To Be Changed

Sexuality is affected by a mix of: Presentation (“Your type,” gender presentation- scale of femininity/masculinity etc) and body type (this does include biological sex markers and also secondary characteristics like your nose, size, etc)

Therefore, a lesbian is a person who is attracted to:

A) A presentation of femininity and/or womanhood

AND/OR

B) A female body type

So yes: labels do have meanings! But A lesbian does NOT need to be attracted to BOTH to be a lesbian.

You are allowed to want to fully medically transition. You are allowed to want to completely pass as a cisgender man. Your gender dysphoria may make you uncomfortable or hate parts of your body that do not align with your chosen gender. These facts can all be part of your lived experience and relationship with your own gender.

That is not everyone though. And I recognize that’s difficult. It’s difficult when you are suffering to see others in your community who maybe are not going through the same levels of emotional pain you are. You may instinctively want to say, “They don’t get it. They can’t be like me, they don’t deserve the resources I do, because they don’t understand my pain.”

I assure you, they do understand struggle. They understand the struggle of living in a society that marginalizes them and isolates them. Your pain, your dysphoria is derived from the same place as this struggle: you live in a world that punishes deviation from the norm.

Your relationship with your gender, whatever that may be, is valid. You are allowed to want to pass and not deviate from binary gender norms. You are allowed to feel hurt.

But I’m not sure the target of your hurt is being directed in the right place. Your fellow trans people are not your enemy. The neopronoun user probably understands your hurt better than any cisgender person. You just may not have the same view of your own gender expression, and that’s okay.

I fear you guys just don’t get the life experience of being a trans man (who used to be perceived as a woman and still is by some people) who likes only women. I am never going to be a cisgender man and I don’t want to be. I am a man in most social scenarios but in romantic ones I am a butch. Living in our heteronormative society, being on T but with no surgeries, I feel more aligned with the butch romantic experience than cisgender men.

Women who are attracted to me still like female bodies. I haven’t had any surgeries and I don’t want them. I’m simply on T, which means I am seen as a man by society…with all my clothes on. I’m a man with a female body. Both of these things exist at the same time, it’s just part of my lived reality. This means I’m seen as a man to broader society, which is my goal, but I still have a female body which effects how I navigate the world. This includes in healthcare/reproductive rights and also sexually.

I agree with you that people who were born female have certain oppressions they face because of their anatomy. I share many patriarchal oppressions with you when it comes to my body.

That being said, I am socially a man and will never be seen as a woman in society. If you saw me in public, you would not think I was female. I present myself as a man and live as one day to day, because this is what feels right and happy to me. Because of this, I don’t share some of the social oppressions that women face and I would not enter social spaces for only women because that is not how I am read— even though I am female, women would be uncomfortable if I entered their space because I look like a man.