Be very careful with any sort of language calling this a “phase” - even in saying “Well, you are still figuring out what you are, and that’s fine!” can be taken that way. I chose to say “You are my child, nothing you can do will ever change how much I love you.”
Period.
That’s some typo.
My daughter just turned 16, is a strong feminist, and is in her school’s LGBT alliance. I don’t yet know if she is straight or gay or anywhere in between but whenever she discovers her sexuality, I will still love her and support her 100%. My advice, gathered mostly by listening to Dan Savage and my wife (only one of whom I am actually intimate with):
In any case, there are a lot of resources out there, PFLAG was mentioned upthread but there are books and other forms of media as well. I do really like Dan Savage (column and podcast) and he does handle a lot of the “nuts and bolts” sex advice but he also talks a lot about coming out, LGBTQ issues, gender issues, science, and politics.
I agree with everyone here counseling that your daughter needs your unconditional love and support. She sounds like a good kid who loves and trusts you. Don’t blow that. Don’t try to take her away from her school where she is successful or away from her good friends that she cares about.
Please always consider her perspective. She’s a queer kid. You love her and must accept that about her. She sounds like she’s in a supportive environment at school but the world is sometimes tough for queer kids. She’s going to need for you to look out for her and fight for her when the time comes. She’s also going to need to space to be who she is, so let her fight her own battles on her own and come to you when she needs support.
You understand how easy it is to brainwash children. Don’t try to brainwash your daughter into believing there is anything wrong with being queer. Doing so won’t make her straight; it will let teach her that she can’t be honest with you about who she is and drive a wedge between you.
My aunt was beautiful girl, and dated boys a lot in high school. She grew up mormon, about as straight a religion as there is, then went to BYU, about a straight a school as you can find. She found a roomate there and they lived together for decades. Everybody picked up eventually that she was a lesbian, but she didn’t come out until her mom and dad passed away. Since everybody basically knew anyway, it was met with a collective shrug.
Being more catholic isn’t going to make her straight, sending her to another school isn’t going to make her straight. She might find more straight boys from a bigger pool, but that’s about it.
When she starts having sexual experience, she might find she prefers men in that area. She may not.
Nothing you do will change this. As such, just love her, as you always have.
I think you are underestimating how bubble-y someone’s bubble can be. I grew up in the middle of a country which if you asked any grown-ups was sex-crazy, invaded by hippies and their drugs even before destape hit… and the amount of innocence and ignorance we had was ridiculous. Those from my school not so bad (The Nuns took Sex Ed seriously), but between girls from The Other Nuns believing that you could lose your virginity to a tampon and those from The Public Schools being convinced that you could get pregnant if you bathed while ovulating, the ignorance could have been chopped with a cleaver.
And people ask me why I’ve avoided Barcelona.
It looks like the OP has been very receptive to the general vibe here. The best thing to do is continue to love and support your child and do your best to help them make good decisions for a happy and healthy life.
… you think Barcelona has less than a dozen schools? Only two Nuns schools in all of Barcelona? Really? There’s at least five within a six-block radius of my grandparents’ house.
I grew up in a 30K people town 450km from Barcelona. I promise Barcelona does not contain all of Spain.
Sorry for the crack. A lot of my friends have loved their visits to Spain, but it’s just never appealed to me. Your anecdote was kind of like “another bad story about Cleveland” (a city that I enjoy, but that a lot of people like to bust on).
Please give my kind regards to any and all nuns in your hometown - which is roughly fifty times the size of the town I grew up in, by the way.
Re-read this part of your post until you really,* really* understand it.
I think you’re responding to something I didn’t write. I disputed the claim that the OP’s daughter was “never pushed or pressured to like boys by anyone,” I made no claim whatsoever about how much ignorance or knowledge she had of sex, or about her innocence of anything. You’re seriously telling me that you went to Catholic school and no one, no preacher or nun ever, in any way shape or form, in school, in church, on TV, did anything that in any way indicated you should be interested in boys? No mention of ‘when you get married’, nothing about having kids with your future husband? Outside of school, there were absolutely no relatives asking if you have a boyfriend yet, no friends saying ‘look at that cute guy’, no movies where the guy gets the girl, or shows where the girls compete for a guy’s affection? You didn’t read any fairy tales with their expectation of marriage?
There was an assumption that we’d all be heterosexual and might be interested in marriage*, but no, grown-ups did not push the idea that we had to be interested in pairing up, not until each of us started showing an interest in it (which happened at different ages for different children). When that happened, the school was more interested in explaining that “yes ok, you think (s)he’s cute, that’s nice but you’re not allowed to hug him/her when (s)he’s said ‘ewww no!’” than in trying to push us into relationships. Some of my female classmates did the “do you like me y n” thing in 5th grade, having seen it in a movie; the reactions from the boys getting the notes went between “if you want to talk to me why don’t you talk to me?” and “ewwww!”.
The existence of people interested in those of their own sex wasn’t mentioned in our presence until we were in 6th grade, at which point there was a huge nation-wide fuss over the decriminalization of sodomy and debate over whether homosexuality was a choice or not. But at the time there were only two TV channels; it would have been impossible to find one that didn’t mention the issue whereas nowadays there’s tons which don’t have so much as five minutes of news in the whole day.
And the only person to ask if I had a boyfriend yet was a priest in Asturias when I was 10. I got out of the confession box so quick I almost ran over the banks.
I don’t understand why you’re posting like you disagree with me, you’ve just explicitly said that grown-ups pushed the idea that you had to be interested in pairing up, you just claim that they waited until you showed some interest in it (which doesn’t contradict me). So even if I accept all that you say as true, you’re agreeing with my assertion. And sorry, I don’t believe that you went through an entire education in Catholic School without ever hearing the Church’s basic teachings on marriage and procreation. I really doubt that no relatives ever talked about your future husband or children, or that you never watched any movies or TV shows that portrayed ‘girls into boys’ as normal and expected.
When one option is heavily discussed, and another option is treated as something that doesn’t exist, that alone is pressure to the option that’s heavily discussed, in this case ‘girls liking boys’.
I havent read this whole thread but it seems to me most women go thru a bi stage especially as teenagers.
My youngest daughter came out as gay when she was 22 YO. But we knew if before then as it was pretty obvious. It was a little shock to the system, but now we hardly ever thinks about it. She’s married to a lawyer who I like and we have a grandson from them.
I certainly didn’t, and I don’t know anyone who did, at least in real life. Any of my friends who were bi weren’t just going through a “stage”.
WTF? Where do you get that from? Do you have any cite for that at all?
To the OP: Looks like you’re reading the thread and agreeing with most of the posters here. It will all be fine – she’s going through a phase or she isn’t, but either way, she needs your support.
There are a lot of social scientists that would like to see the research you’ve done on that, presuming it’s not just watching chicks make out on “Girls Gone Wild” vids. While women tend to be less exclusively interested in one gender (middle number on the Kinsey scale) than men, I’ve never seen anything supporting the idea that most women enter something that could reasonably be called a ‘bi stage’ - holding a relationship with another woman, having multiple female sex partners, fantasizing about sex/romance with other women, or something along those lines.
I certainly didn’t. Where do you get this information? Where does anyone pick up this idea?
Sexual fluidity: A capacity for situation-dependent flexibility in sexual responsiveness, which allows individuals to experience changes in same-sex or other-sex desire across both short-term and long-term time periods.
Studies have tended to show that female sexuality tends to be more fluid than male sexuality. However the extent and cause of these gender differences remain unclear.
Sexual Fluidity in Male and Females
Research Shows Women Are More Sexually Fluid Than Men
However, that same research tends to show that the term “phase” doesn’t really apply to the majority of women’s experiences in this area. “Gay until Graduation” really doesn’t describe the situation for most females who participated in these studies.