Heh. Little brain fart relating to the subject of “lesbian peer pressure”…
One of my wife’s old roomates was, shall we say, a rather libidinous gal and proudly rough-around-the-edges (for example, she drew from personal experience to explain to my wife and I what “air tight” means). She worked over at the Radcliffe Institute, and went to many of the lectures given by visiting scholars there. One of those lectures featured a radical feminist whose name escapes me; anyhow, this woman discussed at some length the beauty of the love of women for each other, and I guess must have implied or made explicit somehow that such relationships were superior to those of women with men. The roomie came home in a huff, incensed by what she had heard. “Where does this chick get off, anway?”, she exclaimed. “What, I’m not a real woman, too? Just because I like dick?? It’s not as if I can help it!”
Why do we always assume that teenagers are “confused” if they have a same-sex crush? If a 13 year old girl says she has a crush on a boy, does anyone ever say “well, she’s just confused, she doesn’t really know if she’s hetero. It might just be a phase.”
I was attracted to girls when I was 13 and there wasn’t any confusion.
I think the OP is handling the situation just fine, BTW, no criticism there. I just wanted to say that teenagers should be given a little more credit for knowing what they like than we generally give them.
Eh. She’s just entering adolescence, it’s only going to be a big deal if you make it one. Besides, at least half the people I knew at 13 were fooling around if not outright sexually active. Aside from the occasional bout of mono, it never had much adverse impact. The only thing I’d note about it is that she may be acting out because she senses a lack of attention, or because she’s having difficulty socially.
Congrats to Kiminy on doing a good job. If I can offer another suggestion, don’t over-psychoanalyze the situation. I think that’d be easy to do given the way this thread has gone. Don’t look for signs she’s really gay, or doing it for attention, or this or that or the other thing. Just deal with it and be supportive, like you’ve done so far. The chips will fall where they will and it will work out the best if you don’t play P.I.
Joking aside, I am amazed with the tact and grace that you handled the situation. It’s really hard for a young teen to tell their parents ANYTHING, let alone something outside of the conventional norms. You’re doing just fine and she’ll grow up to be a lovely young bi/straight/gay woman of whom you will be exceptionally proud.
A lot of people have been mentioning that your daughter might not “really” be bi, and will eventually end up with a guy. I haven’t really seen anyone adress the possibility that she is, in fact, completely homosexual, and claiming to be bisexual to make it easier for you and/or her to accept. You mentioned that she’d been suicidal before, and you thought it might be because she was afraid of telling you about her sexuality. If those episodes were related to her sexuality, this seems a more likely scenario. In my experience as a closeted teenage bisexual, denial is a lot easier than suicide. Of course, one person’s experiences are not necessarily transitive to anyone else’s experiences, so I’m not throwing that out as gospel truth. Just something to keep in mind: she may just be going through a bisexual “phase” and still end up dating girls for the rest of her life.
Regardless, you both are doing a wonderful job handling this. If we had more parents like you, Canada wouldn’t be so totally kicking our ass in the “Act like a 21st century nation” department.
I just don’t buy this angle. I see no reason why the kid would be freaked out about her orientation, there doesn’t appear to be pressure from the parents and coming out seems to have made her very popular in school. It may just be that this wasn’t foreseeable, but it still seems odd that she would feel sexually repressed. I’d say the more likely explanations are normal sexual pathfinding or attracting attention. It certainly doesn’t imply she’s secretly heterosexual, of course, nor should one hope she is.
Come to think of it, it might be a rather advantageous turn of events. If she’s into girls as a teenager she’ll be much less likely to get pregnant or contract any major VD during what is often a promiscuous period.
From what Kiminy has posted I don’t think I’d say her open bisexuality made her “very popular”, just that she’s gotten extra and apparently not-negative attention at school because of it. Would her classmates be as tolerant if she said she was really a lesbian? Would she expect them to be as tolerant? If not, that alone would be reason enough for a girl her age to identify as bisexual instead. Like Miller said, it’s not possible to determine her situation based on other people’s experiences, but it’s not unheard of for homosexuals going through the coming-out process to sort of open the door halfway and say they’re bisexual first.
Thank, thank you, thank you. This point can’t be brought up enough.
For the record, the only thing I found about being gay when I was just figuring it out (at 11, FTR) was one of those books about puberty that says it’s just a phase. Lost five years of my life due to that book.
(I’m not sure I believe in such phases. Most of the people I know who were just “going through a phase” as a teenager either came out later, or are still closeted and having same-sex affairs. )
Even if phases like that do exist, there’s no harm in assuming it’s true – and plenty of harm in saying it isn’t.
In Nashville the selection process was based on the second letter of your last name. Relative merit amongst qualified students was irrelevant. Later dated a girl that sued 'em over it… good times.
[/hijack]
I have a hard time imagining what a 13 year old thinks having a boyfriend or girlfriend means. Besides the somewhat mysterious statement that you were “going with” someone, I couldn’t exactly see that it amounted to anything substantial. Then again, they didn’t sell thong panties in kid sizes when I was 13.
I don’t think people really take the romantic interests (so to speak) of children seriously. You don’t say a 13 year old girl is “confused” for having a crush on a boy, but many probably still dismiss it as “puppy love” or something similar. In my personal experience, they do so with good reason… they’re kids playing at being older than they are, and they really are a little fuzzy on what the terms mean.
I’d be more interested in what she thought it meant to have a girlfriend (or boyfriend) than the fact that she had one rather than the other.
Second, when I was that age, I was sure I was different somehow. And one day I’d become a great scientist. A scientist that builds gigantic robots. My peers were convinced they were bad-ass gangstas. We really weren’t quite in line with reality.
Third, when I was that age, my idea of a good meal was ramen, ho-hos, and a couple of Capri Suns. I ate that every day. The idea being: I really had no experience to judge what I really wanted.
So I’m personally a little skeptical. But, I don’t think the situation could have been handled better.
As a man in his low 20’s who grew up in California, went to school in Berkeley, and in generally is pretty fucking liberal, and who stilll would like to think that he’s bi despite only same-sex experiences, I completely buy that angle. An accepting home, in an accepting community is still on an unaccepting planet. It can be surprisingly hard to know what you truly feel when what you perceive is filtered through centuries of social bullshit.
This is exactly what both of the two closest friends of mine who are gay did. (Um … is that sentence clear? I have three very close friends; two of them are gay.) Both of them originally decided (just a few months apart from each other, incidentally, depite the fact that they live in totally different areas and are different ages) that they were bisexual and “liked boys as much as girls.” A very short while later, they both realized that they were actually completely gay, and that their feelings for girls were nothing like their feelings for other boys.
I think they both decided at first that “bisexual” was a better thing to be than “gay,” since it’s not as permanent and people (i.e., parents … or maybe even themselves) can still hold out hopes that they might still get married and have kids.
Can I point out that it is perfectly possible for a woman to “really” be bi, and still end up with a guy? Much like, if your daughter is bi, yes, you still have to worry about pregnancy? Pretty much by definition?
Someone who is bi seems to have a hard time getting acceptance from the straight community as well as from the gay community. My impression is that they are seen as unfairly playing both sides of the field, just playing, indecisive or confused. As for my daughter’s fears, Kiminy and I have both tried to make an accepting home, allowing our children to be who they feel they are (and this is especially important with our ADHD/Asperger’s son). We have not put pressure on her in any direction, but given the recent election results, I can fully appreciate why she might be afraid to feel or express who she thinks she is. Some of the things she has said to us or done over the past few days leads me to believe that she is not fully aware of the larger social issues and climate. She has not been as discreet as she should be at school, and got into a bit of trouble because what was an innocent act (getting a kiss on the cheek from her girlfriend) was amplified into a rumor of something more inappropriate. There are still plenty of off-color remarks, jokes or outright threats against homosexuality sprinkled in casual conversations that would make anyone questioning their sexual orientation afraid to express or deny who they are.
Such is the life of 13/14 year olds, who are just beginning to explore relationships, but who suffer the concequences of what they don’t fully understand. They are still parroting what they get at home and church without thinking through what they say. Part of being a parent is to help them understand what they’re going through, give them perspective, and deal with the consequences of their words and actions.
I’m bisexual, or pansexual, or something else that involves honest attraction to both genders.
I ‘realized’ it and came out to myself when I was 14. I was quite unhappy about it. Being not-heterosexual is bad: walk through the halls of a high school some day. If you don’t here someone say, speaking about something bad, “That’s so gay,” I’ll give you ten bucks. It’s not trendy to be anything but straight. So, eventually, I changed my mind. I only liked guys. That ‘lasted’, in the sense of I only acted on interest in guys.
Very few - if any - 13-year-olds have the slightest idea of who they ‘really’ are. I went vegetarian when I was 13 - my parents were sure it was a phase (for 5 years and counting).
All I can say is you’re doing the right thing thus far. Listen, don’t judge. Be supportive. Encourage her to be intelligent when it comes to romance, regardless of the involved genders.
Not a gender thing, but when I started high school, my parents wrung their hands and hoped that I would soon grow out of the “phase” of wanting to date guys who weren’t white and Christian. To their way of thinking, it was “rebellion”. Fact was, I just went to a very diverse school, and if I’d restricted myself to only white Christian guys, I would have greatly reduced my potential dating pool.
People are people. And it’s possible to have a lot of crushes that don’t come to fruition, or relationships that don’t last long, not because you’re not meant to be with someone of that gender/race/religion, but because you don’t yet know what kind of person you want to be with.
