How did you realise you're queer?
This one is hard to say for sure - I had a crush on a boy before my first crush on a girl, but I didn’t recognize it at the time because I just thought the guy was REALLY cool and that was just a normal way to view him. It took a while to realize he was in-fact NOT cool and was actually a HUGE dweeb and I just thought he was cool because he made my tummy feel all tingly. I was like 10 or so when this started and I didn’t realize it until I was like 25.
At 11 I had an aunt ask me if I wanted to have kids with my future wife or if I wanted to adopt, and I had this acute sensation of the warmth leaving my body and my stomach turning into a black hole as I realized that *I* was NOT going to be giving birth ever because I could not. That moment passed but the feeling of emptiness stayed and it felt wrong forever after that. But I didn’t know what that meant or what the feeling even was so I thought it was normal and ignored it.
I sleep spoon people if I share a bed with them and on one school trip we ended up getting 4 people placed in a two bed hotel room. I shared a bed with a guy I had a HUGE crush on and felt this alien sort of fear, like I’d just been caught doing something wicked, when he told me I’d spooned him the next morning.
Contrast that with falling asleep on my bestie’s boobs on the ride home, like just fully snoring and drooling on her boobs, and it was just like “well yeah whatever we’re besties.” I was always friends with women in the same way gay men were friends with women, or the way women were friends with women. I was never friends with men the same way other men were friends with men. At best I was like the pet of my male friends, like a little weirdo that followed them around and didn’t speak the same language but was still kinda funny to have nearby, and at worst I was like an emotional flashbang where everything I said gave them a sort of pseudo-gender dysphoria because they’d never seen the world the way I saw it.
Once I graduated HS I went to BYU where I made friends who were “like me” in a way, but they have almost exclusively been queer and only came out openly years later.
Once I got out in the mission field I was always seen as “weird,” which seemed to validate the feeling I’d had my whole life that there was just something different about me. That I was just not like other people. I started to develop a sense of it from learning a new language - the feelings I had were like trying to speak Spanish by translating things word-for-word from English. I learned that some of my feelings couldn’t be translated word-for-word and still make sense, so I learned how to communicate them better. The improved communication helped in some ways but definitely did not make me feel more normal, if anything it really solidified the feeling that I was truly thinking and feeling “in another language,” so to speak. I came home and at BYU started dating but all the dates felt off, like I was holding onto some big secret or moments away from something HUGE happening and I couldn’t ever be in a relationship in that time because I never knew what The Big Thing I was feeling was but I knew it would sink a romantic relationship.
I started talking to other queer people and relating with them. It made me feel less invisible. The feelings of difference were made smaller near them - instead of feeling like I was constantly having to translate my feelings like they just got them. I could use metaphors and language with them that nobody else understood. I accepted I was as probably “a little bi,” as I called it at the time, and left it at that. But when my faith crisis built up my feelings became more and more poignant and less and less avoidable.
I transferred to ASU because I knew that whatever was coming had been building up for a while so it was going to be BIG. It didn’t happen immediately, but there was a sort of catalyst for it - another exmormon trans woman had posted a timeline on r/exmormon, including pics of her during her mission. I realized that the joy on her face in her later post-HRT pics had been the joy I’d been aching for. I wondered if what had worked for her might work for me.
I stayed up for days researching this - literally I slept like 8 hours in 3 days because I couldn’t shake this feeling - the sick, cold, empty feeling in my stomach, the feeling that had been there since I was 11, felt less immovable - I had a new hope that I could remove that feeling instead of letting it drain my joy. I found from exploring that I shared some experiences with trans people. Not all of them, but enough that when I reframed the question to not be “Can I prove with 200% confidence that I’m not straight and cis” to “can I prove with any degree of confidence that I am straight and cis” I realized I couldn’t. That meant I felt OK with experimenting. I started HRT after coming out to my parents, and that first week on HRT made me feel better than I had felt since I was a child. I felt a comfort that reassured me that even if I was dead wrong and I was not a woman in any capacity that estrogen and bisexuality were a winning combo for me.
And honestly, that’s about where I stayed. I feel confident in my femininity, I know I’m a woman, I know not everyone sees things the same way as me, but I’m not trying to prove anything to anyone else. I’m doing what heals me for as long as it heals me. If estrogen stops making me feel so damn happy I’ll stop taking it. I don’t see that happening, just like I can’t imagine not living life as a woman.
Some things that can be helpful to know for those who are still exploring:
Research data shows that queer people don’t always know or recognize queerness immediately in the way the general community thinks they do. It’s often recognized in retrospect. It often starts with feeling “different” from peers. It often starts with feeling separate in a private sort of way, the kind of thing that does not show up physically and may not be there for others. From there, it often proceeds to asking the question “If I were queer, what would that mean? How would my life be different?” and if it feels like it would be a relief or a release of some unspoken pressure, even if it wouldn’t be a relief in other social or relational ways, that can be a good sign.
Additionally, there is often an absurd amount of pressure put on people in the queer community to PROVE that you are queer before a jury of your (non-queer) peers. It helps to let go of that idea - we are not living in a world where the default is heterosexuality and you have to prove you’re not the default. It often feels like that (because of social scripts about identity disclosure) but it rarely happens like that. Instead of asking how you can know for sure for sure for sure, ask yourself if you can prove the opposite - can you prove you’re cishet? If not, if you can’t prove you’re cishet in a meaningful way, then start thinking about exploring queerness.
Ask yourself how you’d like to be in your daily life - the phrase “you don’t seriously mean you want to get GAY MARRIED do you?” or “Didn’t you always picture yourself in [gender conforming clothes] on your graduation day?” are kinda dumb because you don’t DO that every day. If you wanna get married in a tux or a dress then fucking do it, but you have to spend every day before and after that living the life you’re in - so would you rather go grocery shopping as a man, a woman, or neither? Would you rather argue about whose turn it is to do the dishes with a man, a woman, or neither? Would you rather watch YouTube video essays on your couch as you are right now or as a queer person? Would you rather go to work thinking of yourself as a cishet person or a queer one? These are things you do every day. Of your mom would just die of shame seeing you walk down the aisle in a dress and that matters to you then get married in a tux. But that doesn’t mean you have to be a man, because you have to spend every waking and sleeping moment in a body and life that’s not your own. That means that even when your mom’s not there, when your pastor’s not looking, when your boss is out sick, you are still you, and if you’re instead stuck being someone you’re not you have to be that person even when those people aren’t there to give you the approval that may or not be making that worth it.
I guess to summarize it, I don’t know for sure what I am, but I know every second I spend as a queer feels better than I ever did being a cishet person. I know even the bad days spent as a woman are better than the average days I had as a man.
I can also say that exploring and experimenting makes the whole process easier - trying to figure this out without letting yourself experience it doesn’t work. This is not a math problem that can be solved in your head. This is not a philosophical conundrum or a riddle that must be solved before the Sphinx lets you pass. This is a life to be lived, a person to be witnessed and known, and you need to spend time with yourself to know how it feels. You need to experience it to know it. If you’re asking this question, usually what it means is your experience with being cishet (because any moment spent trying to live as a cishet person is a moment spent trying experiencing cishet life) hasn’t quite felt right and that’s a good enough sign that you might want to try a new experience.
Another thing I think of is the parable of the talents - one guy ended up with 10 talents because he took risks and explored. One person ended up with 5 because he took risks and explored. They were both told their effort was worthwhile because they took a risk. They didn’t need the same number of talents, they didn’t need to be perfect, they just needed to have tried. The guy too scared to take a risk was the only one chastised, not because he lost the talent of gold he’d been given but because he did nothing with it. He buried it with fear and doubt. Don’t let the fears and doubts about making a mistake ever hold you back from trying anyways. Growth always comes from experiencing your own life for yourself, not from living carefully to avoid offending or irritating others.
Be gayer, read more Terry Pratchett, and give yourself time to really meet yourself. Because giving yourself time to be who you ARE is always worth the risk of making a mistake. There is no mistake that cannot be learned from, but there is so much growth that can be missed. I love you, stranger, and I hope beyond hoping that you can let yourself explore and experiment and experience yourself fully, because whether you’re queer or not, you’re worth the risk of exploring it.
