Who told you to pick a side? A parent? Friend? A therapist?? Maybe it was a partner who needed your identity to hold still so theirs could feel secure. Somewhere in the accumulated weight of all that picking, you can start to wonder if they’re right. Maybe the shifting landscape of your desire, your gender, your sense of self was evidence of something broken rather than something beautifully, and stubbornly alive. It’s not. But the fact that you had to wonder at all tells you everything about how poorly our culture, and sometimes our own queer communities, handles the people who refuse to fit neatly into a single box.
This post is for the people who have been told their identity is a phase, a pit stop, a hedge. It’s for everyone who has felt too queer for straight spaces and too straight for queer ones. And it is a celebration. From a small group of LGBTQ+ affirming therapists in Dallas, cheers.
The Myth of the Fixed Self
Western culture loves a clean origin story. You were born this way, always knew exactly who you were, you came out once and the narrative arc completed itself. That story works for some people, and when it does, it’s true and valid. Along the way this narrative calcified into the only acceptable story and the damage began.
Rigid categorical models of sexual orientation and gender were built to make identity intelligible to institutions. Medical systems, legal frameworks, and social structures all feel they function more smoothly when people hold still. The problem is that human beings are not institutions. Dr. Lisa Diamond’s research on sexual fluidity documents what countless bisexual, pansexual, and fluid people have been trying to convey: attraction is situation-dependent, responsive, and capable of genuine shifts across a lifetime. Complexity…not indecision. The two are not the same thing and confusing them has cost people years of self-trust.
What makes this particularly painful is that the pressure to choose does not come only from straight culture. Homonormative erasure, the quiet insistence within LGBTQ+ spaces that “real” queerness looks monosexual and fixed, operates as its own kind of gatekeeping. When bisexual people marry someone of the opposite sex, they have to endure the inevitable “so, you’re straight now?”. Gender fluid individuals watch nonbinary identity get reduced to a single androgynous aesthetic that does not match their experience. The box gets smaller from both sides.
The Double Bind
The minority stress model gives us a framework for understanding why bisexual, pansexual, and sexually fluid people face elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidality compared to both heterosexual and gay or lesbian peers. This is not merely “queer people have it hard.” This is a specific, measurable disparity that exists within the queer community, and it is driven by a stressor that monosexual identities do not carry: erasure from two directions at once.
Let’s take Marcus for instance. A pansexual man in his early thirties. At Thanksgiving, his mother refers to his boyfriend as his “friend.” At a gay bar the following weekend, someone tells him he is just experimenting. Two different worlds. The same message. You are not real. The clinical term for what Marcus does next is concealment. He starts editing himself depending on the room. Downplaying his attraction to women when he is with queer friends. Avoiding the word “pansexual” at work because he does not want to field the blank stare. Each small act of concealment, accumulated over years, become a slow deletion from the inside out.
This double bind creates a rejection sensitivity that threads through everything, including romantic relationships. A fluid person partnered with someone who treats their identity as settled (“you chose me, so you’re gay now”) learns to hide parts of their interior life to keep the peace. Attachment injuries follow. Not because fluidity is destabilizing, but because being asked to deny it is.
What the Science Says
Conservative narratives love to frame the increasing visibility of fluid identities as “social contagion,” as though TikTok invented bisexuality. Research out of UC Santa Cruz directly counters this, finding that social media reveals pre-existing diversity rather than creating it. People are not becoming more fluid. They are becoming more willing to say so, which is a very different phenomenon.
Neuroscience research supports the idea that sexual orientation has prenatal hormonal influences, but those biological baselines do not account for the longitudinal fluidity Diamond and others have documented. The honest scientific picture is that orientation involves biological, experiential, and relational factors working together across a lifetime. Categorical models that insist on a single fixed point fail to capture this. They were never designed to. They were designed for simplicity, and simplicity is not the same as truth.
Gender fluidity finds similar neurological grounding. Brain imaging research shows distinct functional connectivity patterns in transgender and nonbinary individuals, supporting identity as something lived in the body and the brain rather than performed or chosen. When a gender fluid client in Texas says “this is who I am,” they are not making a political statement. They are reporting an internal reality that science increasingly corroborates.
When You Stop Apologizing
There’s a moment in sexual fluidity therapy that every affirming clinician recognizes. It does not happen in the first session, and it cannot be rushed. But when it arrives, it’s magic.
It’s a bisexual woman who’s spent three months in therapy trying to unpack why the word “bisexual” gets caught in her throat every time she tries to say it. She grew up in a conservative church, came out eight years ago and she still whispers the word. In session, her therapist doesn’t tell her to be proud. That instruction is useless if shame is alive in the body. Instead, they slow down. They locate the catch and trace it back to the first time someone she loved and trusted told her she was confused. Over the weeks, she starts to inhabit the word differently. Not because she was convinced, but because she finally had a space where the word did not require a defense.
That is what truly affirming therapy looks like when it comes to queer self-discovery. Not cheerleading. Not pasting new affirmations over old wounds. It is the slow, meaningful work of untangling shame from identity until a person can stand inside their own experience without apologizing for the shape of it. A therapist who truly understands that the client doesn’t need to be educated about who they are. They need a room where who they are doesn’t demand justification.
Fluidity Deserves More Than Tolerance
Too many therapeutic spaces treat fluidity as something to accommodate. The intake form has an “other” box. The therapist nods when you explain pansexuality and moves on. That is tolerance, and tolerance is the lowest bar imaginable.
At 53 Christopher, fluidity is not a footnote. It’s understood as a legitimate, clinically significant, and deeply personal dimension of identity that shapes how a person moves through the world, forms relationships, and processes shame. We understand that your identity is not a box to check. It’s the ground you stand on.
If you have spent years editing yourself to fit someone else’s categories, you do not need another space that asks you to translate your experience into simpler terms. You need a space that was built for complexity from the beginning. 53 Christopher was built for exactly that.
About the Author
Mayme Connors, LPC-A, LCDC, NCC is a Dallas based therapist who works with LGBTQIA+ adults, couples, and polycules who are exhausted from performing stability, success, palatable queerness. Her clients come in burnt out, trying to figure out who they actually are beneath all the expectations and survival strategies.
Using approaches like Internal Family Systems (IFS), Gottman, Relational Life Therapy, and DBT, Mayme helps clients untangle the deeply held beliefs from family, culture, or society that keep them stuck. She’s collaborative, sometimes irreverent, always honest, and deeply present.
Therapy with Mayme isn’t sterile. It’s messy and magical and hard, one badass step at a time.
Ready to start therapy? Book a consultation or learn more about working with Mayme.
