Queer YA tends to validate gay and lesbian identities with a force and clarity it doesn’t grant to bisexuality. And when queer YA does validate bisexuality, it only tends to do so in two very specific and limiting ways: either the bisexual character has had relationships with at least one boy and one girl in the past, or the bisexual character is currently in a love triangle with exactly one boy and one girl (I say boy and girl because queer YA suffers from a truly appalling dearth of nonbinary characters).

Made out with a girl? Check. Made out with a boy? Check. Congrats, you’re a genuine bisexual! Please proceed to the Bisexual Registration Office to submit your paperwork and confirm your status. No, you haven’t checked those boxes? Sorry, but why exactly do you think you belong here?

This trope spreads the insidious idea that, while straight kids and gay kids can know their identity instinctively, bisexual kids “can’t know for sure until it happens,” i.e. until they’ve had positive sexual or romantic experiences with people of multiple genders. While gay and lesbian kids also hear that message from the straight world, I think it’s something bisexual kids are more likely to internalize. After all, most of us are attracted to people of the “opposite” gender. So when we start to explore queer spaces, we get imposter syndrome. That nagging feeling that we need to do more to prove to others, and ourselves, that we belong. I’ve experienced that, and I’ve heard it from nearly all of my questioning friends at one point or another.

And that’s so harmful. It’s not as though we’re all asleep in a glass coffin of heteronormativity and being kissed by someone of the same gender is the only way to wake up. There are tons of valid ways to figure out one’s identity, and sexual experimentation is only one of them.