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bispec-remade · 5 years

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hi! sorry to bother you out of the blue, but i saw yr post on bisexual identity & i was wondering if you had any advice for someone questioning? i've id'd as a nb lesbian for a few years, but i recently came to the realization that that's never really felt Right or Comfortable & i've consistently felt disconnected from it. i think i might be a bi trans guy, but trying to unravel my feelings about men when i've spent years avoiding the hell out of them is..Hard, to say the least, especially (1/2)

when most questioning resources are specifically directed at people who are cis and bi, or just talk about transness as hearing trans guys exist and knowing you were one immediately/consciously wanted to be a boy as a kid all the time or w/e. you don’t have to answer this if it’s a lot/too personal!! sorry!!!! (2/2)

i can’t really speak for everyone on the process of questioning, but i can certainly speak for myself. i think it might help you to hear a little bit about how i’ve identified over the years, and what i largely struggled with in figuring out my identity. while it isn’t exactly concrete advice, you might find a little piece of your own truth in what i have to say about my own questioning process. i’ve done a lot of introspection on my identity as well as the journey my gender and sexuality has taken over the years, so i have a lot of thoughts regarding the entire process.

just as a warning: this is about 3,000 words of text, and most of the more general advice will be at the end of this. i also. barely proofread this so apologies if some of what i say lacks clarity.

over the past four or five years that i’ve identified as someone who’s part of the lgbt+ community, i have identified as all sorts of things under the umbrella. lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, nonbinary, so on and so forth. right now, i identify as a bisexual trans guy, and it’s the most comfortable i have ever been with an identity. but it’s taken me a lot of exploration for me to get to this point. largely due to a struggle with an aversion to manhood, a struggle with community, a struggle between gender and sexuality, and a struggle with other’s perceptions.

see, the last time i identified as bisexual (aside from right now of course) was actually the first time i identified as anything within the community. but it always felt fake somehow, like i was maybe faking my attraction to girls (i thought myself to be a cisgender girls) in order to feel special somehow. it was brief, and it was always just a fleeting thought, a “what if”. i never really solidly identified as bisexual at the time, and i lacked the knowledge of what attraction felt like to know if i was attracted to girls.

and then, that possibility that i might be bisexual all got tossed out the window when i realized that i wasn’t cis in 2014. after that, i didn’t identify as bisexual for a very, very long time, but i never went back to identifying as cis either. it was my first genuine exploration in the lgbt+ community, where i concretely identified within the community. i identified as nonbinary for one month, before i realized that i was actually more comfortable identifying as a trans guy. a gay trans guy to be specific. i can’t really explain why identifying as a trans guy felt right, it just did. it wasn’t really an “aha”, more like an “i like identifying this way, it feels comfortable”. i’m also not sure why i wrote off the thought that i might be attracted to women. maybe because i had a much more concrete and sure identity in my transness, and i no longer felt the need to evaluate if i was attracted to women or not.

i think i identified as a gay trans guy for the longest. around two years. really, the only thing that changed in that time period was that my gender started to feel less and less binary with time, and so i saw myself as a gay nonbinary guy. but then, one day, i started considering a different possibility. what if i was a nonbinary lesbian? which sounds strange of course, because “lesbian” is multiple leaps from “gay guy”. not only does it mean aligning with a different gender, but it means being attracted to women (which gay men are not), and not being attracted to men (which gay men are). and honestly, i’m not sure quite how it happened. i think it was just a convenient alignment of changes in how i viewed myself. i was starting to notice that i was maybe attracted to girls beyond a mere “what if”, and certain events taking place at this time made me kind of disillusioned by manhood (putting both my attraction to men and my identity as a man into question).

and so began what i call my flip flop period, where i switched between nonbinary lesbian and gay trans guy about 6 times. and yes, that is a LOT of times to be making that kind of flip in identity. to summarize, it was…gay trans guy (two years, which i already talked about) to they/them nb lesbian (for a month, and they/them pronouns because while i had heard about lesbians using he/him pronouns at the time but i was too scared to identify as such) to gay trans guy (because i missed using he/him pronouns and because it was scary and unfamiliar identifying as a lesbian) to he/him nb lesbian (where i was comfortable identify as a lesbian and using he/him pronouns) to gay trans guy (partially in response to backlash for identifying as a he/him lesbian) to he/him nb lesbian (for over 6 months) to a very ambiguous questioning period where i didn’t really identify as anything (which i’ll talk about later). all in all, about two years.

yeah. it’s a lot, i know. and at this point, you might start wondering, “if you were constantly switching between believing you were attracted to men and believing you were attracted to women, then why the hell did you never consider bisexuality?” and…now we get to the thought process that had secretly been running underneath my questioning process the entire time. my desire to feel accepted by the community. you can see it in how i viewed my gender as well as how i viewed my sexuality.

i think at some point, my identity sort of became this tug of war between what felt right for me, and what i felt like the lgbt+ community and wider society would accept (which was fueled by my own internal biases). and in questioning, i think people really need to be honest with themselves about what their particular hangups with identifying as something are. it requires serious introspection. and for me, it required introspection on why i was hesitant to identify as a lesbian, a trans guy, and bisexual. because for me, each identity had its merit and it wasn’t so simple to figure out which was most comfortable for me. a lot of people tell you “identify as what feels the most comfortable to you!” but sometimes, it isn’t so simple to find what’s most comfortable for you. sometimes you have to actively work towards letting yourself feel comfortable in an identity, especially with all sorts of internalized bigotry that you might be struggling with.

i struggled between these three identities so much (enough that i didn’t even consider the third an option for three entire years) because i was treating it like a pros and cons kind of thing. the benefits of identifying as this, and the disadvantages. which can be a way to approach questioning of course. but it isn’t the best way to do so if you’re also factoring other people’s perceptions into the equation. and when you compare identities like that, it also becomes a sort of issue of “i’ll settle for this one because it’s the most comfortable, even if it doesn’t really work perfectly”.

so, what were my hang-ups with each identity? well, with identifying as a lesbian, the issue was that while i did feel a sense of community stronger than i felt with any other community, a sense of belonging, it meant identifying with womanhood to a greater degree than i really wanted to. and then there was the issue of me most comfortably identifying as a lesbian using he/him pronouns, which is an extremely controversial topic as you might know (i still remain wholly in support of lesbians using he/him pronouns, even if the identity didn’t personally work for me). hell, i even got anonymous hate because of identifying as such. and then there was the fact that i couldn’t imagine a reality where i could actually be out as a nonbinary lesbian using he/him pronouns. transitioning or not transitioning would mean a certain inherent level of dishonesty about my identity.

with identifying as a trans guy, it was…well, once i started identifying as a lesbian at a time that i was already sort of wary of manhood, but i started building an even more and more negative mindset towards manhood (both identifying as a man and being attracted to men). the thought of identifying as a man made me feel guilty. it was even more difficult for me because at one point, i was so averse to men that i was fairly sure that i was completely unattracted to men, though still open to the possibility of being a man. and at some point, i accepted that i was absolutely attracted to women, regardless of my gender. and the thought that i might be a straight man made me feel. disgusted, honestly. i tried identifying as a possibly straight trans guy for maybe two days, but. that flopped very quickly because i could barely think about being attracted to a woman for two seconds because i felt guilty for being attracted to woman as a man. this isn’t to say that straight trans guys aren’t valid, but i was dealing with my own shit at the time, and that was just how i saw things. it’s. complicated, and personal, so it’s hard to really explain in words, but the combination of my aversion to men and my aversion towards the thought of men’s attraction to women made things tough. and while i completely understand why people would be averse to manhood (and i still am myself, to some degree) it was extremely toxic to my own questioning process.

which brings me to the third one, which my mind was subconsciously putting out of my mind as a choice. bisexuality. i…it’s hard to really explain my feelings towards bisexuality. that post you mentioned, about bisexual identity? i largely wrote that based on my own previous perceptions of bisexuality. i feel like the reason it resonates with so many people is because i was speaking for my own internalized biphobia. and i’m not proud of it, but it was definitely a thing. for some, bisexuality comes this inherent feeling of not belonging, of loneliness. as if you’re identity is not enough, or that it’s too much.

to keep it short before i start waxing poetic: i think i couldn’t handle the thought of being attracted to multiple genders at once. at having a “straight” and “gay” part of my identity. and this perception is the way a lot of people view bisexuality, even if they openly say that you shouldn’t see bisexuality as “straight” + “gay”. bisexuality is often seen as “part you should be proud of” + “part you shouldn’t be proud of” by wider society and the lgbt+ community, and i. couldn’t accept that. so i never thought of my attraction to men (from when i identified as gay) and (my attraction to women from when i identified as lesbian) as possible pieces of a bisexual identity. it was one or the other, and my mind was subconsciously nudging myself towards an identity where i felt entirely within the lgbt+ community. not to say bisexual people aren’t entirely within the lgbt+ community, but the internalized biphobia i was struggling with felt that that was how i would be viewed if i identified as bisexual. so i didn’t.

so, how did i settle on my current identity as a bisexual trans guy? well, first of all, i was honest to myself. like i mentioned, i pulled all of my thought processes as for why i did and did not want to identify as certain things into the limelight. including the ones about bisexuality. then, i saw just how much my identity relied on the perception of others, and how much distress that was causing me. so i decided to think about things not in terms of how others would view my identity, but in terms of what felt genuinely comfortable. i forgot about how i would be viewed if i was a nonbinary lesbian using he/him pronouns, i forgot about my aversion to men and what it means to be a man in this society, and i forgot about how bisexual identity is unfortunately often viewed in fragments.

but i didn’t come to a conclusion immediately. actually, for a solid month or two, i let myself drift. i chose to not identify as anything, to see where my normal interactions with the world would point me. starting with a blank slate so to say, and trying to view my feelings outside of the context of society. merely looking at someone and saying “hm, she is attractive” instead of “hm, she is attractive but how would i feel about my attraction to her if i was a man”. or, “hm, i do still like he/him pronouns as i always have” instead of “hm, i do still like he/him pronouns as i always have but how would i be viewed if i identified a lesbian”. or “hm, that man is attractive” instead of “hm, that man is attractive but can you trust him when you’ve been mistreated by men so many times in the past?” it’s hard to do, but it gives you the most honest and comfortable understanding of your identity. finding the box that fits you first, instead of trying to find the box that fits you and that fits society.

i first tried to understand my sexuality, because it felt a little more objective to me. viewing things in the way i was, with this clean slate, it was an either “you are or you aren’t attracted to them” sort of thing. plus, my gender is sort of innately tied to my sexuality (thanks to that nonbinary element of my gender), so i had to get sexuality pinned before i could pin down by gender. and what i found was that. well, i’m bisexual. i am definitely confident in my attraction to all genders, though i still view my attraction to different genders in different ways.

as for my gender, it took a little bit of time once i had the bisexual part of my identity down. i knew i probably wasn’t a bisexual woman, as i couldn’t really see an element of womanhood to my gender with the knowledge that i was attracted to men (update as of 05.12.19: i no longer view things this way, and i do have an element of womanhood to my gender). so it was more of a problem of how nonbinary i was. because my nonbinary identity is probably the thing i’ve been most confident in this entire time. i do not entirely identify as a certain gender, and i haven’t for a long time. that part has stayed the same. but how comfortable was i identifying with manhood, if at all? and…i sort of eased into it. first privately identifying as bi and nonbinary. and then bi and nonbinary with maybe a slight inclination for manhood. and soon, my identity got more and more male with time. so now i pretty confidently identify as a bisexual trans guy, with the nonbinary element of my gender being more personal than an explicitly stated part of my identity.

and that was my entire journey with exploring gender and sexuality! i guess some things i’d like to leave this off with that actually serve as proper advice are…

don’t be afraid to try things out. quite frankly, even though none of my previous identities (bi cis girl, gay trans guy, nonbinary lesbian) ended up being right for me, they were still extremely important to my personal journey, and i openly embrace those times i identified as such. for example, identifying as a nonbinary lesbian was necessary for me to even accept that i could be attracted to woman, but i do NOT see that identity as a stepping stone towards my current identity. in that time, i genuinely identified as nonbinary lesbian. that was my reality. it just so happens that my reality from back then helped fuel my reality today. and maybe some day i’ll find a more comfortable identity than that of a bisexual trans guy. i’m open to the possibility, but right now, i’m living my most comfortable reality. (update as of 05.12.19: i actually did find a more comfortable identity! i find myself identifying with both bisexual manhood and bisexual womanhood right now, so i consider myself bigender. there is still the element of me that remains a bisexual man of course. though i have since reconsidered my identity, what i have said here still stands.)

try not to worry about what others think so much. identify as what’s comfortable for you. no matter what you identify as, no matter what ends up being comfortable for you, there’s the sad reality will always someone who takes issue with it, even if you end up not identifying as lgbt+ in the end. but the happy reality? there will always be a community of people willing to accept your identity, and you WILL find them even if you don’t have that community right now. in a really weird way, i find it a little comforting that there’ll be haters and lovers out there no matter what i identify as. it means i’m free to identify the way that’s comfortable for me. because hell, those come with EVERY identity. so please don’t feel tethered down by the expectations of the community that currently surrounds you. do what feels right for you, and then find the people who will accept you for it afterwards.

don’t be afraid to go without a label. i personally find comfort in labels, which is why i only temporarily went without a label to help myself through the questioning process. but it is still completely an option to simply exist, and it can be really freeing to do so. sure, there is no community called the no label community, and even communities centered on ambiguity of gender/sexual orientation gather around a specific label, but you don’t really need an X community or a Y community to be happy. communities gathering under labels can be great ways to easily meet people with similar experiences, but you can just as easily find people with similar experiences outside of communities. hell, some of the people i relate to the most when it comes to gender and sexuality don’t even identify as bisexual people or trans men. so if you’re scared of missing out on community if you choose to abandon labels altogether, then i assure you that it is completely possible to find community anywhere and with any identity (or lack thereof).

thank you very much for the question, and i am extremely touched that you saw me as someone to ask about this sort of thing. i myself know quite well just how frustrating the internal struggle you’re going through is, and i really do wish there were more resources for this kind of thing. it’s such a deeply personal process and yet i’ve seen so many people struggle with the exact same things i struggled with. this was probably a lot to absorb, but i hope shedding light on my own experiences perhaps offered you a bit of insight on yourself, if not concrete advice on how to approach questioning. i wish you luck in figuring things out!

#mine #okay to rb #asks #anonymous #questioning #Anonymous

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