As I said, the closest I had come to describing how I was feeling, was to my desk mate Anna in highschool: like there is a gay guy living inside of me. I still lacked the vocabulary to put a name to it and the knowledge to recognize that I am not really broken in any way.
In all the (very often very complexed and serialized) fantasies I had, I found myself slipping into the role of the guy as often as not. Eventually, with high speed internet and a laptop that I could take in bed with me, and later even smartphones, free porn could be explored without fear of getting caught. It proved an entirely dissatsifactory experience. Turns out I needed sound and turns out that the sound annoyed me at the same time. Mute or music score didn’t do anything, but clips with sound were just as bad.
Boredom sometimes is a good advisor, as it was sheer boredom in a hotel room that actually had me try to look up gay porn. I figured that I liked guys and the women in porn were annoying, so a double dose of what I liked and cutting out the part that did nothing for me seemed reasonable. My reasoning paid off and soon I was tumbling down the rabbit hole that was tumblr before the great purge last December. I found an active niche community where I made virtual friends I have to this day. It also scratched the itch for a while.
It was through social media that I learned a lot about LGBTIQA issues, and ultimately, a lot about what my education, both formal and informal has left out. Including about whole groups of people who exist but were never mentioned to me. And soon I found my head spinning. I found stories and people who’s experience seemed to at least partly match mine. I learned that transgender exists and I learned that asexuality exists and that both are legit. People like me are out there and I am not as broken as I thought I was.
Picture this: for over three decades, I grew up, lived and tried to resign to the fact that I would much rather be a boy, but it is not possible; that it would be weird anyway to be a boy-who-used-to-be-a-girl, but still like boys; and that I would never ever tell any boy that I liked him, because A) I am socially awkward as fuck and B) it would automatically mean that we should at some point have sex. I have no interest in doing anything more than going to movies and concerts and icecream parlors and playing computer games and staying up until silly o’clock talking about life, the universe and everything and maybe snuggling on the couch and making out while watching something on TV. I am one of the people for whom “we should go for a drink sometime” means we are going for a drink and “coming up to see the collector’s edition of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings” gets me genuinly excited about the books and carries no innuendo. I do not know if it is the fact that I am uncomfortable being female and sex would just drive the point home. I do not know if it changed if I transitioned. I do not know if it changed if I found someone with whom I could let go and have my brain take a back seat. I’m going to operate under the assumption that I am ace and potentially demi.
So then came the downward spin. I started wondering and second guessing myself. I suspected this must be a sort of psychological hypochondria. I came to know about something and I kept nodding to myself and saying “yeah, me too… I know this!”, but maybe it was really all in my head, like you feel your skin crawling when you watch documentaries about ants. Am I really trans if I do not suffer from paralysing depression over it? Am I really gay if I still wear a female body? If I changed my appearance to look male, would I really be gay if all I do is look at guys and masturbate over gay porn? Am I really ace if I don’t want anything sexual with another person, but actually do masturbate?
I said I would need to seek out a therapist to clarify this stuff and find some answers. I read somewhere on a ftm resource site, that if you ask yourself a question for five years, you don’t really need to ask it anymore because you actually already know the answer – you just need to start working on accepting it. I guess it works with three years as well, because that’s how long the doubts have been circling in my head. It seems too much though. Sometimes I am certain about the way I feel. Other times I feel like it must be fake – like I am trying to be a caricature for Pride parades – trans, gay and ace all rolled into one.
Speaking of Pride – sometimes I also feel like I am committing some sort of betrayal. I supported my gay friends long before I had the knowledge and vocabulary to realise I might be part of a gender/sexual minority. Because it seems the fair and right thing to do and injustice always makes me angry – LGBTIQA themed as much as cruelty to animals or racism or bigotry or misogyny. Now it sometimes feels that maybe it is only self-serving after all. It’s weird and illogical and not who I am, but the nagging thought is there.
There was one thing I stumbled upon fairly recently that made me fight back against the doubts. A little comic published on thenib.com that I found by accident had me nodding to myself while reading it… by the end of it, I was in tears and needed to gather myself (a thing that I also had to do with each and every one of these posts).
The little comic in question is an autobiographical piece by Dylan Edwards entitled Nothing Wrong With Me. It details how the author, who grew up in a conservative family, struggling to understand the lack of sexual attraction, finally finds out that trans* exists, transitions and while still preferring guys, the famed increase in libido of hormone treatment fails to set in. It takes another doctor and a frank discussion that he is now an asexual gay trans man and accept himself as such.
In a way, it was crushing to know that three and a half decades of being different in ways that sometimes hurt were all in vain – there is nothing wrong with me either. In another way, it was an immense relief – the tears were flowing because I got somehow liberated from a cell that I built myself in my mind, to hide all these thoughts away in. That is when I started ordering all the books that have come in about other people’s experience. I am beginning to think that, maybe, just maybe, I have the courage and the endurance to pull this trough. I keep telling myself that so far, it was the chances I never took that hurt most. I already feel like I have wasted so much time simply because I did not know, I was never told and I told no one who could have pointed it out. I… I just don’t want to look back in another three decades upon a life lived without love for myself and take all my what if’s to the grave.
