Something I laugh at myself for is that before I realised I was actually bisexual, I did consider myself to be faking it. I was a teenager who had heavily internalised the male gaze, and set too much of my self worth according to the attention I got from the opposite sex (which was not very much — I was an undiagnosed autistic with bad anxiety). I was aware of the trope (mostly in media) of (usually implicitly straight) women making out with other women to be titillating to men. I concluded that this is totally something that I would do, when I got to university.

I later heard about how problematic this trope is, and felt really guilty because even though I hadn’t participated in it actively, I felt like I was contributing to the ambient societal biphobia. I later learned that many straight women would not enjoy making out with another woman, even if it was to get male attention. In hindsight, I think perhaps that it was in fact, me who was titillated by the idea of me making out with another woman (but it took me a while of digging through internalised biases to realise this)