Are they as believable as teens identifying as gay?

The 7 year-old gay thread led to me to ask what you all think.

Personally, I think there are teens, especially girls, who think, or want others to think, they are bisexual, when in fact they are not.

I could be way off base, but I think a lot of teens are too uninformed or inexperienced to really be able to make that declaration as if it is fact.

What exactly defines it, who you sleep with or who you prefer to sleep with? A lot of young people I think experiment with both sides but I think eventually most of them are going to pick one or the other.

Being bisexual is popular right now. It would depend on the person.

It depends on what you mean by "bisexual". The term is defined differently by different people. What criteria do you use to determine whether or not they are bisexual?

I think it also depends on the individual. I hate it when people ask generalized questions like this about children, teenagers, etc, as if ALL teenagers are the same. It's just like on the 'legal drinking age' threads where some insist that there is a magic age at which "children" suddenly become adults and responsible.

Some children are more precocious than others and some teenagers are more self aware than others. There is no "standard" teenager to which all of these rules apply. For every teen that might be "confused" about his/her sexuality, there is another that is perfectly clear about their sexuality. In the absence of contradicting data, I think we should defer to the individual. If a teenager self-identifies as bisexual, who are we to say that they are not? If they later 'change their mind' as they grow older, or 'discover' their true selves, THEN we can label them as 'experimenting' when they were teenagers.

That's trickier. As I said in the thread about the seven year old; I wouldn't dismiss their claim, but would keep in mind that at their age (especially during those teenage years) their hormones are raging and their tastes are alternating and being manipulated by outside influences.

I'm not sure how I would react to a teenager claiming bisexuality. It's one of those things where you have to just let them have their room to sort things out and wait to see if they are still asserting it at twenty-one.