Identity can be a weird thing, and I think I’m probably a little stranger than most when it comes to some of this stuff. But I’m going to attempt to give a complete description of how I got to where I am today, and how I came to understand some of my various identities, specifically ones relating to gender and sexuality (though a few other identities are mentioned). Also a warning note: while none of this post is graphic, it does talk about some specific practices with regards to sex and masturbation, so be prepared for that kind of explicit content.
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I have to start by saying that my first identity is that of being female. This happened first chronologically (somewhere before I can remember), and it is also probably the identity with which I most strongly identify. It’s very possible that the early understanding of this identity is somehow the reason for such strong identification, but that’s moving into the realm of speculation that can really never be verified. But I cannot remember a time before I understood what “female” was and could recognize it as something that I was.
I also remember this early understanding leading me to some strange conclusions, circumstances, and interactions as a child. I had a concept of female long before I understood the idea of “male,” and so the young me just assumed that everyone was female. I don’t remember ever specifically thinking such a thought, but I do vividly recall the day when I first realized that not all adults had boobs. Like, bam! I was younger than five, and suddenly my mind was blown, and I began to see boobless adults everywhere (generally people call these people “men,” though presence or lack of boobs is in no way a determiner of gender). And I didn’t know what that meant, and it made me scared because I didn’t know what I’d be like as an adult, and I recall having a very specific aversion to the idea of not having boobs as an adult.
Slowly this revelation morphed into the societal concepts of men and women. I came to understand that you could very much know what you’d be like as an adult, and I felt so unlucky when everyone was telling me that I was male. I think this was the first time that I really hated the concept of “the system” or “the world” for making things this way. However, the idea of being left out because somehow I was “male” and not “female” according to everyone else was largely pushed to the back of my mind. Adulthood was eons away from the present, and right now I was just like everyone else and so it didn’t matter.
My closest friends were usually girls growing up. They were just more fun to hang around. And while I knew I’d get made fun of if I played with “girl toys” where others could see, they were usually way prettier than “boy toys.” Then I discovered legos, and at that point in time (the early nineties), legos weren’t really segregated as a gender-specific toy. There were so many possibilities with legos! And I could build anything that I could imagine. This was the first of many obsessions that I had growing up. My first complaint about legos? None of the sets ever came with enough minifigs. And there were like rarely any girls. Luckily, you could take the hair from some of the girl minifigs and put it on the “standard” smiling face to make that character a girl, too, which allowed me to decrease the size of the minifig gender gap (a gender gap that still doesn’t make any sense to me).
As I started attending school, my friendships with girls began to crumble and fade away. There was societal expectation or something, and they saw me as “the other group” instead of “one of them” and this was only heightened by the way that school separated us into boys and girls. Restrooms, gym classes. Teams for activities (“boys on this side of the room, girls on that side”). A few of my really close friendships with other girls remained, but I was told that I was supposed to hang out with the boys and in boy groups. This was when I first started getting depressed. I mean, boys were okay to hang out with occasionally, but they got pretty boring pretty quickly. I would retreat to my room, spending hours and hours playing with legos. I built entire worlds, made up stories. I also began writing down some of those stories, and I spent a lot of time making maps of my fictional worlds, and drawing my characters. All of those things (writing, sketching, and fictional map making) are important parts of my life even to this day.
But shortly after this point, the world was introduced to a phenomenon: Pokemon. And Pokemon was the greatest thing that I had ever seen. It made me interested in video games, it made me interested in card games, it made me interested in anime, and it made me interested in collecting things. Also, there were adorable pokemon, and badass pokemon, and pokemon for every kind of situation you could imagine! I grew up with pets (dogs, 4 cats, many fish in fish tanks), and pets that were bonded to you and had special powers? That was just amazing. This was my second obsession growing up.
However, unlike legos, my parents had a problem with pokemon. They didn’t like that they evolved (“it promotes The Theory of Evolution!” and even the nine year old me knew that the theory of evolution made a lot more sense than god creating the world in seven days), they didn’t like the violence (my retort: but they don’t fight to the death! They only fight to being knocked out, and then you make them better at a Pokecenter!), and they said the card game made them think of tarot cards. So Pokemon was banned in our house, and I was forced to get rid of my cards and games and everything that had to do with Pokemon.
So I had all of this obsession, and nothing to obsess over. What’s a girl to do? I was at summer camp when I saw these older kids playing another card game. And this one was much more mature. It had angels and demons and elves and goblins and wizards and magic. And that’s what it was called: Magic: the Gathering. I asked them to teach me how to play, and they obliged. Some of the rules I was taught weren’t quite correct (regeneration was like the most powerful ability ever according to these rules), but by partway through the next school year I had a couple of decks of my own and was playing regularly (if casually). By the time my parents thought to question my involvement in magic, I was immersed too deeply for them to even think about extricating me. I remember my mom asked me if it was a “good” game (meaning not evil, not if the mechanics and stuff were awesome), and she mentioned reservations about some of the menacing looking creatures and characters. So I told her that those were the bad guys and the point was to overcome the bad guys. I put together a deck that only features angels and knights and soldiers and pretty looking things and showed it to her. This satisfied her enough that she really never questioned Magic again.
A combination of getting involved in Magic, my dad teaching me to play DnD, a growing interest in video games, and my always love for books and comics made me realize that I was absolutely and definitely a geek. Or a nerd. Those terms were very undefined for me for many years. And while there weren’t any local card shops or comic shops to meet with fellow geeks, I had pretty much infinite access to the internet, and so I was able to connect with other people with shared interests.
But the joys of those kinds of connections were tempered with the awfulness that was the onset of puberty. Like the girls that I had been friends with, my puberty started several years earlier than most guys. But unlike those girls, my puberty came with the sharp realization of what that meant for my changing body. When body and facial hair began to grow, I felt so ashamed of it. I noticed the chests and hips of other women developing, and I saw that mine weren’t, and so my depression grew. And with puberty comes the onset of sexuality, so I had to figure out all about that while dealing with growing issues with how my body physically looked. Not to mention getting erections (for no discernable reason) in public places. That was the most embarrassing experience for me ever, made even more embarrassing by the fact that I wanted to hide the fact that I had a penis from everyone. I knew people assumed it, but I didn’t want to give them any proof of its existence.
Well, combine unlimited internet access with growing sexuality and you get plenty of room for exploration. I tried many things during those years, and I quickly discovered a few things: I was not in the least bit interested in pornography, and masturbation was one of the least pleasant experiences ever. It became sort of utilitarian: I’d become aroused and the only thing that stopped the arousal was masturbation, even if it made me feel awful every time, and never felt good. And masturbation is hard to do while wincing at the act. And so I finally stumbled upon a method that worked better than all the others: if I could forget about what the mirror said I looked like and focus on how I knew I was supposed to look (breasts, vag, hips, etc…), kept my junk hidden under underwear, and stroked it as I would stroke the proper equipment, the experience could be at least neutral. Not awful, but not amazing either.
And so to correspond with this process, it often was nice to look at pictures of women, of how I imagined my body to be. Not naked women – this wasn’t about masturbating TO the women in the pictures – but women in clothes, sometimes in underwear. It was about pretending that I was those women just long enough for me to disassociate with the parts that I had in order to stop feeling aroused and get on with my day.
It was during my exploration of pornography that I came to realize that I found peoples’ bodies attractive regardless of their gender. Of course, I told myself, I wasn’t gay, though. I don’t know how my parents would have reacted, but I wasn’t about to tell anyone, let alone admit to myself that my sexuality was anything other than heterosexual. And, besides, I generally was happier being around women anyway, so there was no reason for me to worry about that part of my sexuality. As time passed, I was always super conscious about LGBTQA issues that I heard about, and always tried to act in support, and even got into quite a few fights with my parents over marriage equality, all the while removing my own sexuality from the conversation. It wasn’t until I was at college that I had my first encounters with male partners. I was also exposed to the idea of bisexuality (thanks in part to friend of mine who has identified as bi for most of the time that I have known her), and began to realize that that was an identity that accurately described my approach to sexuality – I don’t really care what a person’s gender is so much as what that person is like.
During my college years I also had my first encounters with sex. I slept with several partners, but I never enjoyed myself. I became really good at faking an orgasm, because I didn’t want my partners to feel bad, and I was really happy when I was able to cause them pleasure. In retrospect, I wish I had been more honest about how I felt towards sex. But I thought they might hate me, or think that I was less of a person or something. And so I lied that it was a good time, time and time again, and I hid how much work it was to fake an orgasm, do the motion of having sex, and imagine my parts as being different (similar to with masturbating, I had problems functioning unless I did so). I term this kind of performance “sexual acrobatics.” It was physically exhausting and required me to do what felt like unnatural things with my body.
After I came out, I finally told my (now ex) girlfriend about my feelings toward sex, and we tried several things to make it more pleasing for me, but nothing really worked. It wasn’t until almost a year after we had broken up that I really gave thought to the fact that maybe I was asexual. A therapist I had been seeing at the time was encouraging me to “make sure to masturbate” all the time to keep my “sexual sensitivity” as I transitioned. But I didn’t want to. HRT had curbed my libido so I no longer needed to masturbate to stop feeling sexually aroused, and I was aroused much less often which was such a relief to me. And as I wondered why I was so opposed to doing what my therapist was suggesting, I began to think that maybe it was just part of who I was. Perhaps there wasn’t something wrong with me, or perhaps it wasn’t just a consequence of the dysphoria I had with certain parts of my body (which had been my theories about it up to that point). So I did some research and came to the conclusion that I was asexual.
However, more recently I have refined my identity even further, and consider myself demisexual rather than asexual, partially due to the influence of a partner that I had who identified as demisexual herself. I found that that word was a better description of how I feel about sex. I don’t like sex, but I like the idea of sex. I like being able to sexually please my partners, and I get my own kind of pleasure from their pleasure. And while none of those things mean that I couldn’t identify as asexual, demisexual just feels like a more accurate description to me.
a trans-parent perspective 