Coming Out as Nonbinary Helped Me Understand My Attraction to Men
Before I realized I was nonbinary I was pretty sure I was a lesbian. I knew that at that point I was only really interested in dating women and nonbinary people. I knew that I had dated and been attracted to men in the past but was trying to sift through those feelings and figure out which were genuine and which were comphet rearing its ugly head. I knew that the phrase “compulsory heterosexuality” didn’t feel right for me. I had loved my ex and been genuinely attracted to him. None of it had felt compulsory to me. But I knew, for certain, that I was not a “woman who is attracted to men”. I continued to identify as queer while quietly debating if I was a lesbian and if I could or should claim that label.
It turns out that the error in my thinking wasn’t my attraction to men. It was that I’m not a woman.
There is no one lightbulb moment in my coming out story, not when I came out as queer at 19 or nonbinary at 25. Both times it was a collection of small things that made me open that door- stories from friends, media, memes (yes memes), and reflecting on my life and my experiences. Once I opened that door to queerness or transness in my own mind even more things began to make sense. My sexuality was one of those things that helped me open the door to transness. I am attracted to men, but my attraction to them is not the way a woman is attracted to a man. It is necessarily queer, because my gender is also queer. Once I realized that, something about myself clicked into place.
This is something I sometimes have a hard time expressing, because I don’t want to imply that, for example, bi women are experiencing “straight” attraction to men. Everyone’s relationship to queerness is their own and that’s not a fair generalization to make. But they are experiencing being a woman attracted to a man, which I am not. It can also be hard to talk about this because I find myself in a lot of spaces with cis women who joke about how much they hate men. Let me be clear- I’m not here to defend cishet men. I just wonder if our conversations don’t have the unintentional side effect of further alienating trans men and any trans/nonbinary people who are read in public spaces as “men”. (Obviously in an ideal world, our gender would not be assumed by our appearance. But for nonbinary folks the truth is that in public, at the grocery store, in line at the gas station, we are seen as man or woman). It’s the same reason that “women and nonbinary people” is not the “safe space” many people assume it to be. Who is that space excluding, both explicitly or implicitly, who is also marginalized due to their gender?
This is starting to read like a long-winded and personal defense of being attracted to men, which maybe it is. I don’t know. What I do know is that when I think about who I want to date now, other trans people are at the top of the list. I am hesitant to pursue dating cis men, either in person or on “the apps”, in large part because of the fact that I don’t want them to be attracted to me as a woman. I’m already painfully aware that most people see me as a woman, even after top surgery. I see it every time a stranger calls me ma’am or someone misgenders me or I go into the women’s bathroom. I guess there’s still a part of me that doesn’t think a cis man could ever understand my gender enough to see me as anything other than a woman-lite in a romantic relationship. The fact that I don’t seem to have the same assumption about cis women is probably something for me to unpack later on. That is, in so many ways, what is so magical about t4t relationships- having another person who has personal experience with the expansive, confusing, difficult, exhilarating ways gender can work.
It never ceases to amaze me the ways my sexuality and gender relate to each other. It’s one of the reasons I like the term “genderqueer” so much. Sometimes in our haste to remind people that sexuality and gender are different things, we divorce them entirely. Sometimes, in my experience, they tangle together, they push and expand each other and bleed over into every other aspect of life. And sometimes it’s enough to not try to untangle that web and just move on with my day.
