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Building on this post: something I've been thinking about a lot recently is that a lot of other people (both cis and trans) tend to assume that trans lesbians' experiences and sexuality are roughly continuous with those of straight men. This is wrong! https://twitter.com/QueerGirlEmilie/status/1215734983840673793
I get the thinking. Trans girls grow up falsely believing they're guys, and so are assumed/expected/raised to experienced and express normative heterosexual attraction to women. If you're a trans lesbian, you transition, but you're still into women. So it's the same, right? No
Sometimes there's some lowkey transphobia going on here so it's worth just ponting out: trans women are women, trans lesbians are lesbian women. Not straight men on HRT. Lesbian women. But I think there's also just a lot of misunderstanding going on
So let's talk details. To begin with, it's worth pointing out that most trans lesbians don't exactly experience normative heterosexual attraction to women in the same way that cishet men do. Dysphoria and confused gender feelings mess with that a whole lot
Before I transitioned, just the thought of doing any sexual or romantic with a girl made me nauseous, because doing that would feel like I was adopting a masculine role - the role of the boyfriend, the male lover - and that kicked my latent dysphoria into overdrive
Similarly, for many years before I ever contemplated transition I was completely in love with all kinds of lesbian fiction - yuri manga, lesbian movies, lesbian characters in video games etc. Not because I found it titallating but because I wanted that. i wanted to be that
Another thing is, I didn't always identify as a lesbian or a straight guy! A lot of people, including honestly a lot of other trans girls, tend to assume that if you're a trans lesbian, you must have absolutely no romantic or sexual experience with men. This is so weird
Before I transitioned, and for a considerable time after, I identified as bisexual. I'm not really sure I was ever truly into guys, but feeling some level of attraction to guys and having sex with guys made me feel a lot less like a gross men. Gender and sexuality are weird
So it's really not true that I was experiencing the world as a straight guy and then just seamlessly slipped into a different gender role and became a trans lesbian. It was a lot more messy than that, and the same is true of the vast majority of trans lesbians I know
Another aspect of this is, as Emilie mentions, compulsory heterosexuality, which is the expectation that girls will be attracted to men and that they need to perform and engage with this attraction in order to be accepted as women
When I first transitioned, my family and friends assumed I was going to be solely or primarily interested in men. Every mainstream cultural message I'd ever absorbed about women (including trans women) told me I needed to be into men
The first trans feminine community I entered into treated attraction to men as the default and trans women who weren't into men were generally treated with a level of scepticism. So for a while I just kept desperately convincing myself I was into guys, even though I knew I wasn't
The medical gatekeeping around trans compulsory heterosexuality is also extremely real, certainly in the UK. I've heard a lot of stories about trans lesbians being denied gender-affirming treatmen specifically because they are lesbians
Many trans healthcare systems operate on a really really crude system where a cis doctor asks you a bunch of stuff like 'what toys did you play with as a child?' to see if you match up well enough with what a woman is "supposed to be". And women are "supposed to be" into men
So, there's a lot of internal and external pressure faced by trans lesbians to disavow their own lesbianism and experience attraction to men. This is nothing like what any straight man experiences, but it is a whole lot like what cis lesbians experience!
One last thing is, the way it feels to be a trans lesbian experiencing attraction, sex and romance to other women. It doesn't feel like cishet attraction. It's not burdened by any of those weird, crude expectations. I don't recognize any of that in my life
What I do recognize is lesbian experiences of sex, attraction and romance. Over the years, lesbians have owned and used a lot of terms and paradigms to refer to how we experience these things. Top, bottom. Femme, butch. Stone, pillow. And so much more. That stuff is what I feel
When I read cishet experiences of their sexuality, I feel nothing but alienation. When I read lesbian experiences, they resonate with me deeply and I recongize those things in how I experience my sexuality with the people I love and am attracted to
It's simply not the same. Not even close. As Nire says here there are even physiological factors. Hormones affect how you feel things and how you want to have sex. Trans women's bodies aren't like men's bodies https://twitter.com/NireBryce/status/1216109880584523776
I don't know any trans lesbians who just comfortably slipped into their lesbianism as a natural extension of having lived as a straight guy and then having transitioned. That doesn't really happen and the idea of it is crude, simplistic and often pretty transphobic
But I know a lot of trans lesbians who had to fight hard for their lesbianism, both against internal forces of alienation, confusion and internalized expectation and external forced of compulsion and invalidation
And through that fight, their love still remains tender and sapphic and powerful and I love my trans lesbian sisters above all else
I should probably acknowledge that obviously there are differences between what cis and trans lesbians experience. But in my experiences those differences are pretty superficial and they only serve to highlight the fact that we're all lesbians
Anyway this is just some thoughts but if I was gonna give this thread a point it would be that I really, really need to stop catching people talking like trans lesbians are just straight guys painted pink. Knock that shit off, doesn't matter who you are
