Transitioning to Straight
I always liked girls, so I assumed I would be a lesbian after my gender transition. I was wrong.
Back in high school, when I couldn’t figure out why I felt so compelled to secretly dress and act like a woman, I started to wonder if I was gay. I’d always been attracted to girls, and I even had a girlfriend at one point, but no other explanation really made sense. So one day I decided to try an experiment. I looked at the nearest boy, who happened to be a coworker whose name I’ve forgotten, and tried to imagine what it might be like to kiss him.
The experiment ended before it even began. The moment my lips mentally touched his, I felt an immediate wave of revulsion. I flinched. There was a sense of panic, then retreat. Wow, I thought. Definitely not gay. Thank God.
Looking back, I wonder if revulsion is really what I felt. It might have been fear. It might have been the same warm, tingly feeling I get when I imagine kissing guys now, which my teenage Catholic self didn’t understand and was too scared to acknowledge. I really don’t remember anything more than the visceral reaction it caused. Whatever I felt in that moment, it was not merely passive disinterest; it was an active rejection.
In the years that followed, the idea of being gay never resurfaced. I dated girls. I fantasized about girls. I fantasized about being girls. But men never entered my thoughts in a sexual way. I never secretly watched gay porn. In my daily life I was surrounded by men — on the wrestling team, at the fraternity house, working in IT — and none of them interested me at all.
Then I started taking estrogen. About six months into hormone replacement therapy, I started noticing a strange tingly sensation when I imagined being treated as a woman. It was strongest when thinking about sex and intimacy. Over the following months the sensation grew more intense as my genderless fantasy partners gradually became more masculine. I realized this warm tingly feeling was something I’d never experienced before with women. I started to wonder if that was due to the estrogen, or if I’d just never really been aroused by women at all. It felt like my body was trying to tell me something my mind didn’t want to acknowledge, and it scared me. I ran small experiments, changing the gender of my partner mid-fantasy. With men my body tingled. With women it did not.
It was (and is) a very confusing time. Over the course of about a year, I transitioned from a heterosexual man to a heterosexual woman.
At least, I think that’s what happened.
Did my sexual orientation — or my gender, for that matter — really change, or did it just take me a few decades to recognize it? To understand who I’m attracted to, did I first need to understand who I was? I knew being a gay man felt wrong, and therefore assumed I was a straight man. Clearly it was more complicated than that.
It’s tough to disentangle sex from sexual orientation. When I imagine being intimate with a man as a woman, it’s arousing. When I imagine being intimate with a man as a man, it most definitely is not. If I mentally change the sex of my partner, my own self-perception has a tendency to shift as well. Being with a woman makes me feel and act more like a man, which makes the tingles disappear. Switching back to a masculine partner, I naturally take the female role and acquire a female body, and suddenly the arousal returns. Heteronormativity is apparently deeply ingrained in my fantasy life.
(To make things even more complicated, this is all happening entirely in my own head, where there’s no pheromones or other physicality to alter the experience. The scientist in me is craving real-world data. But until I can set up a controlled experiment with multiple partners of various genders, I’ll have to settle for writing articles about my own introspection.)
I could easily tie myself in knots trying to figure out the complex interplay between sex and gender, but the simplest explanation for what I’ve experienced is that I’m freaking straight. I am a woman who is sexually attracted to men. It shouldn’t be such an odd concept, but it is.
I’ve been trying to inhabit this new identity as a straight woman for a few months now, and I have to say… it fits. It fits in the way that being a lesbian, which I assumed I would become at the start of my transition, never really did. I like being the token straight girl in my group of trans lesbian friends. I find myself hoping it’s true. It feels like it is.
If I’ve learned anything on this journey of transition, it’s that I should trust that internal sense of self when it tells me something just feels right.
Still, I can’t help but wonder if this is really a change or if I’m discovering a truth about myself which has always been there. Whatever happened during my high school thought experiment, it made enough of an impression that I still remember it 20 years later. I can recall the circumstances of the first time I kissed a girl, but the emotion stirred up by that actual event is less vivid than the memory of that one time I thought about kissing a boy. I can still feel the mental recoil. There must be a reason it stuck with me for so long.
For the sake of simplicity, I tell people my sexual orientation changed during gender transition. But of course it’s not that simple. I was probably attracted to girls before starting estrogen, or I might have just been envious and living vicariously through them. I never liked men before, but maybe what I really didn’t like was the idea of being a gay man. It could be that I’m attracted to the concept of masculinity, but reality would not live up to expectations. Maybe what I’m really enjoying is being validated as a woman, and the men in my fantasies are merely props who trigger that feeling.
Or maybe I’m just a straight girl and always have been.
