listen and demand to have your own feelings respected. Let your partner know why you feel the way you do, or try to figure it out together. Long, hard conversations, are sometimes the biggest challenges and can help you know and care for each other in a deeper way.

Everything requires effort but no effort is in vain. You learn and you grow, and you’ll stumble again, but each time, your feet will feel a bit more coordinated.

In the end, always remember: focusing on the present builds the likeliness for a future.

Struggles Of Being Bisexual And The Messy Realities We Deal With

Some people know all along. Some people talk about it, some don’t. Others, don’t come to terms with their sexuality until later.

I realized I was attracted to people of all genders significantly late: in high school, which, combined with the fact that I already happened to be in a long term relationship with a boy, assured my parents that I was simply going through a phase and was really only into men.

1 – Bi Privilege

The Myth

However, I never enjoyed any kind of ‘privilege’, as bisexuals in a different-gender-relationship are often assumed by homosexual people to do.[1]

On the contrary, my mother threw a fit when she caught me asleep on my bed with a friend who happened to be a girl and feels, to this day, threatened by most of my female friends.

As for my seemingly supportive father, he warned me that if I didn’t change that ‘habit’, I’d probably never be able to form loyal monogamous bonds with people and sustain serious relationships, since I’d always be unsatisfied and greedy. When I went through a psychologically ugly phase through winter because of my own issues, they both decided that the reason of my sadness was nothing else, but the confusion caused by my abnormal, unsettled sexuality.

So yeah, bi people don’t receive any kind of special treatment. My family treated me with caution, tears and disappointment, as if I’d come out to them as a lesbian, with the slight difference that I actually was in a relationship with a man back then, and continue to be in a relationship with another man today.

Even if sometimes I get the illusion that I can lay back and ‘enjoy’ the privileges of this relationship, I still can’t let them know I’m into LGBTQ+ activism, and I have to be careful of cameras at Pride.

2 – Biphobia and Bi Erasure

A Guide to Non-Inclusion and Invisibility

Whenever I discuss my sexuality in a new group of people my age, I must expect the guy who’ll say nasty, objectifying things that have to do with me liking girls and assumedly being kinky, promiscuous, and into wild threesomes, as most bisexual people are stereotypically considered to be. There was also that straight girl who patted my back and condescendingly told me that, now that I’ve tasted sex with men, I’m fooling myself and will probably never be really satisfied with a girl, and that gay girl who asked me what sort of weird, wicked thing I was, and how liking boys works, exactly.

The thing is that, bisexuals usually have to live big part of our lives without having our identities recognized, which something strongly adds up to the invalidation of our feelings and problems, and the sense of not fitting anywhere.

We are represented in the media, but as the dangerous ‘straight girl’ you should never fall for, the experimenting ‘lipstick lesbian’, or the ‘once-lesbian celebrity that settled for a husband’, since most narratives seem to be afraid to use our name.

Invisibility renders it harder for us to come out and be understood by friends, colleagues and family, to seek both legal and social support, and to receive medical or psychological care without being labeled as confused, a transmitter of diseases, or worse, encouraged to cure ourselves in order to solve most of our physical and mental health problems.

3 – Bisexuality and Mental Health

The Dead-End

As a result, it appears that both bisexual women and men are easily affected by mental health problems and psychological issues. Specifically, a large survey from the UK has shown that bisexual women, more likely than lesbians, may experience eating problems or self-harm. [2]

They are also more likely to suffer from depressed feelings or anxiety, according to a research by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. According to major Canadian study, bisexual men are 6.3 times more likely, and bisexual women 5.9 times more likely, to feel suicidal than heterosexual people.

As for trans bisexual people, they also run the risk to be denied healthcare services based on their sexuality, according to the 2014 Movement Advancement Project report and Rainbow Health Ontario. More recently, Joelle Monaghan, a Dalhousie University nursing graduate, shows in her recent research how bisexual female students are more likely than others to suffer from depression and turn to risk-taking behaviors, such as the use of substances.

4 – Things to Consider

The thing is, we’re tired of always having to prove the authenticity of our existence to others, running the risk of still having our stories invalidated afterwards.

If we seek help for our problems, we need trained health professionals, who won’t expect us to convince them about our issues, assume things about our sexual partners, life and practices, based on our sexuality – or vice versa – or invalidate our experience.

We need people who will sit back and hear us, keen to be educated and open towards things they might have not experienced. We need public services and easy access. We need people who will not make us feel weird, cryptic, or apologetic about an important part of our identity.

Don’t forget to consider racial discrimination, sexism and transphobia, disability, poverty: intersections of our different identities that add up, induce and affect mental health, while at the same time limiting our access to solutions.

Remember: reaching for help isn’t always that easy, especially when other parts of our identity make us less privileged than others. It’s not only up to the individual to work for courage to ask for help. It’s also a huge responsibility of a system that has to make it accessible to all of us.

[1] I identify as pansexual, which means I am attracted to people regardless of gender, even though I sometimes use the umbrella term ‘bisexual’ in order to be more broadly understood to people who are not yet acquainted with all terms. To clarify, when we use the term ‘bisexual’ here, think of it as an umbrella term for people who are attracted to more than one genders, be it bisexuals, pansexuals, polysexuals etc.

[2] http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/838142