September 18, 2026 | Amy Luettgen

Dr. Amney Castaneda: creating the support she once needed herself

Finding the words was only the beginning of her journey to self-acceptance.

Dr. Amney Castaneda:

Dr. Amney JH Castaneda, N.C.C. (she/her or they/them) is a professor of counselor education and supervision at the University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh and a longtime activist and advocate for the LGBTQ community.

Born in Madison, Indiana, and raised in the small town of North Vernon, IN, Dr. Castaneda obtained her bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at Ball State University (in Muncie, Indiana) and pursued a doctorate at Auburn University in Alabama before moving to Wisconsin in 2008.

Amney is a full professor at UW-Oshkosh, where she has been working since 2008. She is also serving as the associate school director for counseling and human services (formerly department chair) for the past four years.

She co-owns a business called Somewhere Over the Moon Trainings, where she and Dr. Liz Cannon develop and facilitate LGBTQ and DEI trainings in the greater community. She has facilitated trainings across Wisconsin (at schools, non-profits, and corporations) and outside of the state. Trainings vary in focus depending on the customer, but often they focus on understanding LGBTQ identities and people, mental health, risk factors, and appropriate interventions.

Amney reflects that growing up in a small town in Indiana was not a very fertile environment to figure out what her identity was. There were no resources for LGBTQ young people.

As a young person, Amney just made an assumption she was straight as she was attracted to boys. She just thought that everyone thought women were beautiful and didn’t connect those feelings with being bisexual. She had crushes and kisses with other girls but calling herself bisexual, at the time, just didn’t seem to compute. There did not seem to be a societal framework that supported bisexuality as a valid identity.

“That was my understanding of myself at that time. I just figured everyone found women attractive. I guess I was impacted by the idea that bisexuality didn’t exist. I didn’t think there was any other way to be than straight or lesbian and because of my attraction/romantic relationships with boys, I didn’t consider that I could be a lesbian.”

After high school, Amney went to Ball State University to study for her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees.

At that point, Amney was still thinking that people were either straight or gay. It didn’t yet compute that bisexuality was a legitimate identity. During her college years, she described her identity as “heterosexual, but....”.

Activism had always been an interest for Amney. While living in Indiana, she had been involved in anti-racist work, so getting involved in campus activism at Auburn University in Alabama seemed a natural thing to do. Although the campus was very tight-knit, the wider Alabama community was not very supportive of LGBTQ issues.

Initially, she considered herself an ally and was interested in helping to establish LGBTQ resources on campus. After co-founding an LGBTQ graduate student group (Spectrum Alliance,) and spending significant time within the community, Amney started to realize that she needed to really examine her sexual orientation.

“I knew I needed to take a deeper look at my own identity. I was becoming more involved in queer activism and I had some crushes on women," said Amney.

"While this was not the first time I experienced same sex attractions, and as a young person had experiences with other girls, however, I think that the tipping point was becoming involved in a relationship with a woman who was in my friend group. When things were brewing with us I realized I had to figure out what this meant about my sexuality. It was at this time that I came out as openly bi.”

When Amney came out as bi, she thought that being open about her identity would be welcomed within her LGBTQ circle. However, some members of the group were not as supportive as Amney expected. She encountered blatant biphobia.

“I heard from a lot of people, ‘well, we’re just going to think of you as a lesbian. We can’t imagine you with men, anyway.’ It seemed they were only willing to see me as a lesbian and were erasing part of my identity.”

Amney had a close friend who told her “ but you’re heterosexual” repeatedly, as that is how she had identified up to that point. Another friend told her to break up with the woman she was dating because Amney would only end up hurting her girlfriend because she needed to ‘figure herself out.”

It was a difficult time as Amney tried to understand her own identity and the bi-erasure and biphobia she was met with did not make that process easy. Amney wondered if these comments were true, and it made her journey to accept her bisexuality that much more difficult.

The first person outside of the LGBTQ community that Amney ”came out to” was her brother, Shane. Amney has Shawnee ancestry and follows traditional Native American spirituality (specifically following Lakota teachings.) Shane was her “Hunka” brother, formally adopted within a “Hunkpapa” (adoption) ceremony.

Shane was talking to her one day and just blurted out, “I think you’re bisexual”, and she responded, “Yeah, I think so too.”

“Shane’s response was so much better than the reaction I was receiving from my LGBTQ group at Auburn.”

Amney reflects that Shane’s support motivated her to feel more comfortable with her bi identity. It wasn’t until much later that Amney was able to tell members of her biological family that she was bi.

Amney’s relationship with her mother was not close and somewhat fraught, especially when her mother became a fundamentalist Christian.

“I didn’t feel comfortable coming out to my mom because of her Christian beliefs and the homophobic comments she would make. In my family, if you tell one person something, everyone knows so I held off."

"However, I had a niece who identified as queer and after conversations with them I adopted that term for myself. When I came out to my mom, she and I were not talking so I ended up coming out to her in a letter. She said she 'loved me unconditionally' but followed up with Bible quotes that were homophobic."

"When my aunt Bess died, she invited me and my girlfriend at the time to the funeral. However, when I got there, she kept introducing my girlfriend to people as my friend.”

Afterward, her identity was simply silenced, and no one really talked about it within her family. Her mom continued to pray Amney would find a "nice man to settle down with." She added Amney to the prayer list at her church indefinitely -- a list of people the whole church would pray for.

While family support was fragile, and her place in the queer community sometimes felt uncertain, Amney did find support in her academic life. Amney found a mentor in their doctoral program, Dr Kimberly King-Jupiter, who taught her qualitative research class.

Amney felt she could talk to Dr. King-Jupiter about the climate on campus and some of then negative and biphobic reactions she'd received.

“I ended up co-teaching a women and gender studies class alongside her, and we would often talk about social theory and our lives in her office. Ultimately, I told her there had been negative experiences with faculty about being bi, and we both talked about negative experiences living and working in Alabama around racism, homophobia, sexism, etc.. ”

One of the most confusing experiences occurred with Amney’s advisor.

“My advisor told me that when she was contacted for references, she made sure to tell them I was straight, so they wouldn’t look at my resume, assume I was part of the LGBTQ community, and hire me to fill a DEI quota.”

Luckily, not everyone at Auburn was trying to keep Amney in the closet. One of her supportive colleagues came out as transgender.

“We thought of her as a Mama Bear. She and some members of the LGBTQ community did provide me with a feeling of safety, even though there were some very negative responses to my identity. It was not all bad. ”

When Amney arrived at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, she was fortunate to connect with Dr. Liz Cannon, the director of the brand new campus LGBTQ Resource Center.

“I became a SAFE Trainer right away, and I was also really interested in getting a resource/support group going for queer faculty and staff. It was difficult though, and it was almost as if the staff and faculty didn’t really feel they needed it. The situation was so different from what it had been in Alabama where community felt like everything.”

However, Liz and Amney did go on to establish EQUAL, an employee resource group. A few years later, they formed OUT, an LGBTQ community group which has been up and running since 2013.

The aim for the groups has been to build sustainable queer spaces. IT started out in person and just supporting those in the immediate area, but after COVID, it moved online, and now it serves people across Wisconsin.

Amney reflects that there were many bi myths that impacted her and led to internalized bi-erasure and biphobia.

“When I would watch TV, as a young person, and camera angles would focus on women’s bodies, I just thought everyone would think that women are beautiful. I didn’t necessarily make the connection that I was attracted to women, at that time.”

She didn’t really see bisexuality as an option because she really didn’t think that bisexuals existed. This seemed to be such a pervasive societal view that Amney didn’t really think she could be bi as she was also attracted to men. Bi-erasure made it extremely difficult for Amney to see herself as who she really is.

“Bisexuality was always portrayed as an unstable state. It was a phase. That caused me to misunderstand and mis-identify myself for a long time. When I was in a relationship with a woman, I was told I was a lesbian. And, for a time it felt fine to have people call me that because I thought it was a legitimate identity and being bisexual was not.”

While there have been times when Amney has struggled with her identity she has also been acutely aware that bi folks need and deserve advocacy. Amney joined a Speakers Bureau with two other bi+ activists, Victor Jason Raymond and Liz Cannon. Amney says she feels most energized when working as an advocate for a supportive community.

“I remember driving home from a meeting with the Bi Speakers Bureau and, inexplicably, feeling so pissed off. I had been feeling annoyed and angry as I listened to others’ coming out stories and waited anxiously to share mine in public in a new place that didn’t feel safe to me. I wanted to get away from it. Even though, intellectually, I knew sharing this information was a good thing. It was very intense, and when I was almost home I just started crying. At first, I didn’t understand why but after some self-reflection I figured out that it was internalized biphobia. I had gobbled up such negativity about bisexuality all of my life, and it was something I had to release. I had felt I was only legitimate when advocating for other identities in the community, not bi identities. So I felt really uncomfortable because this was the first time we were focused solely on bi identities.”

Even though Amney had been advocating for queer positivity and equality she had been carrying negative societal messaging and never focusing on bisexuality specifically (only in relation to the greater community). It was an epiphany to start to shed the gloom that had hovered over her bi+ identity.

Amney has developed a holistic, non-sequential Bisexual Identity Development Model and has led one set of the American Counseling Association’s LGBTQ competencies and contributed to the trans and nonbinary competencies, along with a current taskforce developing a comprehensive report on conversion therapy/Sexual Orientation Change Efforts (CE-SOCE). Her work is well-regarded in the academic community. In her position as a full professor, she wants to help students feel they have a safe space at the university.

“I see students recycling the same struggles earlier generations had to deal with, and I want to help them through all that. My biggest point of pride as an educator is when a student will come to my office, maybe not even saying much to begin with, and finally feeling safe enough to come out to me. I love to see them embrace their authenticity, and I want to be a mentor and role model for the queer students on campus so they can see a bi+ individual who is thriving. I love to see them embrace their life.”

Right now, Amney has concerns about the political climate. Throughout the DEI pushback, historic progress is being lost: the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh lost its LGBTQ Resource Center, Center director, and many other unique positions, programs, and spaces.

“It's disheartening. We will have a lot of work to do to recreate the resources that have been lost."

Amney envisions a future where society moves past rigid binaries and stigma. She hopes for the adoption of a more expansive understanding of human sexuality and fluidity. It is an utopian vision, but one which Professor Castaneda is uniquely situated to help create.

“I just want people to be valued and cared for and to get an equal playing field. What if we understood the human condition differently? We could understand that it’s okay to experiment, look into it, and just figure yourself out at your own pace.”

“I have so much admiration for younger generations who are unapologetically themselves. I would envision all of us advocating and working together, intergenerationally, to push identity conversations forward.”