i don't know, maybe some of you know the expirience or at least something similar. i was thinking about asking this on the more general trans comm, but .. idk.
i used to play the male part for most of my life. i soon discovered, i liked boys a lot. (also i did like girls, but that faded somehow. i have new theories abt that...). it took long to accept that, even longer to embrace it. but when i went to uni in another town, i did not want to hold anything back anymore: i was gayyyyy.
i think now, that i repressed a lot of my bisexuality in that move. i wanted to be that deviant boykisser. what did i like abt homosexual relations?
- hotties be hotties ofc.
- it was radical defiance of norms! (edgy, i know. but that's what it felt like. the drama is different)
- i wasn't expected to use my genitalia for penetration. (that i understand now)
- i was allowed, to be softer, more feminine in presence of gay men. (that too, i only see now)
i know and accept, that i am trans for 1,5 years now. i'm on hrt for 6 month and it was the right choice. over the last months i joked about being unsure how i felt being straight now. it's not a joke. it's ramping up in the last weeks. there is this first thing, that it's basically not true, that i am exclusively into men. but i come to understand that of all men it's the gay ones (the fruity ones to be precise) that i love, as friends and as partners.
i am afraid rn that i am closing that door. that gay space i called home for 15 years (or so) may still welcome me, but it won't be my space anymore. it's bad statistcs, but gay men treat me differently. (which means i look more and more fem? yay.) it is less flirty (in the "yeah we're all gay" way, not the sexual way). i can't really describe a thing yet that i only noticed when it stopped.
i am sad. i can not see me dating heterosexual men. i know bi men exist, and even some heteros are a little softer. but this is not so much about dating. i am not interested in that rn. it's more about the label and an image of oneself. i feel naked without that gayness.
i feel there is a specific gay expirience, when you have to ask yourself for the first time if it might be okay to show some affection (just a little) toward your crush/friend. to show weakness, to break out of your role. i feel this was an expirience that connected me with my partners in the past.
ok i am loosing my point. TL;DR: i am increasingly sad, that i am not gay anymore.
xoxo kluczyczka
(also, do i call myself ex-gay now, to annoy the biggots?)
If it helps to think about it this way at all, historically it's all been one big fluid community. Trans women, gay men, bi men, lots of varieties of nonbinary, and even just cross dressers, all fit together under one beautiful tent of people society refused to look too closely at. Before the labels got solidified, any of those labels and plenty others could mean just about whatever the individual felt like it should mean, and there was no point in trying to explain any of it to a dictionary maker or even your average cishet person. To some extent in the real world it's still like this, especially with older generations, but for a lot of us labels have taken on a far more rigid and organizational meaning than they ever had before. I think there's some really valuable insight in remembering that the countless generations before us did share in many of those niche and unique experiences of being queer and embracing it, no matter the details of who we are. The point being that if you don't want to lose a label you feel community and identify with, no one has authority to tell you you can't use them both just because they feel contradictory. You're part of a beautiful cultural tradition that did and still does use them both at once.
Ugh, I hate labels. My experience with my family is that you slap a label on it and suddenly everything stops. ADHD, autism, my chronic illness, angry, greedy, gay, lesbian, extroverted, introverted... it's like everything else about a person falls away, all nuance and personality disappears, once they can describe you in a word.
The idea of summing an entire life up in one word and then anything done that they think contradicts that word gets tittered at behind thin veils... it's so infuriating. I still get hung up on people in the community using labels because there's a part of me that just explodes.
i need to think about this for longer. infact, i need to think about it all in the next months. but thanks for your input. :)