Trans Twitter Topics

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!

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

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

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

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

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