When a small mammal scrunches up and cleans its face and whiskers with its little hands very rapidly. I just wanted to give you that thought for a moment did u like it.
a rambling transfeminine retrospective on my sexuality. spoiler, I think I'm trading in 'bisexual' for, well. we'll get to that.
let's start with the most obvious common denominator: I'm attracted to women. that much has been overwhelmingly clear since middle school.
while i sat on my hands feeling genderweird for many many years, i started identifying as nonbinary around 2018. which posed a kind of silly question: if I was nonbinary, "straight" didn't really make sense anymore as a label (an enby who exclusively dates non-enbies, I guess??). I came to the conclusion that the question was irrelevant as now that I had broadened my own gender to be non-binary, I could recognize the same in potential partners, and certainly had other enbies I was attracted to.
the two labels that made sense at the time were the infamous pair: either 'pansexual' or 'bisexual'. For the latter, I used the more recent definition of 'two or more' gender identities but not all. that felt more accurate, as there were certainly large swathes of gender identities i could never see myself with.
so I'd intentionally smudged the edges, as it didn't make sense to draw a hard line given the spectrum of people I'd encountered. after all, I sure didn't want to come across as non-inclusive or transphobic myself. I'd seen a lot of policing around attraction to enbies online: I wanted to be part of the solution, not the problem.
plus, i liked at least some men, right? the last several years had introduced me to all sorts of newfangled subgenres of man, certainly there had to be some that fell into my boundaries. would you ignore the existence of gnc / feminine men, huh? And those… what did people call them? femboys? denying your attraction to them would just be your internalized homophobia.
but taking a step back, while the edges might have gotten blurrier, the overall shape of my attraction has always been. obvious. and it really wasn't changing, even when my understanding of my own gender was.
over the next several years while I inched my way towards feeling comfortable adopting the label 'transfem' (a threshold I really only crossed once later starting hrt) a sort of existential fear set in: the little mental model of myself was starting to sound more and more like one of those transfems. you know, the t4ts. the agps. which of course, i knew was debunked!! hateful rhetoric, right? I wasn't some fox news nightmare. I just happened to be transitioning. femininely. and happened. to like women. And had never dated a man. And couldn't imagine myself ending up in a long-term relationship with a man. But don't erase the femboys right! so what if you've never met someone who identified as one. so what if it originated as a porn category. so what if 90% of them eventually came out as transfems. Hell, if i started HRT and didn't explicitly come out, maybe people I knew would just assume I was one! softbois were trendy, right?
I was a gentle and safe enby with blurry boundaries whose sexuality never encroached on women, especially not queer women! we peacefully coexisted! I wasn't a bathroom invader, I was bi, after all!!
It's embarrassing to even type out considering how much i resent that fearful and hateful part of myself. I knew better, I know better, but I couldn't outrun it.
the straw that broke the camel's back and got me to start hrt was when one of my closest friends, a lesbian, started dating a trans woman. it was the first time I'd seen someone in my personal life express direct, consistent, authentic attraction to a transfem. proof a version of myself like her could actually be lovable.
and once I did start hrt the dusty mess of a lifetime of misdirected desire began to settle. like sure, obviously there are physical changes, including sexual. The psychological difference, however, was gradual but more profound. confusingly, my preferences feel different but simultaneously redoubled. The closest comparison I have is like scribbling out your thoughts in a messy first draft, then erasing the sentences entirely and rewriting with a new clarity. The fluff is cut, the articulation, crisper.
for more than a decade i was terrified that i was the frat boy ogling the girls kissing while I watched three women end our relationships when I wasn't man enough for them. i learned sexual scripts from shitty straight tumblr kink blogs before they banned it all. even this post has gotten excruciating to write as I close in on another lexically notorious pair: 'sapphic' and 'lesbian'.
you know, the lesbian flag was actually designed by a nonbinary lesbian? i'm often reminded. it just means "non men loving non men" right? right. sapphic is certainly more poetic. I've always been a sucker for Greek mythology. you ever hear the one about a man who was turned into a woman? it's horribly misogynist.
maybe someday I'll be able to hold those words without burning myself. or put them in my bio. or say them. it almost feels stupid how long it's been there, that same desire. i self reflected for two decades and all i got was this stupid t-shirt. my first crush turned out to be a lesbian, though neither of us knew it at the time. a very circular journey when you think about it.
but at very least, we can all rest easier knowing im not into men.
cats always step precisely on your most sensitive areas when theyre crawling on you lovingly for cuddles. bladder dick ovaries boobs stomach bruise it doesnt matter. they have homing devices on their paws for the exact area you’re most tender at the moment and they put their full weight into that step. and sometimes they might keep their stance midstride so theyre just standing there forever forcing you to endure the pain. because they are simply too cute to get mad at
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