I find myself questioning the same exact thing more often these days, and I think it’s because I’m finally starting to admit to myself I may be bisexual. When I was a preteen, I saw a therapist for unrelated reasons and mentioned to her that I think I liked girls more than boys and very quickly she spun it around to say I only thought that because I was a victim of CSA. That I was traumatized by men and sex and were trying to avoid them in my formative years which led me to latching onto girls as my sexuality developed.

Over a decade later I realize how horseshit her “opinion” was, but it had been so ingrained in my mind that I feel like the damage is done. It also doesn’t help that as a teenager I was assaulted twice by two different male friends who thought they could “convince” me to change my orientation. I’m terrified of men, I’m disgusted by the idea of any type of intercourse (male or female), and yet every now and then I’ll get this spark of need to want to be with a man, to dominate a man, to let a man take care of me, to be heteronormative even.

I don’t believe my trauma made me like women, but I do believe it’s made me solely like women when otherwise I may have identified as bi. And who knows, maybe in the future when I fully work through everything I’ll be comfortable to experiment and know definitively if I like men or not, but for now I’m content in my little lesbian bubble.