I was busy thinkin' 'bout boys

In 2018, someone told me that when I transitioned, my sexuality wouldn't suddenly change. I had been attracted to women before transition, so I would still be attracted to them afterward. I hadn't been attracted to men, so I wouldn't suddenly develop an attraction to them.

That was a lie. Now, without that lie, I wouldn't have transitioned. I owe almost everything in my life to that lie. But it was still a lie.

Yet the liar here wasn't a Reddit commenter whose name I never even knew; the liar here was me. When I told myself I had never been attracted to men, I wasn't acknowledging entire chapters of my personal history. I had spent so much of my adolescence afraid of being perceived as a gay man that I willed myself into being a gay woman, when the truth of my sexuality was somewhere in the middle. (The truth of my sexuality is that I'm a disaster bisexual, thanks.)

My experience is not uncommon. For elder millennial trans women such as myself, growing up in the 1990s and 2000s was such a minefield of social stigma around being either a gay guy or a trans woman that if you could simply pretend to be a straight guy for long enough to make it to adulthood, you might well have opted to do so. I sure did.

As I aged, the ways of men became more and more inexplicable to me, something that was reflected in my work, especially between the years of, say, 2013 and 2016, the years when I was, like, "Artistically speaking, you must admit that girls rule, and boys drool." I wanted so badly to not be a man, but I didn't want to say those words out loud because I knew if I did, I would be admitting that I wasn't a man. And being a man was what I knew! It was comfy! Everything else was scary!

When I finally came out and started spending more time around women, the world snapped into focus. My life, my past, myself – they all made sense to me in a way they never had before. My longtime editor even remarked that she had noticed how much sharper my writing got after I came out before I had even told her what was up. I'm not surprised! Once I admitted that basically all of the emotions depicted in True Detective were deeply alien to me, I could finally enjoy True Detective as a kind of social experiment wherein Nic Pizzolatto trapped some boys in a glass jar and made them fight philosophy battles.

Lots of other trans women around my age have told me they had similar experiences. Many of those women were trans lesbians, and when they finally came out, they felt a sense of relief that they would never have to deal with men again. I had been so convinced I was a gentle transbian, and then I came out, and... I started thinking men were hot.

At first, my attraction to men felt a little like having intrusive thoughts. Suddenly, unbidden, I would notice a guy jogging in the park and think, "Oh, hey, he's hot," and some part of my brain would immediately sound a series of alarms and lock things down. I had gotten so used to ignoring that part of myself that when it returned, I assumed its missives hailed from the same part of my brain that was deeply self-destructive.

Perceiving one's queerness as a series of intrusive thoughts is not all that uncommon for baby queers. Indeed, the process of slowly coming to acknowledge my own transness followed a similar pattern of feeling like my brain had been invaded by a different self, then realizing how much more authentic that different self had felt. Still, the irony was not lost on me that I was having intrusive thoughts about heterosexuality. At one point, I emailed a friend with the all-caps subject line, "WHAT IF I'M STRAIGHT?!" and she assured me that if I was attracted to women (and I am!) then by definition, I couldn't be straight.

Still! I had been promised that my sexuality wouldn't change. I wouldn't wake up one morning and suddenly want to kiss boys. Yet here I was, feeling like that really had happened. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that I had simply put a huge part of myself on a shelf. I had had fitful attractions to guys as a teenager. I had ruined a few friendships with guys over crushes I didn't realize were crushes. I had even had fitful romances with them. But they'd almost always left me unfulfilled and wanting. The one time a guy kissed me "like a girl" (whatever that meant to 16-year-old me), it was so shattering that I stopped talking to him entirely. (He went on to marry a girl who looks just like me, which I'm counting as a win.) Yet because all of those experiences didn't fit my narrative of myself – and because they simply didn't make sense to me on some level stemming from my gender – I put them on a dusty shelf and forgot about them.

So strictly speaking, my sexuality hadn't changed. What had happened was that transition finally forced me to be more honest with myself about which people of all genders I was attracted to and why. It also, paradoxically, proved beneficial to my marriage, because my fellow disaster bisexual wife and I can now compare notes on people we find attractive. Still, I'm not going to pretend any of this was easy. Indeed, in the moment, it felt like a constant series of low-level explosions, devastating my life. Transition forces you to be honest with yourself, and being honest with yourself is sometimes a very scary, very lonely process.

If you spend enough time in online trans spaces, you'll find plenty of other trans people who also feel like their sexuality is wildly yo-yoing around. They went into transition, thinking they knew which people they were attracted to, and they eventually came to realize they barely knew anything at all. In the end, they felt more whole for knowing the truth about themselves, but in the moment, it felt terrifying. Being trans is already taking a huge assumption society has made for you about yourself and saying, "Actually, I think maybe this other thing is true." Now imagine adding on the idea of having to relitigate your own sexuality in a way that might seriously threaten any extant romantic partnerships, which are likely already threatened to some extent by your transness. It's scary!

The truth of the matter is that it is impossible to be honest with yourself about who you are if you are lying to yourself about something so fundamental as your gender. I've long likened this to a house with rotten floorboards, covered up by a truly garish carpet. Once you rip up the carpet, you'll discover all of the additional work that needs to be done to have a house you can actually live in. But first you have to rip up the carpet, and just doing that is a lot of work.

So if you come up to me and say you think you're trans, and you're worried that your sexuality might change if you come out, I will probably tell you that it's unlikely to – but "unlikely" carries a degree of uncertainty to it. Then I would add that if you're asking the question to begin with, there's probably something there worth unpacking, just as there was with those many years of questioning your gender. Every time you learn a new thing about yourself, no matter who you are, it will seem just a little bit scary. Maybe, then, take a moment in the middle of that terror to accept that you will never come to the end of knowing yourself. The sooner you make your peace with that, the sooner you can get on with the business of living a life that feels more like your own.

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Three things: These are some things I've been into this week!

• I don't talk about it all that much, but I semi-regularly play in tabletop RPG campaigns with my good pals at Happy Jacks, usually consisting of around 10 to 12 sessions. Currently, I'm in a Monster of the Week game called "The World Ends Thursday," where I'm playing, basically, Buffy Summers, but now she's a mom, and she's forgotten a lot of what happened to her as a teen. It's a wild group, and it's been a lot of fun for me to play every week. Check it out here.
• In other "Emily plays silly little games" news, I quite enjoy the New York Times' latest silly little game, Connections. It asks you to take 16 words, then group them into four groups of four, and I am pretty good at it. (Also: If you are a movie fan and haven't tried Cine2Nerdle, you should!)
• This morning, I woke up, and my wife launched into a story she'd read on Reddit about someone's birds disappearing. I was so confused as to why she was suddenly talking to me about birds, as, again, we had just gotten up, so it all kind of rolled off of me. But it is a pretty weird story. Missing birds! (Bonus Reddit post: Grimace! The burglar!)

This week's reading music: "Zorbing" by Stornoway

Next time: I feel like writing about writing, so if there's anything you're curious about writing-wise, either reply to the email version of this newsletter or post a comment! (Only paid subscribers can comment.)

Also possibly next time: If I somehow score LA Eras tour tickets, I am absolutely writing about that. (Fear not, readers: I already saw the tour in NY, so if it doesn't happen in LA, I will be fine.)