Samantha just WAS; Samuel, on the other hand, can’t just BE. Her resting state is, fundamentally, the polar opposite of what it should be. That single, subatomic switch we flipped all those years ago can’t be unflipped, no more than you can unflip that first card you used when building a house out of them.
As somebody transfeminine and nonbinary, this really spoke to me. I think part of why it took me so long to figure out I’m trans is that I don’t want to be super femme 90%+ of the time, I just want to throw on jeans and a tee and not be read as male. Like I’m nonbinary, but I want to present as a tomboy or as close to nonbinary on a female base form as I can get, if that makes sense?
Anyways the article was excellent and I’m glad I read it.
It certainly is in some ways; can’t get through a given week without questioning whether maybe I’m just cis and want to be unique or a binary trans woman in denial. But on the other hand, I do have my feeling of simply not fitting into the gender binary to fall back on, which is there even when gender dysphoria and euphoria are not.
Ugh I hate the part about being presumed “a gay man”. That happened to me, probably starting in high school, and it is so cruel… not because of homosexuality, but the presumption of a male-oriented sexuality - attraction defined from a man’s perspective. I felt so lonely and so isolated for so many years (into my mid thirties in fact) because nobody actually checked whether their assumptions were accurate or not.
I love women, and sometimes men, but I can never love them as a man would, only from a woman’s perspective and that is fundamentally different. Thankfully, there are people like my partner out there who understand our plight, so I no longer worry about dying alone and entirely misunderstood <3
This section killed me. Sums up my entire high school experience, even though I did not come out until almost 30.
“Even Sam herself starts to wonder if she’s a gay man, because it would definitely explain the queerness she feels all the time. It would also explain why she feels a kinship to the gay community, even though she’s not gay herself. Alas, she was a boy who exclusively liked girls — it didn’t get much more hetero than that.”
There’s really no substitute for reading the whole thing, but if you just want to know what it’s about, it’s a semi-autobiographical, semi-hypothetical account of what it looks like to grow up repressing your gender identity, particularly if you happen to be assigned male at birth and like women.
If that has been your experience, it’s very likely to resonate. When I was still questioning, it felt so eerily familiar that it led me to frantically scour the internet for more information on the transgender experience until my egg finally cracked about 24 hours later (after many years of periodically peering around without really getting anywhere).
Oh I know, “every guy thinks about being a girl from time to time right? Who me? I suppose I think about it every day, that’s normal for a boy, right? Wait… what do you mean you literally never think of that? come on, you’re not joking? Never? Oh… wait… you really don’t think ‘what would this be like if I were a girl’?”
I was baffled. How could these other boys I knew not think of it that way?
This is what I hate the most about “protect the children” type rhetoric and the hysteria that goes with it.
I didn’t have to grow up and be a guy. I just never even knew there was any other option. The only reason I knew trans people even existed at all is because they were the butt of a joke in a movie. Typically the joke = here’s a trans person GROSSSSSS EWWWW
Ace ventura as an example. But I had zero positive influences or anyone to talk to about it.
I’m glad I found yall too. I just wish …no, it just should not have been so hard to find you all.
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