I’ve been straight as far as I can remember with some questioning, but the thought came to me. All I hang out with is straight people. My friends are straight, my fiancé is straight. But what if I’m bi and I like girls? What if I’m just “straight” because it’s the norm? Women are pretty and there’s a small chance I’d date one even if I’m not interested in dating women but what if that’s just heteronormativity and such. How do I even know if I actually am bi but it’s repressed? Or if I am straight?
On the one hand I think gay folks are much more likely to conform to straightness and have a harder time understanding their same-sex attraction, but on the other hand I don’t think the social context can fully dominate your sexuality - if you are attracted to girls, you will have that capacity to feel that attraction innately and it will be there even if you don’t understand it exactly.
So how do you know if you are bi? Are you able to feel sexual and/or romantic attraction to men and women? That’s about it … the ability to feel that attraction is what’s relevant. Straight people can’t feel same-sex attraction, they only feel attraction for the opposite sex.
I dunno, I’d love her all the same if he was a girl but for now, and I think women are pretty, but for now I only seem to feel that attraction to men. There’s exceptions like if someone I dated for a while turned into a girl, though.
I tend to think thought experiments like if someone you love suddenly was the opposite gender is not useful, because it builds into the context that you already love the person. I just also don’t know if that’s how sexuality works - continuing to love your partner is not the same as continuing to feel sexually attracted to them the way you were before. The question is whether you think you have the capacity to feel attraction to women. It doesn’t have to be the same intensity with which you feel attraction to men, and even the way the attraction works can be a bit different - but there is a question of whether you feel that attraction.
It’s hard to know for sure. I struggled with my own sexuality and didn’t realize I was bi until I was a teenager, but it was theoretical. I transitioned as an adult and my sexuality became much more balanced once my sex hormones were finally corrected - now I have experiences all the time where I see attractive men or women and feel obvious or overt attraction, where before I primarily only felt attraction one direction and I didn’t typically feel overt attraction the other way.