"Contradictory" Queer Labels 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
After having this conversation with a cis male friend of mine, I thought it would be cool to share w/ the internet in case anyone’s curious:
One time we were talking, and I casually and unironically referred to myself as “a straight person”, which threw him off because he’s used to referring to me as one of his “gay” friends, and I’ve never corrected him for it. Basically, as a non-passable trans heterosexual woman, I’ve come to see the issue of labelling my sexuality as less of a right vs. wrong thing and more of a conversation about the utility of words. In other words, I think there’s valid reasons for calling me “straight” AND there’s valid reasons for calling me “gay”:
I’m a woman who is only attracted to men (***Obviously, sexuality is never that simple bc gender is never that simple, but I’m attracted to people who are often perceived as men), which means I’m a straight woman. When people call me “gay”, it often comes with the implication that I’m not or can’t be a woman in the same way a cis woman is, which is transphobic.
However, before realizing I was trans, I spent several years trying to build self-esteem as a gay boy while surrounded by people who acted like being gay was something embarrassing or shameful that I needed to correct or at least hide from others. For me, making the switch from that loud and proud “I’m here! I’m queer!” attitude to “I’m not gay! I’m not gay!” feels like betrayal to my younger self and the confidence they fought for me to have.
At the same time, I’m not exactly the most passable at this stage of my transition, which means that any partnership I enter with a man is still going to be perceived as queer by cishet society regardless of our gender identities.
At the end of the day, the only real difference between gay men’s sexuality and straight women’s sexuality is that one is “supposed to” be attracted to men, while the other is “not supposed to” be attracted to men.
As a trans woman, I feel both the pressure to be exclusively attracted to men as a part of assimilating into womanhood and the judgement from those who see me as a crossdressing gay man. I think the most cohesive way to label my sexuality is to say “transheterosexual”, that is to say, ultimately heterosexual, but in a way that’s complicated by a trans identity. And like most people, I often find myself using “straight” as shorthand for “cisheterosexual”, which is probably problematic and confusing, but most cis people seem to get that I’m usually not talking about myself when I say “straight people”.
I wanted to share this story because I wish more queer people adopted this mindset with ALL of our various labels. Oftentimes, we get too caught up in trying to find the “right” label or rejecting the “wrong” one, that we forget that language is a tool we use to express ourselves and sometimes our lived experiences are too complex to be captured by one word. Life is full of contradictions, yet somehow our labels aren’t allowed to be. So the next time you see a queer person whose combination of labels doesn’t make sense to you, say “tell me more”. You might learn something new about the queer experience.😉
