is it the new trend for so many young people to say they're gay/bi etc?

[mrsfuzzy]

now, i'm very liberal i don't care if someone is white, black, green, straight, bi, trans [you get the picture], and i think it's great that we are more tolerant as a society [for the best part] toward alternative life styles, but....according to my dd majority of her friends are bi/gay/trans etc, not that's a problem, but i'm curious is this a trend thing in recent times ? a few years ago more people were saying they were depressed, bi polar became the 'fashionable' condition to have, not always diagnosed, which was annoying to me personally as i have the condition and it's no picnic, so why do so many people like to wear 'badges' of what 'defines them ? is it attention seeking or something else ?

Cleebope This is an issue right here. It's not "lots of celebs". Come off it. I assure you, being LBGT hardly makes you popular in general. School antics and openly being LGBT 24/7 is completely different. School antics, if they are antics, should be treated as such but being openly LGBT in a supermarket, a carpark or walking down the street is hardly attention seeking. It's brave, progressive and shouldn't be sneered upon as though they are being fashionable. The unfortunate - and I'm sure innocent -sentiment of what you are saying comes from a dark place of that the LGBT community should stay small minority (God forbid there are too many of them) and that they are tolerable, but only in the shadows (God forbid someone is openly and proudly gay).
When a husband pecks his wife on the lips and holds her hand down the high street its normal, it's lovely. When a gay kid does it its attention seeking trendiness, because why would anyone want to be gay really. Not saying you are saying that, I'm just explaining the sentiment . Slippery slope. Trust me.

YABVU. Many people fall somewhere between 100% straight and 100% gay. Children are hitting puberty younger and figuring out who they're attractive to. Some might grow up and find that their feels settle with a preponderance of homosexual/heterosexual attraction, and others might remain bi. It is perfectly normal for kids to question this.

When I was at school (2001-2006), calling someone gay or bi was an insult and nobody was out about their sexuality. I couldn't tell anyone that I liked girls and it caused me quite a bit of suffering. I am very glad this has changed.

*attracted

I don't think it's a trend. It's because there's more awareness and acceptance of these things now. Concepts such as gender fluidity, transgender, non-binary etc. have been around for literally hundreds of years. I'm glad that younger people have access to this information. It could have stopped a lot of people in past generations feeling like there's "something wrong with them". I didn't even know I was pansexual until a few years ago.

I think it's a very positive thing.

Otherwise you end up with people like me, married to a man but completely gay. When I tried to come out as a teenager it was so unacceptable to my parents, grandparents and peers that I forced myself to try to be straight without fully realising what I was doing. Now I will never experience a fulfilling relationship without blowing a family's world apart. I blame my mum and her homophobia for the most part.

It is progress.

I'm not sure if more teens are gay/bi or if they just feel more able to say it than in the past. I had gay and lesbian friends at school but it was only after school that they were openly out as they didn't want to admit it to everyone at school.

I also think that if gender neutral had been a thing when I was a teen, that loads of us would have identified with it. There were quite a few goths at school, I think that seemed more gender neutral.

We campaigned for girls to be allowed to wear trousers, but it wasn't a statement of us not being girls anymore, we were just cold.

We campaigned for girls to be allowed to wear trousers, but it wasn't a statement of us not being girls anymore, we were just cold.

Don't know why that's so funny but i'm dying

It was when I was at school. I'm bisexual and have always been bisexual but I had many friends who said they were bisexual or gay who no longer identify as either at all.
I think it is a time of uncertainty with your sexuality as w teen so we often feel unsure but also there's this idea it's cool and different to gay/bisexual amongst some groups and that we must label ourselves rigidly.
I also had a friend who thought she as trans and spent a few years going by a boys name and wearing boys clothes, shaving her face and strapping down her chest but who now no longer does this at all.
I'm very glad she wasn't cajoled into sex reassignment treatment which happens to some kids now.

They'll be listening to 'rock and roll' music before you know it.

acasual, squares think it's just a noise, but the kids love that jungle beat.

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book. (Cicero)

Or a paper on cold fusion. (Johnson)

Or a lament about LGBT issues.

My teenage sister is a big user of Tumblr which is a social media platform full of this stuff (though thankfully she doesn't buy into some of it herself). She saw someone describing themselves with a term she didn't recognise. Googled it and it the definition was "a person that chooses not to label their sexuality". Right, that's not a label at all

I think sexuality is pretty fluid so probably equal numbers of not 100% straight people just more accepted nowadays. I do think there's a big difference between saying you're gay/bi/straight and describing yourself as "a poly-panromantic demisexual genderqueer". That's actually from the bio of a special snowflake girl that showed on my tinder the other day.

I think lots of teens are desperate to find an identity and a group. Each generation has had subcultures (teddy boy, punk etc). It creates a sense of belonging, some of this probably comes down to that.

The rise of people identifying as gender queer makes me feel uncomfortable. I believe gender identity disorder is real but like it should go hand in hand with body dysmorphia. If someone has no issues with their body but says they don't feel like a boy/girl I think it just reinforces outdated gender stereotypes. Plus in some cases issues with your body are about other things. I didn't like my breasts in my early teens, but that's because my body was changing and they were new and scary. I love them now.
Hopefully one day we'll reach the point where you can like whatever you want regardless of what's between your legs.

So with you on this; daughter has 2 friends who are pan-sexual. WTAF is that????? And also how do they truly truly know at only 13???

I don't think it's a new thing, I think it is just more acceptable for people to be vocal about their sexuality because it's totally acceptable to be gay/bi/trans these days.

I think it's a good thing.

pansexual is the new bi.
But I'm being CIS-sexist to say that. (sigh)

I suspect it's a mix of acceptance to people who are definitely 'not straight' and a bit of other being more comfortable with 'trying' it out. Being gay was a very bad thing when I was at school - working class, northern comp. I had homophobic abuse despite not being gay. I think sexuality is flexible with many shades of grey. It does seem more fashionable now, and other things do have trends (in the statistical sense) including being depressed or even suicide - listen to the freakonomics podcast on the subject.

I know a trans teen and don't think they are doing the right thing, although I will support whatever they choose to do with their body/life and they have no idea what I think. I suspect the real cause is being unhappy with who they are as a person and not fitting the ideal of how women are expected to look/be. The media, social media and peer pressure all make us believe we are not good enough. We need better female role models in the public eye - women who are tough, tomboyish, average looking etc for girls who don't want to aspire/it isn't realistic to be model like beauties. It's like men and women are different species when we aren't that different at all.

If you look at other historical societies, it seems likely that the vast majority of the population has the potential for being bi, with a few gay-only or hetero-only people at either end of the spectrum.

In Ancient Greece, or Victorian public schools, this was so obvious that nobody had to make any kind of announcement about it.

In the Middle Ages or the rest of Victorian England this was so unacceptable that nobody could speak about it at all.

In the 1980s and 90s there was a growing expectation of coming out of the closet, declaring if you were gay- if you did not it was assumed you were 100% straight.

What is happening now imo is that the younger generation have grown up with this constant expectation of box-ticking but are quite smart enough to realise that gay and straight are not enough boxes to cover human sexuality.

Seems silly to blame the teenagers when it's our generation that has presented them with endless forms to fill in since the day they started primary, identifying their ethnicity (never enough boxes on that one), first language (not everybody has one), religion, and heaven knows what else.

Totally agree with MyCatWasRightAboutYou and allowlsthinkalot

Feels like progress

When I was growing up I went to school with people who were clearly gay or at least bi, but they kept it to themselves, some more successfully than others. The one guy who was open about it was bullied and ridiculed mercilessly, which no doubt had a massive impact on his confidence. That was the general environment that gay / bi teens had to face 20 years ago.

Nowadays, like many have said, not only is there more fluidity amongst sexuality, but this takes place on in an environment that is more accepting and tolerant than before. Most young people don't see sexuality as a big thing anymore. If that means that young people have a more welcoming space to explore their (often conflicting) feelings, then that is surely a good thing.

Don't think Celebrities or the Media have anything to do with it. It is just one of the few areas in which society in general seems to have made a lot of progress recently.

I do know that "you're a lesbian" is still something used to bully girls, even straight ones, so maybe being bi is seen as more acceptable than being a lesbian.

Agree with James above.

pansexual is the new bi.

Someone give me a TV show.
I have a tumblr, too.

allowlsthinkalot strongly agree. I was the same, in the 80's my family were very homophobic, didn't have a clear understanding and were terrified of all the gays killing everyone off with AIDS.
I was terrified when I thought that I was 'one of them' ( i knew when i was 12/13). I managed to convince myself I was wrong and like you i managed to 'go straight' with several secret dalliances until I decided on my 30th birthday I just couldn't deal with the sadness anymore. I had eating disorders, was harming and miserable. not long after I blew my husbands world apart with the announcement that I am gay.
Surprisingly though the world had changed in that time and i was accepted, my family were all full of 'why didn't you come out sooner' and 12 years later my ex and I are (surprisingly) still friends. Most importantly I accepted myself.
Not saying it was easy and that people didn't get hurt but the fact that people can now speak so openly about how they feel, give themselves labels and be so open is a massive positive.