If you think stereotypes have some basis in fact, you’d probably say the signs were there all along.

I’ve been rocking a bob cut on and off since childhood. Source: Supplied / Amy Hall

I studied gender and sexuality as part of my undergraduate degree, and strangers often perceived me as queer, which probably wasn’t helped by my being an outspoken feminist with a bob cut and a penchant for Doc Martens boots.

A scroll through social media tells me I’m not the only one.

Good luck, babe!

“Ultimately, there’s an assumption that men should be the object of women’s desire; it’s fundamentally built into how we understand gender.”

“Heteronormativity just means that heterosexuality is treated as natural and normal in society and it’s unmarked, so it operates in the background, no one questions it,” she says.

McCann agrees and says those norms and expectations filter into every aspect of our lives, particularly narratives about sexuality that dominate popular culture and the media.

For most of my life, I thought I was straight. Source: Supplied / Amy Hall

These narratives are “usually extremely monosexual,” she adds and can lead to further misunderstanding and confusion about sexualities that sit outside the gay-or-straight binary.

“The media, particularly, latches onto easy, very discrete narratives, and those get replicated over and over, and then people feel like if, in their individual circumstances, they don’t map onto that narrative that, then mustn’t be them.”

Never mind that none of my classmates were even remotely my type or that some of the girls who bullied me would hook up with each other at sleepovers.

Credit: Yarn

Generational differences in sexual identity

Analysis published in the academic journal Population Studies, suggests Australia’s LGBTIQ+ community more than doubled in size between 2012 and 2020, primarily as a result of larger numbers of young women identifying as bisexual.

Younger Australians are much more likely than older Australians to identify as non-heterosexual. Source: SBS News

“People are able to do that earlier in the younger generations because of the kind of cultural space that’s changed, the narratives that have changed, the number of celebrities and public figures who are out that’s changed, and then the internet culture and the connectivity and the articulation is different,” McCann says.

Moving through different life stages and events can also afford a greater understanding of sexuality, Power says.

“If they’ve been on that heteronormative path and it’s relatively comfortable, and maybe they’re aware of their sexuality to some extent, but it’s not been pressing, then it makes sense that they might not think about it until later, or it might not be something they’ve needed to pursue in any active way until they’re older or their life shifts or something else becomes visible for whatever reason.

But because it felt like something I should have been aware of from a much younger age — like every other bisexual person I knew — and that my attraction to women and gender-diverse people is a lot narrower than my attraction to men, I didn’t feel “queer enough”.

The moment I knew

I had been travelling solo around the UK and Ireland for a few weeks, which gave me a lot of thinking time, and as the sounds of Self Esteem’s Prioritise Pleasure rang out through the crowd, a wave of clarity washed over me.

Self Esteem singing into my soul on a day I’ll never forget. Source: Supplied / Amy Hall

It’s been around 18 months since that defining moment and while I feel more comfortable openly describing myself as bisexual, I’m still somewhat hesitant to fully explore this side of myself.

But I guess baring my soul on the internet is a step in the right direction.