Well to be fair your still part of the LGBTQ+, if you need any insight we sometimes call out significant other (whom is nonbinary) our wife / our lesbian wife.

“Gay” is realistically just another word for happy so if your happy your still gay in that end :3

Also no one should be out here separating friend groups off of gender or sexuality so be you, no one is going to punish you for that.

TLDR you haven’t lost status or connections to any group of people, just have fun with life!

You could always date obvious eggs. Then you'd still be gay technically. Although they might figure things out in the presence of a trans woman so you're gonna need to find a pool of eggs to draw from.

Are you familiar with the concept of cultural Judaism? Jewish is unique in describing a religion, an ethnicity, and a cultural group. Someone can be raised in Jewish faith and culture, walk away from the religious aspect, but still retain much of the culture. Someone like Einstein was culturally Jewish. He was open about and identified with his heritage, but he was an atheist in terms of belief.

I would say you're culturally gay. You had your most formative years in the gay community. You may no longer meet the definition of 'gay' as an orientation, but you're still culturally gay. If you spend long enough time in a community, you can retain cultural attachments to that community even if you no longer meet the defining central feature uniting that community.

you certainly arent alone in this feeling, my trans partner and i (nonbinary) like to joke that we are so gay that we circled back to being straight. lol our relationship may look more and more hetero ( once we pass better) but we will always be queer :)

Consider dating trans men. T4T is a thing, and a lot of trans people find comfort in each others' company precisely because that particular conversation is at the same time less relevant and more relevant. That internal negotiation has already been had, and making specific requests of that partner is much easier because they understand why it hurts.

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.

You can be straight and queer at the same time.

I've got a friend who has a similar issue, and I can empathize.

It's not so much about the label as the shared culture that you have with that type, built around that specific experience of transgressive vulnerability.

It sounds like you've crossed the line of femininity. It kinda sucks (and I lost a partner to it myself), but part of gay culture is defined by a masculine exclusivity that won't recognize you as one of their own anymore.

It is bad statistics, though, because there's a lot of intersection between the gay and wider queer cultures. You can still find that feeling again in the wider queer community, it's just going to be different now.

Frankly, I can't see myself dating cishet men either. They and the exclusive gays just won't be interested. XD

Ha! Straiiiight!

You can call yourself gay if you like it. I certainly won’t argue with you. The bigots will call you gay anyway, even though, strictly by definition, you aren’t.

Given some transmascs keep using the lesbian label, i don't see why transfems can't use the gay label.

And even if you choose to reject the label, at least you got to proudly wield it before. I wish I could at least have had that.

In my opinion this is one reason why labeling one's sexuality is counterproductive. Humans are changing beings and we always limit ourselves by the labels we put ourselves under.

There are certainly positives to labels, especially in that it helps people understand you better quickly, but i think the trade off is still valid... is it truly beneficial for one's particular sexuality and the cultural connotations of living under that sexuality to be a core part of one's identity? as queer people, we do share experiences from the systemic injustices that affect us, but it is under those labels, such as queer and lgbtqia+, we should identify with, rather than categorizing our complex selves into simple boxes that limit ourselves from exploring our own sexualities

I relate.

You might enjoy this short stand up bit by Carson Olshanksy. Theories of Non Binary Heterosexuality