Always be willing to reexamine and reevaluate your identity [...] You never know, your seventeen-year-old self's "absolutely never" may just turn out to be your Current You's "weekend plans..." ;)
I'm a lesbian.
Well, that was unexpected. You can just stop reading here if you want to avoid the emotiony bits.
I have been queer for as long as I have been anything more than just a little kid. It's been close to nine years since the first time I started thinking I was different. At the time, for a preteen without a lot of exposure to queerness or understanding of language that might have helped me, the word I used was gay. To be honest, I had little conception of what attraction actually felt like, but I was certain I wasn't like other boys my age, and this made some amount of sense. I started there as many trans women do, and as a result, I haven't ever really had a time in my life where I imagined I might not be attracted to men. For a while now though, or really over the past ten months since ditching the asexual label, where I've... learned the difference between what I like Conceptually and what I like in Reality, I've leaned heavily towards women, and gone back and forth with calling myself a lesbian even while claiming that I was still bisexual and continuing to pursue casual relationships with men and just sort of been a generally disastrous trainwreck without ever stopping to introspect a bit on what all I was doing, and how I really felt. Oops.
So I slowed down a bit. And turns out! real shocker to everyone who knows me! I'm gay. and I'm still not amazingly proud of it actually, but it feels important to approach it honestly. I have realized that for the longest time now I have been indulging what is, at its core, something that I believe is safe to call a very problematic form of compulsory heterosexuality. It has been almost impossible for me to conceive of the idea that I can be a woman, a trans woman, without being at least somewhat sexually attracted to men, and I've made poor decisions to try to Make that true, and that absolutely needs to Stop. Moreover, I find it hard to shake the shame of being both transsexual and a lesbian in a world where nowadays at best, it is stereotyped in increasingly bizarre ways, and at worst it is villainized and demonized in the same ways it always has been. I get uncomfortable with the jokes that are often made, even by other well-meaning queers, about trans women who are lesbians -- I get uncomfortable with many of the ways of viewing or talking about women that have become associated particularly in online spheres with the combination of those two identities. I do not see myself at all in that growing culture of stereotyping, that changing conception of what these words mean, and that lumping together of trans identity and sexuality into one, and I think it's going to kind of suck to have to try to carve a path through that I fear. But it's time to face up and be honest: I'm really not that big on men looking at me, I've got better things to do, and acting otherwise is not the Safe Option, it's harmful and it's even dangerous.
I think now's the part where I'm supposed to have some snappy little joke, but really, I got nothing good... At the end of the day, I'm just a woman, a feminist, and unsurprisingly now, a lesbian. Ready to live life to the fullest and with honesty. I'm nearly 22 years old, and the world is my oyster. You know what I mean?