Welcome - Host Gillian Parker (00:04)
Hey! Welcome to the All Teens Considered podcast. I'm your host... Gillian Parker.
All Teens Considered is not a replacement for therapy or personalized advice, but we hope it provides some insight into issues that you or your friends might be dealing with beyond self-help.
The purpose of All Teens Considered is to explore what teens are thinking and feeling. We actually survey our audience to hear from real young people and invite mental health professionals to get scientific and expert advice.
We want to change the stigma around mental health by making mental health education interesting, relatable, actionable, and totally normal.
So, if you are a teenager listening right now, this podcast is for you. And we want to hear from you. What issues or topics do you want to see covered? How could we make ATC better for you? Share your thoughts by texting 512-537-1778.
Guest Emily Bridge, LCSW, Introduction (01:13)
Our guest today is Emily Bridge. She's a licensed clinical social worker and board-approved supervisor with experience in individual couples and alternate relationships therapy.
She also has extensive training in treating sexual issues as well as more generalized psychotherapy. Her specific passion is helping folks sort through questions about identity and orientation. Emily is a native Austinite and earned her MSSW from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to opening a private practice, she worked in inpatient and outpatient psychiatric hospital programs. Since starting her practice in 2011, she is focused on providing care to adults navigating life stressors. In addition, she is a proud member of the LGBTQIA+ community and is committed to providing support to fellow members.
Most importantly, Emily's toy poodle mix Truitt often joins her at the office to snooze the workday away.
Host Ben (02:15)
All right, Emily. Thank you so much for joining me on the show today.
Guest Emily (02:19)
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Ben (02:21)
Today we're talking about really important topic – the LGBTQ spectrum. And as I think that everyone can agree, there's not a lot of education surrounding this subject. I want to start off by just asking you, what is the LGBTQ Spectrum? Is everyone on it? How does it work?
Emily (02:42)
Great question. LGBTQ+ plus stands for lesbian gay, bisexual, transgender, and then queer or questioning. There are a lot of other words that might go into that acronym afterward that get encompassed just in a plus sign. Things like intersex or asexual could also be included. I think that it is a pretty broad spectrum that encompasses a lot of different types of identities, a lot of different types of orientations and people who identify within the LGBTQ community might not look anything like each other at all.
Not everybody falls into the LGBTQ+ community. There are certainly people who do identify as being straight or cisgender individuals who very strongly would not identify as being LGBTQ+ community, but currently the estimates are that about 10% of the population of the US adult population would fall into that community.
Ben (03:56)
That's interesting. So is cisgender straight? Does that mean that you're on the Spectrum? I know for a lot of people, sometimes it's not always a hundred percent obvious. Could you dive into that?
Emily (04:11)
Let's start with defining what cisgender means and what straight really means. So cisgender is if you personally identify as being the same gender as the biological sex you were born. Meaning that if you were born with markers of femaleness, like female genitalia, and female hormones, you also identify as being a female person as an adult or the same as being male.
A straight orientation means that you are generally romantically and sexually attracted to people of a different gender than your own. Generally, straight means if you're a female you're attracted to male people. Male people are attracted to female people. I think for a lot of us as we're growing up, whether it's in elementary school, middle school, high school, college, or beyond, we ask the question, am I gay? Or, am I not straight?
I think it's become more and more common now to ask the question, “Am I really a female or am I a male?” That's a totally normal question. And a lot of times what happens is that we experiment. We might, if you're a female, look at another female classmate and try and figure out, do I have a crush on them?
Or maybe you even kiss someone of the same gender – really normal behavior that doesn't necessarily mean that you identify as being something other than straight or that you identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community. It also is a much longer process of coming to terms with not just who you're attracted to, or who you are romantically interested in, but also a sense of self – your sense of where do I fit in in this world?
Ben (06:24)
If I'm cisgender or straight, does that mean that I'm on the Spectrum, but I'm just on the far end?
Emily (06:30)
It can be helpful to think about gender sexual and romantic identity as a Spectrum. I think that generally for folks in the LGBTQ+ community if someone identifies as straight and cisgender, LGBTQ folks would not likely include you within their community.
In that way, it's not exactly a Spectrum. When I think about the Spectrum though, that's kind of an interesting point in that a lot of us get the idea when we're just figuring out what it means to be lesbian or gay or bisexual or straight. We have this image in our mind of a line. On one end of the line is straight and the middle of the line is bisexual and on the other end of the line is gay which very much looks like the Spectrum.
There was research done a long time ago now, that emphasized how it works. But more recently, there are new models of thought on that. It's not really a linear line from straight to gay and if you're somewhere in the middle of it, you're bisexual. It's more helpful to think of it as there's an endpoint where you have no sexual attraction to anybody. And the other end of the line is a hundred percent sexual attraction to someone.
Imagine that there are three lines next to each other. One of those lines is sexual attraction to male people. One of those lines is sexual attraction to female people. And then one of those lines is sexual attraction to other gendered people – people who might be non-binary, gender queer, transgender, that would all fall into that third line. You could fall anywhere on all three of those lines. I could have 10% attraction to male people on the first line, and then I could have 38% attraction to female people on the second line. And then I don't know, 7% attraction to other gender people. In that way, it could be a Spectrum, but it's not from gay to straight, it's from no attraction to attraction.
Ben (08:59)
That's really interesting. So, if I'm thinking about my sexual orientation, how do I go about identifying that? What would be some things to think about when you're growing up and trying to realize what that is? When I was growing up, I didn't feel like I had to question that.
What are some things that we could think about when we're trying to figure out where we all fit into it?
Emily (09:36)
I think that it's really important to remember that it is really confusing to figure out. That's the first thing. You're probably going to have a lot of different thoughts in your head and some of them are going to be totally opposite and that's okay. And normal.
Things to pay attention to are, if we're talking about either sexual attraction or romantic attraction – not gender, but sexual identity – is thinking about who it is that you're drawn to want to spend time with. And a lot of us when we are little kids, we play with everybody, right? It doesn't really matter if they're a boy or girl. And then as we enter elementary school, we tend to gravitate towards playing with kids of our perceived same gender. Little girls play with little girls, little boys play with little boys and they tend to torture each other.
And then you get into middle school and hormones start kicking in and those groups start commingling a little bit more. As your hormones are kicking in, you might find that you're really fascinated by X, Y, Z person or you just have a sense of really wanting to spend time around XYZ person. For most kids, it's going to be that kind of fascination feeling or that draw towards a person is going to be someone of a different gender than yourself.
But if you find yourself like really, really, really wanting to hang out with your best friend who you've known since third grade, but suddenly it feels like a little bit different, then maybe that's an indicator that you're not totally straight. It might be that that friend's really cool and you want to hang out all the time. That’s fine, but it's a possibility that that's an indicator.
Paying attention to who you're drawn to hang out with, not who you want to kiss because sometimes that can feel really confusing. That sense of wanting to hang out feels a little bit clearer. For some folks, it's really obvious that the people that you want to hug, be physically close to or kiss might be someone of the same gender. And that makes it a lot easier.
Other things to think about or to pay attention to as far as sexual identity would be if you're daydreaming about going on a date with someone or daydreaming about hanging out with someone, and you're not really putting a lot of thought into it, it's just kind of happening. We all daydream sometimes. What kind of people are those people? Are they boys? Are they girls? Are they other gendered people? That can be really good information.
Other things that can be really powerful are just paying attention to our bodies because our bodies physically react and give us so much information that we may not ever pay attention to. If you're in homeroom, for example, and you're sitting next to this really attractive person who happens to be the same gender as you. Everyone knows that they're cool and popular and really attractive. So, okay, fine. Everybody thinks that but then you're sitting there in homeroom and you get really sweaty and nervous and you like have trouble talking to them and feel like you can't form your words. That might be a possibility that your body's saying, Hey, your interest in this person is not like a friend.
Ben (13:34)
Does it really matter to know where you are on the Spectrum and how much emphasis would you put on trying to figure that out and psychoanalyze yourself? We're all trying to figure out who we are. Especially as a young person. I don't think that ever stops. At what age does that become clear and do we really need to care that much?
Emily (13:56)
My simple answer to that is yes and no. I think it does matter for people to feel like they know themselves. Like they can be sure of themselves. Our sense of self can change over time. As a teenager, you might come to discover that I'm attracted to the same gender and I believe that I'm gay or I am a lesbian. And then it might be that 10 years down the road, you find yourself attracted to someone of a different gender and suddenly your sense of identity must shift.
Trying to figure this out, it's not so important that we come up with the hard and fast rule of who we are and that's the end. It can be important for us to feel comfortable within our own bodies. Comfortable in the way we live our lives, to have a sense of how we identify.
I think that that doesn't come through psychoanalyzing though. It doesn't come through examining every single detail of our lives over and over again. I think it does come from just paying attention to what's happening for ourselves. What feelings are popping up? What's happening in our bodies? What it’s like to have certain experiences.
Ben (15:30)
How dynamic do you think the Spectrum is?
Emily (15:33)
There's this idea of sexual fluidity that people's sexual attraction or sexual orientation might change over time. And a lot of the research that's been done around that has been focused primarily on women, not so much on men. I say that what the research has shown tends to be more common for women than men.
I guess in my experience, in my practice, I do see people who more often than not identify as straight for a long period of their life. And then at some point later, might identify as not straight, which can be really tough to live X number of years thinking of one thing, and then feeling like your world is shattered when that changes. Folks who, at least in my experience, at some point identify as part of the LGBTQ community, don't identify fully as straight or cisgender.
Ben (17:02)
Well, let's talk about gender. How do you identify your gender then?
Emily (17:11)
Totally great question. It's confusing because terms get interchanged all the time. Biological sex is like the body parts, the hormones that are in our bodies at birth. The markers that tell the doctor when you're born to say this is a male person or a female person. Also, sometimes what can happen at birth is that you might be intersex, meaning that you have body markers of both female and male bodies.
You might have some combination of genitals that are partially male genitals, partially female genitals. Or, you might have hormones that are either more female or male than your genitals look. That's kind of a separate topic, but that can happen. Imagine though, if we say biological sex is in a very simplified form, either male or female, gender then is the sense of self of how we see our maleness or femaleness.
Ben (18:33)
Pivoting to that, what is the definition of gender versus sex? We're assigned a sex a [at birth] and then how does that play into the way that we look at our gender? What are some things that we can do if we feel like our gender is not our sex?
Emily (18:47)
A lot of my clients who might be other gender, which includes non-binary gender, queer, transgender, talk about feeling discomfort in their bodies. Physically in their bodies somehow their bodies just don't feel right to them. And a lot of those clients will find themselves wanting or drawn to playing with the kids of their gender identity, not their biological sex.
Kids who are assigned female at birth might find themselves wanting to always hang out with the boys. That just feels more natural. It especially shows up once puberty starts because then the hormones kick in and all the things that really make big markers of being either a female body person or a male body person get amplified.
Girls who start developing breasts might feel really, really unhappy about having breasts. Most girls have some discomfort about developing breasts, even if they're excited about it, just because it's like weird and different and your body's changing. But folks who might identify as other gender might feel upset and angry about developing breasts. Same for guys who are assigned male at birth, who then in puberty start having their voice drop. They might feel upset that their voice is getting deeper and changing.
I come back to trying to listen to what your body's saying to you, emotionally. Because our body holds emotional reactions. And if your body is feeling a lot of discomforts internally about how your body looks or feels or operates in the world, it might be a marker that you are other gender.
(CLOSING MUSIC)
Episode Closing (20:58)
That's the end of Part One of our interview will Emily Bridge. We’ll post Part 2 in two weeks. Thanks for listening to All Teens Considered.