Thanks for the thoughtful response Emily – yes really important to recognise that this does happen with gay/lesbian sexuality as well, and that coming out is an ongoing process for everyone. There’s a specific invisibility around anything outside the gay/straight binary, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t invisibilities within it as well. Thanks so much for sharing those experiences and thoughts.

There was one part here that jarred for me: ‘Lesbian and gay people are rarely questioned as to whether they are really lesbian/gay. Also generally, once they have come out, people accept that their sexual identity is what they’ve said it is.’

It is not my experience as a lesbian, that people simply accept my sexuality as it is, particularly in the context of therapy settings, however subtle, or never question it, nor that the process of coming out is once and for all, it is continual. It also varies enormously according to our expressions of gender, and people’s perceptions of our gender and orientation. Just the other day a passing stranger pointed at my partner and I and said ‘got to be sisters’ (we really don’t look much alike).

When writing chapters in a gender and sexual diversity book recently, it was painfully difficult and isolating to find expression for women desiring women and there is a still a great deal of invisibility specifically about women’s desire (the existence of this at all). I have aimed to write a personal piece, but not to write as if the only people who identity as women who desire women are those who identity as lesbians. Although, I am in a monogamous lesbian relationship, and tend to choose the term lesbian in terms of my own sexuality, I do at times refer to myself as bisexual. It is hard to find a voice to respond, because I do not disagree about the importance of having spaces where people are not silenced and are free to simply be ourselves, nor with the clearly articulated specific challenges to people who identify as bisexual, or with the need for us all to address this. It’s just somehow I feel my own experience gets submerged here. If there is some energised and supported lesbian platform out there, especially within the field of therapy, then I have not found it yet, nor did I find it when researching the chapters. I want to include and be included. Mind Out in Brighton are in my view an excellent model for the practice of bi-inclusivity and true inclusivity across LGBTQ identities.