Nowadays I am mostly happy to admit, when it comes up in conversation, that I identify and live as a bisexual woman and - though I am mainly greeted with acceptance - there have been multiple instances where people have said something which has deeply affected me. Often these remarks are clearly meant to be innocuous and, as I am a strong believer in always picking your battles just to make life easier, I let them slide. However, enough is enough, I need to get this my chest – other people may have experienced similar and no doubt worse situations, but maybe this will encourage others - maybe even myself - to speak up in these situations, and potentially help others avoid saying the wrong thing.

Scenario One: I was in a club with a group of friends, I had previously matched on tinder with a female friend of the group who also happened to be out. I, being the awkward person that I am, was just kind of dancing near her and making small talk. As the night went on this continued – for me it was going quite well, I was feeling pretty calm and we were getting on well. I think both of us were at the stage of trying to figure out when to make the first move. It’s at this point that one of my heterosexual friends decides that it’ll be a good idea to whisper in my ear ‘go on, get off with her – make all our sexual fantasies come true’. I still love the person who said this to pieces, but the phrase makes me physically shudder. I can rationalise it by saying that it was late, he was drunk, he was just trying to be encouraging. But, on another level, is that ever okay? My purpose in getting with someone is not for the gratification of others, why would sexually pleasing my friends give me any motivation whatsoever? This is probably the most recurrent issue I have with how bisexuality is received – its fetishization, particularly, in my experience, by heterosexual men. It’s not appropriate, or in my opinion, healthy to project your own desires onto those around you who have no wish to deal with your libido. It’s just so grim; my sexuality is not run according to what other people want. Being bi does not make me some bizarre performing monkey.

Scenario Two: now this one, this one really pisses me off. When I told someone close to me at home about being bi the response I got was ‘Oh, that happens to all girls at Uni, all my friends went through a “gay” phase’. I may as well have told them that I’d dyed my hair. This is not a f**king phase, this is something I have been struggling to admit to myself and others since I was fifteen, and it took moving away to a more openly accepting place to finally really accept myself. The fact that I was stating it plain and simply to this person was a massive step for me, so their response annoyed me so much. For a start, sexuality is a spectrum, and figuring out where you lie on that spectrum takes time and experiences can help you figure this out. If your friends tell you that they’ve been with someone of the same gender, why does this need to labelled as a phase, why does it need to be different to any other sexual encounter. Also, if someone trusts you enough to confide in you a certain truth about themselves, don’t greet it with some cliched generalisation. In calling it a phase it suggests that you want me to pick a side, as if coming out as purely homosexual would have made it carry more weight, as if by saying I’m bi I’m just declaring myself to be some sort of half-arsed gay who can’t be bothered to make my mind up – well, I know my side. I know my side for life and it is slap bang in the middle.

Scenario Three: the awkward questions. Now this one is less specific than a singular incident, as it has happened to me countless times. I tell someone I’m bi and their first response is a kind of deeply invasive twenty questions about my sex life, ‘How many girls have you been with? How, you know, “far” have you gone with a girl?”. I honestly can’t think of anything that makes me more uncomfortable, why does it matter, why do you need to know my intimate history at this exact moment? The thing that always bewilders me is that these questions always come from people with whom I have purely platonic relationships, this is never a question of like a prospective partner finding out about any possible STDs, this is just pure nosiness. It’s almost as if it’s a test, like ‘oh so you claim you’re queer but how queer?’ as if they need to quantify in their minds just how sure and serious I am about something which only really concerns me. Imagine if someone told you that they liked cats or dogs equally and your initial response was, ‘yeah but how do you know that, like how much have you actually stroked a cat? Maybe you just haven’t met the right dog’. It’s just so bewildering to me how this seems to be so many peoples’ initial response to finding out someone might just be attracted to both genders. I’m being honest about an aspect of myself, I’m not inviting you to write a complete biography based on my sexual history. Just relax, it’s none of your damn business.

It took a lot for me to decide to write and publish this article under my own name, I didn’t want to open myself up to any uninvited questioning or to make the people from these situations feel uncomfortable, but in the end, I decided to suck it up. There is no point writing something I feel passionate about if I don’t have the balls to own it! Maybe if the people I’m referring to do read this it will open up a conversation or make them realise how they could have gone about things differently. Sexuality is only really an individual’s business, but the purpose of this article is to make people think about how they react if someone lets you in on something so personal. So please, next time someone tells you their sexual orientation, just be cool. It’s not a phase and it’s not an invitation to be invasive. Oh, and also please don’t fetishize people, it’s just grim.