Have you considered that it all might be an attention seeking device? And a pretty good one at that.
But it might not be. And you cannot call a 13 year old who is questioning their sexuality on a bluff.
Shoot, I’m 36 and I don’t even know!! Anyhoo, I can chime in with everyone else who says you are doing great supporting your daughter where she’s at right now, regardless of what the future will bring. It looks like she has been through a lot of turmoil recently and needs your acceptance and support and is getting it.
If she is 13 and is romantically involved with another girl, it doesn’t matter what her motivations are, she is - at this moment - bi.
Look, I’m glad you guys have personal experiences of bi girls doing it for attention, or cutting themselves, or having a high correlation to Goth. And I have a personal experience of bi girls being perfectly normal well adjusted people who often go on and marry men, have kids and drive minivans and aren’t doing it merely for attention or in some self destructive motivation, but because - surprise! - they have a physical attraction to girls as well as boys.
In my experience, eventaully boys catch up, are emotionally just as attractive and physically just as attractive.
The “doing this for attention” argument is moot, anyway, for one reason:
*The proper response is exactly the same as if it were genuine. *
Treat it like no big deal. Treat them exactly as you’d treat an opposite-sex couple. In the case of genuine orientation, because it’s the right thing to do. In the case of attention-seeking, because making a fuss is exactly what she would want.
I dunno.
There has emerged, over the last decade or so, a kind of odd “lesbian chic” which some girls seem to try on like a new hair color or tatoo. You probably can’t go through a week prime-time TV these days without seeing two hot chicks going at it; it’s the ultimate voyeuristic (hetero) male fantasy. Friends does it, Ally McBeal does it, Buffy’s got a lesbo pal…girl-on-girl action is everywhere.
Why? Because teen boys just about cream themselves when they see it, and since they are a major marketing target, even the most puritanical media execs are almost too happy to oblige their hornyness.
Now, why do girls wear jeans that barely cover their genitalia, much less their midriff? Could it be that the media feeds them images of kindersmut fashion every hour of every day, and they figure this is the way they need to be? Could bisexual experimentation be an extension of this quest for trendyness? And is a girl likely to grow out of it? I think the answer is a possible yes to all of the above.
Then again, maybe she really is fundamentally attracted to girls. At her age, I’d say there’s no way to know. If this were the 1950s, my money would be on her being a bona fide lesbian or bisexual, since her exposure to sapphic imagery, etc. would be essentially zero, and what else could put such ideas in her head. But these days? I’d guess it literally could be yet another fad.
Weird and whacky times, we live in. My heart goes out to all parents of teens. I think the best you can do is make sure she’s being responsible and not getting into behaviors she’ll regret later. Having said that, lesbian teens have essentially zero chance of having to deal with teen pregnancy, so that’s a major plus! If I have a daughter, I’ll probably have to supress the urge to shotgun any male child that gets within ten feet of her. Gal pals? Knock yourself out, kiddo.
I so wanted to say that… but I thought it would be indelicate ! 
Kiminy, I was out of the closet as lesbian at 12 and would have had a girlfriend at 13 if I could have. The age at which girls come out has been dropping in the last 25 years. Sexual behavior and decision-making are an issue no matter what the genders are. I would have liked the opportunity to talk with a counselor–not about being gay, but about what it was like to have people know this at school.
Heh, indeed!
Loopydude,
I’m almost 40 years old. This isn’t new. Perhaps its new in the numbers of girls that express “bi” - or the numbers of girls that you notice being bi. And when I was in high school, lesbian’s weren’t all over the place in the media. Certainly, teen sexuality was all over the place, but not “lesbian chic.”
If you are a straight guy, could you have intimate relations with another guy simply because its “trendy?”
If its so common, the whole school wouldn’t be buzzing about it, and it would have lost any shock value. If its not common, then she isn’t doing it for trendiness.
I am in a bookclub with ten women. None of us went to high school together (though several of us knew each other in high school). We are all over 30 and less than 55. Eight of ten of us went through a bi or lesbian period. This shocked all of us when we had this conversation - “You too! I never knew!” - although several of us had very open pasts. But back then, for most of us, it was a very closeted experience. Now it doesn’t need to be.
Hmm. I don’t know. I tend to find hetero female interest in the average man mystifying enough. I mean, the typical male body is an ugly, lumpy, hairy mess that out of common decency should be hidden from view, as far as I’m concerned. Meanwhile ladies…mmmm, ladies. I couldn’t fault anyone for wanting to give one of them a try…
Seriously, though, if I were a teenage boy, and I got “gay is hip, it’s cool, it’s where it’s at; be gay” from every direction, who knows? It’s such a parallel-universe kind of scenerio I honestly don’t know what would be my response. Same-sex coupling of any kind was not pop culture when I was growing up. Now lesbians are sci-fi heros. Notice that on sitcoms featuring hetero girls, they’re making out, and on a sitcome featuring openly, sometimes flamingly gay guys (Will & Grace), they barely give each other a peck on the cheek. My wife loves that show; one episode, Grace’s annoying friend (I can’t remember her name) said something to the effect of “How do I look?” to Grace…Grace grabbed her boobs, gave them a good kneading, and said something like “boobs: check”. I mean, it’s a gay show, and the straight women are getting more homosexual action, as far as I can tell.
From what I get via the media: Gay men going at it: Bad; very bad. Cute girlies trading spit? Goooood; verrry verrry goooood…
On behalf of Kiminy and myself, thank you all for your comments. It has been a surreal two days. Last night, I talked to her about being discreet at school, as some behavior at school is not allowed, regardless of the genders involved. And we both commented that at least we wouldn’t have to worry about pregnancy. Her girfriend is her age, and interestingly, has had many of the same psychological problems and intervention experiences. This leads me to four possibilities for our daughter’s feelings:
- She is bi. Period. The problems she’s had over the past 6 months were due to her struggling with this.
- This is a new friendship, and the newness may be conflated with the shared hospital experience (our daughter really like the hospital and staff).
- This is a safe way to experience and experiment with romantic and sexual feelings that she’s been trying to avoid.
- She’s dealing with some pretty intense pressure to date, as evidenced by her boy-crazy BFF, who talks pretty much non-stop about who’s dating whom.
I don’t think she’s doing it for shock value alone. She just doesn’t come across that way, and she has been painfully shy in new or unpredictable situations in the past. Things change, but she’s not an attention whore, and prefers to be low-key.
At any rate, as many have pointed out, right now she says she bi, so that’s the way we’re going to roll with it.
What has helped us (or perhaps me - I’ll let Kiminy speak for herself) the most was knowing at least one, if not two gay couples who had been in a long-term committed relationship (as in decades), and seeing that there was much more to human loving relationships than the sexual side of it. That’s how I’m treating this situation, as two 13 YO people experiencing some strong feelings for the first time, and as 13YOs there will be problems, pitfalls and good times. It’s just wierd to think I’m going to have to watch her with a female friend in her room, when I’m so used to thinking in terms of watching her with boys only.
Vlad/Igor
I’ve noticed this too, and can’t help thinking it might be part of the equation. We have done our best to keep her from feeling like she has to be a sex kitten, and she really doesn’t watch much television, thus not exposed to a lot of that. However, she spends a lot of time on line, and we don’t know all of where she’s been. she has been very open with us about many things, but I know she also has her secrets.
Vlad/Igor
My uneducated, from the hip assesment: you are right on target.
As I see things bisexuality is all the rage these days. When I was in high school (graduated in 1989) two girls wouldn’t have been caught dead holding hands in the hallway…now its cool. The boys get titilated, other girls don’t necessarily give them as hard a time as they would have had years back. Your daughter is probably doing this more for the attention she will get from her peers, and maybe even from you, rather than trying to establish herself as a full-on lesbian.
And there is a huge upside here…she can’t possibly get pregnant by another girl!! Hell I’d be tempted to encourage it until she was old enough and stable enough to start a family…I worry about my (future) kids getting pregnant almost more than anything else.
Just to add exceptions to this thread of general generalities, in my case as a 16 year old straight male, I find that this is more often than not reversed. More females, from what I can see, want the casual sex end of the relationship where as I want the intimacy.
As for the OP, unless you live in a place that is very hostile to any hint of homosexuality (read: rural NC, the south, the bible belt, etc), I see almost nonexistant negatives and a plethora of postives for a relationship with a girl relative to a boy for your daughter. Teenagers need to express themselves sexually and vent sexual tension, more so than not. If this is, in fact, what your daughter is doing, and she builds a healthy sexual relationship without the possibility of pregnancy, there is little reason to be concerned of this being a fad or not. A fad would achieve the same results that an honest intention would. Besides, your daughter will learn about trends anyways; it would be no catstrophe if she learned this young and in this manner.
On a related note I want to thank the OP and all the parents of teenagers out there that are doing one hell of a job, like the OP. With the strange and obscure world of pubescence it is amazing what some of your achieve. The world needs more of your openess.
Seconded. You guys sound like great parents.
I don’t quite belive you all that seem to know the ins-and-outs of being a teenage girl these days without any evidence. I’ve started a IMHO thread about going through gay/bi “phases” in high school.
You handled this well, Kiminy. Your daughter is lucky.
Something similar happened at our house this spring. Our 13 yr old daughter was ‘going out with’ a 17 yr old girl. I found out by accident, as she had already been told that she was not allowed to have a relationship with a high-school boy, so she decided to keep the new relationship a secret from me.
We live in a very small town in a very conservative area, and I have been amazed by the number of girls who declare they are gay or bi by the time they are in 6th grade. In my daughter’s case, since I know her personality well enough to know that she takes on a lot of the characteristics of the people around her, I told her that if she really was gay or bi, she should come back to me with that information when she’s 18 or 20, knows who she is and knows who she wants to be. If she still feels the same way then, okay.
Young girls, in my experience, can be known to try on personalities and lifestyles like they do clothes - seeing what fits and what doesn’t. At least my daughter and most of her friends are that way. If she’s really gay or bi, that part of her personality will be there when she’s more mature. She knows I’m open to the possibility and won’t turn her away.
As it turned out, the 17 year old girl has now decided that perhaps she isn’t really gay either and has been going steady for months with a boy her own age. And my daughter is now interested in a boy her own age.
Before I get flamed, let me point out once again that the reason my kid got in trouble was breaking the ‘no dating highschoolers’ rule among others, not because she said she was bi.
Good.
She was honest with you.
That’s better than pure gold.
You have a fully-functional relationship with your kid.
