Click
Ugh I hate the part about being presumed “a gay man”. That happened to me, probably starting in high school, and it is so cruel… not because of homosexuality, but the presumption of a male-oriented sexuality - attraction defined from a man’s perspective. I felt so lonely and so isolated for so many years (into my mid thirties in fact) because nobody actually checked whether their assumptions were accurate or not.
I love women, and sometimes men, but I can never love them as a man would, only from a woman’s perspective and that is fundamentally different. Thankfully, there are people like my partner out there who understand our plight, so I no longer worry about dying alone and entirely misunderstood <3
Expressing such a huge part of the way I feel. The author’s little self-descriptive blurb as context, also made more things click.
“Enby writer of love letters, taker of photos. Use whichever pronouns you are inspired to use in the moment; she comes and he goes, yet they remain.”
The desire to just be, as described in the article, put to action by inviting others into the way they describe themselves.
Oh my god…
Explains why I’ve been so uncertain and confused. Thank you for this!
As somebody transfeminine and nonbinary, this really spoke to me. I think part of why it took me so long to figure out I’m trans is that I don’t want to be super femme 90%+ of the time, I just want to throw on jeans and a tee and not be read as male. Like I’m nonbinary, but I want to present as a tomboy or as close to nonbinary on a female base form as I can get, if that makes sense?
Anyways the article was excellent and I’m glad I read it.
This section killed me. Sums up my entire high school experience, even though I did not come out until almost 30.
“Even Sam herself starts to wonder if she’s a gay man, because it would definitely explain the queerness she feels all the time. It would also explain why she feels a kinship to the gay community, even though she’s not gay herself. Alas, she was a boy who exclusively liked girls — it didn’t get much more hetero than that.”
That basically sums up my experience as well. I thought wanting to be them was a part of attraction. As it turns out, not quite
Oh I know, “every guy thinks about being a girl from time to time right? Who me? I suppose I think about it every day, that’s normal for a boy, right? Wait… what do you mean you literally never think of that? come on, you’re not joking? Never? Oh… wait… you really don’t think ‘what would this be like if I were a girl’?”
I was baffled. How could these other boys I knew not think of it that way?
can someone repost and/or summarize the article here in the comments section?
There’s really no substitute for reading the whole thing, but if you just want to know what it’s about, it’s a semi-autobiographical, semi-hypothetical account of what it looks like to grow up repressing your gender identity, particularly if you happen to be assigned male at birth and like women.
If that has been your experience, it’s very likely to resonate. When I was still questioning, it felt so eerily familiar that it led me to frantically scour the internet for more information on the transgender experience until my egg finally cracked about 24 hours later (after many years of periodically peering around without really getting anywhere).
