Yup! Exactly what it says on the tin. I want to see everything Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans, Queer, and what have you posted here! Give us the story of your life; when you realized you were unique and when you came out. Enjoy some therapy talking about how difficult it was and why it still comes with its challenges because of people who do not accept you or parts of yourself that even you might not be able to accept still…
…which I can see some of us in here wanting to help by accepting YOU!!! Yes, this isn’t just for all the sour parts either! Talk about how happy you are the way you are, your inspirations, and what having friends and family as allies means to you! Celebrate yourself as well as each other!!! PRIDE Month is almost at hand and we need to get some fab and gab going on in here!!! <3
I was getting worried and I think it’s helpful to mention that Allies can speak in here too about their queer friends and family. If there is one thing this thread is, as well as the forum, and the community as far as I’m concerned, it’s to be welcoming and inclusive. I’ll add to it and brilliantly describe how coming to terms with myself felt like since I started coming out in 2012:
I’ve struggled with my identity for a long time. My gay awakening came from liking pretty anime boys and wondering “do I like men in real life?” In high school I had an very openly gay friend, the only out person in my school. This was a time and place where it was very dangerous to be gay, Matthew Shepard’s murder had occured just a few years prior in a neighboring state, so it was not a safe place to be gay. My friend was the first person I really came out to. I initially said I was gay but then realized I still really liked girls so i switched to identifying as bi. Over the years I eventually just stopped identifying as anything at all and just thought “I’m attracted to whoever I’m attracted to, why put a label on it”? If anything I’d probably be considered Pansexual, gender is not a factor in my attraction to people. I like who I like. If you’re a hot girl and I’m into you, cool. If you’re a pretty boy and I’m into you, cool, if you’re enby and I’m into you, cool. If you don’t know what you are, that’s fine too.
On the topic of gender, I have similar non-committal tendencies. I’ve recently been feeling more and more feminine and want to present as such, but I dont really know if I could consider myself trans, or if I feel I’m truly a woman. I don’t feel like either a man or a woman, so I guess I’m non-binary or genderfluid. I use he/they pronouns. I’ve thought long and hard about if I want to start HRT to be more fem, but that would mean coming out to a lot of people in my personal life and work, which is something I don’t think I can do right now.
I’m also poly. I’m married and my partner has another partner, and I’ve had a second partner in the past as well. Being poly is nice, but also comes with a lot more challenges than traditional relationships.
For now, I’m just going to continue being who I want to be, like who I want to like, and dress and act how I want to. I’m just queer, don’t know what kind of queer, but I am.
One thing I struggle with a lot is that because I’m both nonbinary and bisexual a) a large bulk of people don’t think I exist in at least two different ways and b) I often fit in oddly with the gay and trans communities.
People like neat categories and these categories are anything but neat. Sometimes they are treated as sort of gay and trans lite and while it’s true that SOME bi and/or nonbinary people can coast by on only revealing part of their personality and being written off as cis or straight with a bit of spice, not being seen for who you are can weigh on you in distinct ways.
And also, on a practical level, I’d have a very hard time getting acess to any sort of medical transitioning, cus I’m not commited enough to either option to work within the system. On the plus side, discovering my nonbinary side helped me come to terms with my queer side. Boy, girl, in-between and beyond, no matter who I’m with it’s always going to be at least a little bit gay.
When I was little, I remember how I would crossdress and enjoyed playing with dolls, and loved watching wrestling (as well as wrestling with friends). I always had an interest in exploring myself as well as depictions of nudity, especially amongst males. However, being a little kid in the 90’s, it was still very accepting to be openly homophobic (and the terms like “that’s so gay” along with it). I remember experiencing homophobia for what might have been the first time in the 3rd, maybe 4th grade. I was called gay and chased through the playground. That’s what opened the closet door for me to go inside and hide, but I didn’t go in and shut the door to the world yet. I didn’t know what “gay” was, but as time went on, others decided for me. I was labeled before I could label myself and I was bullied through the rest of elementary, middle school, and high school. So, both consciously and subconsciously, I needed to be straight, I put up a front, and it carried on through college and a couple of years after… which resulted in a lot of confusion, toxic masculinity, loss of friendships, and regret. My time to come out naturally and enjoy what should have been some magical earlier years of being gay was not only denied, but I also did damage to myself and lashed out, hurting others who might have understood if I had let them in, and I should have treated them as I wished to be treated, not how I was treated for many years before. Dates and encounters with women, that I was encouraged to pursue to have a happy “normal” relationship, as well as having convinced myself that’s what I needed, were awkward, unfulfilling, and very frustrating for both sides.
Cut to around 2012 when a friend, who would go on to become one of my best friends, came out to me, and that got me thinking that maybe there was more to me as well. So, I began to explore the idea of bisexuality. However, that was but a cushion to soften the impact of what would become a multi-year journey into my homosexuality, with a bunch of false starts and finishes, nearly going all the way back into the closet and out again, and internalized homophobia from years of insecurity and anxiety that I will be in therapy working on for what will likely be the rest of my life.
Yet, it was people like my best friend, who invited me to attend several PRIDES, who knew I needed help, and so guided me, nurtured me, and got me used to the idea of a big gay world I could be a part of. The rest of the good work has been up to me, trying apps, enjoying the local scene (what little of it there is), and just being open as myself, where I don’t see much difference now that I’m allowed to embrace it. I’m a dork, I will always be a dork, I quote movies incessantly, and can be weird. I just so happen to like intimacy with men, lol. But I’ve also come to celebrate the awesome friendships that I’ve made out of it, especially with women, and we have become confidants and allies, having each other’s backs when it comes to “guys.”
I am not perfect. I have regrets and wish I could go back and experience it all again knowing what I know now, and take some of it back. Yet, I wouldn’t be who I am now either, learning, seeing happier days than I don’t see, and seeing life as being just a bit more worth it with each and every passing day
I’ve told a few people this already but I have two uncles on my dad’s side that are gay. One of them is possibly the reason I’m alive as he got my mother to hospital when she was having me. As a result I my middle name is named after him and he was also made my god father. He has been an activist most of his adult life for equality for the LGBTQ+ community. One of his proudest achievements was the issue of age of consent, you see in our state certain nsfw acts between couples below the age of 18 (whatever their orientation) were still considered illegal despite the age of consent for all other acts being 16. His support helped get the legislation changed and retroactively anyone convicted by that supposed ‘crime’ would have their record cleared.
My other uncle is one of the smartest people I know. It was because of him I gained an appreciation for fantasy stories through stories by Roald Dahl, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and an appreciation history and politics. For reasons he hasn’t divulged he didn’t come out to his friends and family until he retired.
So I wasn’t raised to be bigoted at home obviously. School and highschool were different. I had friends who were bigots in primary school. Thankfully I was able to distance myself from them during highschool but I only know of one person in my year who was gay. It actually came up on lunch break I don’t even remember what we were talking about but she just blurted out " you know I’m a lesbian right?" and I said something like “no but you talk about Xena so often I was suspecting something was up”.
A few years ago now our country had a referendum for marriage equality, massive waste of money the conservative government spent in order to ‘protect the sanctity of marriage’ in the same year the reality tv show ‘Married at first sight’ came out here and it was revealed that our deputy prime minister had a secret second family on the side. Hypocrites. Anyway getting off topic sorry.
I wanted to celebrate “Yes Day” when the obvious was pointed out and equality was achieved. But not being LGBTQ+ myself I don’t really have much in the way of supportive paraphernalia so I improvised.
I wore that to work. the hat is a replica of the cap Marty Mcfly wears in Back to the Future II and the toy on top is a turret from the Portal game series, I got it from a game store that was selling these in ‘blind boxes’ so I didn’t know what I was getting, for the first year I had it i thought it was just a rainbow coloured thing then I realised it is actually coloured after the lgbtq flag.
Yes! Same for me, I think, though I appear to have had a much easier time figuring it out. Sexual orientation has… basically never been a bother for me, or even a big thing? As I recall it, I got curious some time in highschool or thereabouts when I found out there were possibilities other than straight, thought on the matter, and came to pretty much the above conclusion. It’s perhaps been refined a bit over the years, but not really changed. And if beliefs like “I’m heterosexual” or “I’m homosexual” work for some people, which they appear to, well, I hope those work out well, but I don’t really get it – I mean, someone who believes they’re completely straight or completely gay can be disproved by just a single counterexample, and there always might be that one self-conception-shatteringly-attractive person out there. Or not, because maybe they actually are completely gay or straight. Either way, though, what does it matter? Any given interaction or incident of attraction is going to be between individuals, not an individual and The Entirety of Gender X – and each is going to have its own unique particulars. So why not just deal with each thing that comes up as it does and not worry about it?
(And I say that as someone who is very good at worrying about things.)
…Of course, that said, I say the above as someone who a: had a somewhat unusual upbringing, particular for where it was happening, in which I don’t recall ever being told it was wrong to not be straight (I somewhat vaguely recall at least once, in fact, being actively told it was fine to not be straight) and b: in terms of labels, expects some variety of aro might be in whatever mix they have (though I don’t care enough about labelling the details to pin down said details). And those two together probably prevented a fair bit of pressure to get things more concrete.
Oh, right, also: neurodivergent introvert. It’s, as far as I’m recalling, only in retrospect that I even wondered about what, say, the gossip at my highschool might have been about me. So basically no peer pressure in the equation either.
In comparison to gender, though, my lack of worry about sexual orientation takes on something of a comical aspect, because, oof. I don’t recall when I first found out non-cisness was a thing, though probably somewhere around early-highschool-ish (…Also, oddly enough, IIRC my route to discovering it proceeded quite directly through the Atomic Rockets website.), but unlike sexual orientation, I did not get that matter squared away soon and with little fuss.
Oh, I didn’t apply it to myself, at first. (Partly I think that was because the first information I discovered about it focused on strong, known-pretty-clearly-from-early-childhood, dysphoria – which I could easily tell I didn’t have, and since at the time I only had that category and the default “cis”, well, obviously conclusion.) But trying to figure out what gender even was? I mean, in retrospect, it was possibly notable that I could, even as just a starting point for a more complex exploration, point to that bit of my personality/self that made me Male – but still, gender is just hard in general if one thinks about it. It’s this immense partly cultural and partly biological mess. And that understanding, in the previous sentence, still feels like pretty much the best explanation I’ve been able to come up with in all these years.
So, you know, not easy to figure out how it applies to me when I don’t even know what it is in general. And I think my childhood was more weird than particularly clearly masculine or feminine; there was a slant towards masculine from my sex, and a related default assumption, but looking back… eh. So, anyway, it did take me a while to start consciously going “Wait…” about myself. Possibly until 2015; it quite possibly could have been earlier, but one of the earliest incidents I remember and can date couldn’t have occurred later than that (unless I’m really forgetting something). Questioning gradually built over time (with a few spikes that perhaps I ought to have paid more attention to earlier; there was one all the way back in 2016, at least), exploration followed and also started building, and that culminated (to the extent things aren’t still ongoing, of course) a few months ago when I tried estradiol for the first time. A LOT of data came in over the next fortnight, and, well, here I am.
Well. You don’t necessarily have to come out to anyone to try it. You could procure some estradiol, make a plan for the experiment, make some contingency plans for safety in case it goes really badly, and observe, altering the dosage and such as seems good and with due caution. If it doesn’t work out, my understanding is that it’s probably, though not necessarily, going to clearly not work out early on – and in that case, you can stop, and probably no one you don’t want to know has to. If the HRT does seem to be working out, well, then you have more data with which to decide how to proceed. That’s pretty much what I did.
Right? What would “straight” even be for us?
(Oh, and while I’m replying to you, in this thread in particular, I did, by the way, notice the colors in your profile picture. :))
@ThatGuyLight:
I’m sorry you had such a rough time of things; I’m glad things are better for you now.
…And now I’m wondering how Aperture Science’s attempt to take part in Pride Month would go wrong.
(I do assume it’s a “how” rather than an “if”.)
@Reese There is actually a large correlation between neurodivergence and gender identity i.e. a lot of trans people are neurodivegent. It’s a fascinating connection, and makes a ton of sense really. I’m also neurodivergent, and since our brains are wired differently, we don’t necessarily see the world in absolutes, for example, I’ve always had a strong opposition to gendered products. When I was a kid I wore stuff from the “girls” section, I remember a particularly favorite pair of shoes that had a cute purple fuzzy liner that peeked over the top, clearly designed for little girls, but I loved them. I played with Barbie dolls and didn’t care, I was having fun. I absolutely hate the men’s grooming and hygiene aisle of stores. They have all this bullshit stuff that’s labelled like “hairbrush for men” that is literally just a hairbrush, but it’s gray and says “for men” on it, as if a hairbrush is an inherently feminine product. Other examples: “bath poof for men.” Apparently real masculine men don’t bathe but if they do they shouldnt be using this piece of plastic that’s clearly for women, unless it’s blue or gray and denotes that it’s “for men” on it. I hate that.
I’ve always had a hard time finding deodorant that I liked, until I started shopping in the women’s deodorant aisle. They smell better, they don’t cause irritation, and they don’t ruin my clothes.
Also, shopping in the women’s clothing section now, there are so many more options for things that fit my aesthetic. I’ve always been a huge clothing and fashion nerd, and men’s fashion is just so boring. There are ways I’ve started incorporating my men’s clothes into my current outfits to make them more fem and its a lot of fun. Putting effort into my outfits has always been something I’ve done, but now I feel like I have more freedom to create looks that I like.
On the hairbrush thing, the missus can’t use my brush, and I can’t use hers, neither are suited to the others hair type. So maybe there is something in it heh…?
I found all of this so fascinating because I am the same but on the opposite side: I was described as a “tom boy” growing up. I hated Barbie. I wanted toys tied to the cartoons I liked, and that included action figures. I hated wearing dresses and “girly” clothes. I didn’t like playing dress up, learning to do makeup, or any other traditionally female gendered activity.
Even now as an adult, I reject a lot of gendered things. There are certain feminine things that I do like, and I do still very much identify as female. So while I am cis, I think I’m tilted toward what might be called gender nonconforming.
A cisgender female who identifies with male gendered interests/hobbies, and gender neutral styles? shrugs
Oh, I noticed a while ago; sorry for not saying anything then, if you were waiting for it. Glad I finally did, though!
@syaoran2001:
re the correlation between neurodivergence and non-cisness:
I believe I’d heard something about that, aye.
re deodorant:
Oh, hm; maybe I got lucky there. Though looking for and settling on scentless deodorant may have helped, since, if it works, that eliminates at least one of those factors entirely.
re clothing:
Glad it sounds like that’s working out so well for you.
@Scifire:
Which is totally different from how they usually do things, of course.
Sounds like a good way to approach it.
Pity more people don’t just accept things like that so easily.
Well, I’m an Old Trans (pre 2010s great awakening) and there’s a whole story behind that which I’ve been meaning to share in this thread but the last week has been one giant pain in my butt so, maybe once my wife gets back from New England and things settle down again I’ll bang it out. Til then uh. Trans rights I guess
She’s kind of from all over! She spent most of her childhood growing up in New Hampshire, though. I think she was born in Mass? Also spent some time living in Maryland.
But my wife has moved more times than any other person I know, it’s -nuts-! 36? 37 times? Something like that? She’s ex-Navy, which explains some of it, haha. She’s also trans!
The best part about two trans girls being married is whether or not a person respects trans people as the gender we are, it’s gay no matter how you slice it.
I mean, I cannot compete with that level of queerness, but I can also appreciate that she grew up in NH considering that’s where I live. The scene here still leaves a lot to be desired when compared to the likes of Boston/Provincetown or Providence and Vermont. New Hampshire is a “don’t tell me what to do, but that’s none of my business” kind of place lol. I’m just glad you’ve found happiness and can hopefully stay safe and celebrate this month <3
