Not Bi After All?

You may have noticed that my About Me page now says I'm a lesbian instead of bisexual like it did before (or you might not've). If you're confused about that, here's a whole post about it.

I wasn't expecting this to be the subject of my first blog post, but it appears that I've fallen down the "bi to lesbian" pipeline many sapphic women go through in their lives. Mainly a cis female phenomenon, due to heteronormativity indoctrinating them from early childhood into believing they should be attracted to males and only males simply because they're female, but it can happen to trans women too. I'm a surprise example.

This is a complicated thing for me as a trans woman who believed she was bi for nearly half her life, with heteronormativity telling me that I'm supposed to like women as a "male" before my eggshell cracked. (Gosh, loving women in a gay way is a wonderful and significant thing that's really a whole topic of its own, but I digress.)

To give you the short(ish) version of it, when I was 15 (and still deluded by society into thinking that I was male), I "realized" I was bi. Throughout the years I experienced shallow attraction towards men, mostly fictional (and usually furry) men, and I often felt the need to 'force' myself feel the attraction to men which came naturally towards women.

I was into the idea of being intimate with a man as a woman... but whenever I thought of actually being with a real, physical man, I felt repulsed, barring a couple exceptions. Whenever I envisioned myself settling down with someone, the person in my fantasies was always a woman, and when I tried to insert a man into her place, I felt disheartened and like I'd be "settling for him" and "missing out on experiencing love with a woman", which made me feel a picky and a little guilty for "not giving men enough of a chance".

I thought this was internalized homophobia prior to my transition, and afterwards I just figured I was being picky and maybe experiencing the ghost of internalized male homophobia's past. But after years of trying to force attraction to men, I've grown tired of it.

With that realization, I've come to the conclusion that the "bi" label no longer fits me, and never really has honestly. Which I feel like a fraud for, but at the same time just calling myself a lesbian fits better right now and it feels good to call myself that.

So yeah, I'm a lesbian.