I'm not sure if I'm a lesbian or not.

[aesop]

First time here, I apologise if I'm doing anything the wrong way.


Firstly, to avoid any confusion, I'll specify I am transmasc. Have been for quite a lot of years, that's the one thing I'm sure about being.

I've recently started to question being lesbian due to a lot of lesbian stories resonating with me, in particular a thread on compulsive heterosexuality I found here.

I've always identified as bisexual ever since I was little, but I've had only horrible experiences with men, anything they did gave me the ick and the only reason I stayed was because I found them to be physically attractive and I liked the attention.

Male validation is something I always craved, but when I get it I start despising the man who's providing it. Men often disgust and irk me.

Every girl I've been in love with has drained me. Whenever I love a girl she occupies my thoughts all day and makes me feel things a man could never make me feel. I get genuinely obsessed with the girls I fall in love with and want to do all the things someone would do with a girlfriend.

I haven't had many experiences with dating girls, as they've always broke up with me after a week. But I've never felt uncomfortable with them, I liked dating them. My longest relationship with a girl lasted a few months, I ended it personally just because I was in a bad place mentally and didn't want to make her suffer. I still talk to her and like her a lot.

I have sexual fantasies about girls. Both trans girls and cis girls, feminine and masculine girls, I don't make a difference. But I also fantasise about men, specifically about boy x boy content, and I've recently started to wonder if I really like it or if it's just because of my hyperfixation on BL. I often use one of the characters as self-insert, so I'm not sure of anything anymore.

The main thing stopping me from calling myself a lesbian is my boyfriend. I'm paranoid I'm coming off as transphobic with this, he is a trans man and despite his femininity I see him 100% as a boy, but still feel like I'm deeply in love with him. I've been for about 2 years.

I don't know what else to say. This is probably really messy, I apologise.

[Heather]

Hey there, aesop.

Generally, what "lesbian" means to most people is someone who themselves identifies as a woman who primarily finds themselves attracted to other people who do. With you being transmasculine, and your only current partner also being transmasculine, that doesn't feel like an identity or a word for a sexual identity to me that probably will feel like a fit to you?

BUT.

Really, what words we use to identify our sexual selves are up to us and about what feels right for us. It's not for me or anyone else to assign you an identity or validate yours like a person validates a parking ticket. That's for you to decide for yourself. And often the only way we find out which ones are a good fit for ourselves are by living with them and finding out how they feel, then adapting, editing or starting with something totally different as or when need be. Changes in our lives, our own identities, our relationships and how we experience attraction that can happen throughout life can also facilitate a change.

(That said, given what lesbian usually means, I do think it would do your boyfriend a kindness to talk to him about this if you're leaning to use that term so they don't feel kind of misgendered by default, or like you are saying you are not into them or their masculinity anymore. You two also may need to have an in-depth conversation about how to identify that way to others without it being something that causes them to misgender him.)

I do also want to offer you another option if you want one word as shorthand for the identity feelings and thoughts you've described here and that's "questioning." IMHO, when you have thought so hard like this and nothing feels like it fits, it's often because we just don't know what is yet, and that's what questioning is, a period of not knowing and also doing some thinking or exploring to try and find out. It sounds to me like there's a lot of thinking happening here, and less so a lot of just feeling and seeing what comes to you over time. No one has to have a word for their sexuality when they aren't sure what the words that work for them are. We can all always say, whenever that's true for us, that we're questioning, or that we just don't know right now.