Like all Mariokers, I was thirsty for references in my adolescence, in the process of admitting that I was bisexual, and I found some rare ones: Skin, singer of Skunk Anansie (among them I didn’t know she was bisexual, but the radar worked for me), Beatriz and the celestial bodies of Lucía Etxebarria and the film Girl, interrupted (I saw in Spanish: Inocencia interrumpida).

This last fascination caused unrest in my home. Patients in a psychiatric hospital were the protagonists embodied by Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie.I identified myself with the first one, probably because I wanted the second one (Angelina Jolie is also bisexual, which I also found out later).

My stepfather is a psychologist, Spaniard, imperialist, sexist and LGTBIQA+phobic. When we saw the film he told me that my identification was worrying, considering that I was a psychiatric person with Borderline Personality Disorder; but well, he also saw signs of this disorder in me. This exercise of pathologization was a form of violence that affected me, not the only one.

The name Borderline is used to designate this label. I ironically wrote when I was wonderline in a cognitive-behavioral task that my stepfather ordered me to do. In the meantime, I didn’t know the Kuir movement, I didn’t have a lexicon to claim that the borders, the peripheries, the margins, the wrong paths are my residential areas. I left home when I was 17.

My stepfather probably learned in college that bisexuality is a symptom for diagnosing this disorder; so even bisexuality was a psychiatric diagnosis. According to the website of the Osakidetza, the name Emotional Personality Variability Disorder is also used, and we know that one of the characteristics that we accuse bisexuals of is variability (that we proclaim by actiBIsto).

That day, my stepfather told me that he was a supporter of conversion therapies. I got caught in the fire. My mother was silent then, but after twenty years, in an argument, she made it clear to me that she agreed.

One million signatures (including mine, I hope yours too) have been collected by a project to legally ban conversion therapies in the European Union. We need it urgently, although we will continue to move forward in life knowing that many around us would like us to be healed or at least corrected.