People of Â鶹ֱ²¥: Advisor shares experience as bisexual woman
June 26, 2024
Happy Pride Month!
To help celebrate, four Â鶹ֱ²¥ employees who are either members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community or allies are sharing their stories throughout the month.
Learn more about what Â鶹ֱ²¥â€™s doing to honour Pride Month, along with history, community resources, crisis support, and learning and allyship.ÌýÌý
People of Â鶹ֱ²¥: Meet Katelyn Ott
It’s important for me to talk about my sexual orientation because of how prevalent bisexual erasure is, and how often people assume I’m straight because my partner’s a man.
It’s complicated.
For example, we live in a world that’s not always the most accepting 2SLGBTQIA+ folks, so sometimes I let people assume I’m straight and don’t correct them for safety reasons. But other times, I do speak up to correct people who have a stereotypical idea of what a queer or gay person looks like or acts like. Â
Exploring life as a queer woman
For a long time, I identified as queer and a lot of my partners were women. I lived in Toronto at the time and had a great queer community around me.
I also volunteered at a 2SLGBTQIA+ youth line, where I got to meet lots of rad queer folks and support a lot of youth who didn’t have the supports that I did. That was really meaningful work.
I also went to a healthcare centre specifically for 2SLGBTQIA+ folks, which was amazing. There was no assumption that I’m straight and needed to be on birth control because I’m a person with a uterus. I felt like I could just be me and be seen.
As time went on, I started to explore my attraction to men.
I was trying to navigate my own identity, as well as sharing it with my friends and family. They knew me as someone who primarily dated women and then all of a sudden, I started dating men – it threw them for a loop.
Some of my friends were like, “What? Are you straight now? What does this mean?â€
There’s a stereotype that if you’re dating a man then you must be straight.
I feel like we live in a colonial, patriarchal, homophobic world that likes to put people in boxes. And if you don’t fit in a particular box, sometimes folks don’t know what to do with you and will try to shove you into a box so it makes sense to them and they feel comfortable interacting with you.
Finding a queer community at Â鶹ֱ²¥
Navigating the world as a bisexual person, I felt like I had drifted a bit from my queer community, which is sad, but with a new Proud, Resilient, Inclusive, Diverse, Empowered (PRIDE) Employee Resource Group starting at the college, I was so excited to join and feel that there was space for folks to build that community here.
It’s great that Â鶹ֱ²¥ is working toward having resource groups for folks to connect, especially if they don’t know anyone else in the 2SLGBTQIA+ community.
It’s so nice to have a space where we can share our experiences and chat with others who we relate to without having to expend additional energy to explain what it’s like being a queer person navigating the world.
It really speaks to the importance of equity at the college. If we are actively working together as a group, as a community, to continue to make Â鶹ֱ²¥ as inclusive, accessible and welcoming as possible, that’s such a lovely thing.
Katelyn Ott, Student Success Advisor at Â鶹ֱ²¥â€™s Orillia Campus.