LGBT Blogging Challenge Day 1

Hey everybody! As I’ve been running out of ideas for what to post lately, I’m turning to the 30-Day LGBT Blogging Challenge. I want to start writing on a regular basis rather than just posting some old pieces and rants I wrote a while ago, like I’ve been doing sometimes lately. I am also interested in trying a more traditional blogging format, rather than just personal rants, to see if that brings in a wider audience.

So here’s the first prompt for the LGBT Blogging Challenge. (I looked for autistic and mental health-related blogging challenges too, but I didn’t find any. Maybe I’ll write some myself.) It says “Day 1,” but I probably won’t be posting these every day. I’ll try to keep it to at least once a week.

Day 1 – Your sexual orientation or gender identity. Be creative in your definition.

My identity is a weird thing. I identify as a gay guy, but I’m also genderfluid, in a way, and I don’t know how to explain that to people. I am predominantly attracted to men and to people who are perceived as men by the world, and that doesn’t change. But my gender tends to fluctuate between “boy” and “pretty boy” and “boy-ish person who isn’t really sure what the fuck is going on with this gender business anyway.” It’s easiest to just say I’m male on forms asking for my gender. A lot of the time it even feels right for me to say I’m male. But other times it feels like I’m rounding up, or like it shouldn’t even matter and I shouldn’t have to pick one anyway.

And other times I feel similarly to DMAB people I’ve known, who say that they only feel male in a strictly biological sense, and gender is just weird. Sometimes I only feel male in a biological sense, which doesn’t necessarily make sense for me as a DFAB person who spent a lot of time and money in order to be perceived as male. Why would I go to all that trouble only to feel really reluctant about the way people are perceiving me? And I am especially reluctant to act like gender is biological at all, as though there’s always a strict division between male and female and there’s really such a thing as being “biologically male” when bodies are so infinitely varied. But my gut feeling about myself is that I am “biologically male,” whatever the hell that means.

Transmasculine usually feels like an accurate label for me. So does trans guy, or trans boy. I feel weird being called a trans man (or transman; don’t know why there’s a space sometimes and not other times). I associate that term with people like Aydian Dowling and Buck Angel: these super buff, very binary men who would never ever put on eyeliner. I identify way more with Gerard Way than I do with either of those guys. I feel a lot more fluid than they seem to be.

My gender is weird and not always easily defined, but my sexuality doesn’t seem to fluctuate much lately. I just…like boys, a lot. This would probably come as a surprise to a lot of people in my life, because my first queer identity was as a gay girl. Over time, I kept on fluctuating between calling myself gay and bisexual, before finally realizing that I was trans, so being a dyke or a bi girl wasn’t even a possibility for me after all. Some time after that, I realized that I was autistic, which was why I had always had a really hard time understanding my own feelings. No one ever taught me how to process my feelings as an autistic person, and I didn’t know what the difference was between romantic, sexual, and aesthetic attraction. Eventually, I figured out that my attraction to women was predominantly aesthetic, and that when I wasn’t feeling horrible and dysphoric, I was deeply attracted to men, romantically and sexually.

So here I am, a gay boyperson trying to figure out how to tell people in my life that I am not nearly as attracted to women as I once told them I was. I guess I don’t need to tell them, and if I do, I can just make a Facebook announcement like everyone else. But it feels weird all the same to know that some people see me as something I’m not, and all because of something I told them years ago. But what if I make an announcement about this and then change my mind again years later?

I don’t know. I don’t feel like I’m going to change my mind. I guess even if I do, I shouldn’t base my decisions on the opinions of someone who doesn’t understand that sexuality is fluid and I have a right to change and be confusing. So in conclusion, my current identity is a genderfluid gay boy-type person, but I reserve the right to change it should I feel so inclined.