#down if any tx girlies ever want to get together

[forgottenflowerrr]

I love all the beautiful crazy women on this app. 🫶🫶🫶 truly truly never change.

[m-aira]

On Being a Fake Queer

trigger warnings: childhood sexual assault, q slur

I have a lot of complicated feelings about being queer, the first being that most of the time, I can’t shake the feeling that I may be faking it. For the record, I identify as a Crazy, fat, nonbinary agender individual; I was assigned female at birth, and socialized as a girl - as such, I will be using feminine pronouns when referring to my past.

Let’s back up.

I am a survivor of childhood sexual assault. Although I am still learning how to cope with this, it permeates nearly everything I do in my daily life, how my brain functions, etc. I was assaulted by another little girl, and growing up, this confused the hell out of me, and led me to believe that anything but compulsory heterosexuality was Bad. When I was 11, I started using the internet, and it was here that I met my first lesbian couple. We would all hang out on Palace, they were in a long-distance relationship. I confided in one of them that I had been abused by another girl, and that’s why I felt weird about their relationship, but that I was really trying to wrap my head around it. She understood, and didn’t make me feel like a freak. Around this time, I also started masturbating for the first time, primarily to images of women. So all in all, it was a very confusing, very queer time for young me.

From a very young age, I was considered a tomboy. I remember very clearly getting a “skater” haircut for the first day of 5th grade (something that could easily be hidden underneath a helmet, although I didn’t skate). I was shopping in the boy’s section at stores, wearing my dad’s old hand-me-downs, and generally looked like a little boy. On the first day, our teacher has us line up, separated by gender. I was in line with the girls. My teacher said to me, “I think you’re in the wrong line.” Now, as I am older and far removed from the situation, I look back on it and think, “I probably could have sued that fucker.” Regardless, it didn’t do anything but fuel my confusing feelings about gender - I wanted to look like a boy, but still do traditionally “girly” things. At the time, my parents made me feel like I couldn’t have it both ways, and I was starting puberty, so I had to make a decision; I feel like this decision was mostly forced on me, but that’s neither here nor there right now, it simply is.

Beginning in junior high, I started having crushes on my female friends, but I was never sure if it meant I wanted to be like them, or if I wanted to be with them. I stifled all of these feelings and maintained that I was a heterosexual female. I started hanging out with a group of punk girls, and wanted to emulate them so badly. It was around this time that I also started reading the manga Ranma 1/2, where, if I remember correctly, the main character was able to swap genders (and turn into a panda?) depending on what temperature of water they were in. I thought that was super cool, and wished that I could do the same. This was also around the time when kids were using “gay” and “queer” as insults, and so I was definitely thinking “Nope, I am definitely a Straight Girl, no queer feelings here, that would be Bad.”

I grew my hair out and played the part all throughout high school. I still got crushes on girls, and wanted to be a boy sometimes, but I shut these feelings out as often as I could. 

Fast forward to my third year of college, when I finally moved out of my parents’ house and onto campus at San Francisco State. It was here that I really started exploring my sexuality and gender, and by that I mean I tried to look androgynous as possible, and made out with a lot of cishet dudes. I stopped talking to a lot of my high school friends, who were still using the f slur, q slur, and “gay” as insults; I started getting into social justice, going to bars, and meeting cute girls. I wasn’t identifying as queer yet, but I remember my first “open” crush on a girl - she was a friend of a friend that I had met at a bar for my friend’s birthday. We drank together. She took me outside and we smoked a bowl together. We were with each other the whole night, and I drunkenly confided in my best friend that I thought this girl was really cute, and to ask our friend if maybe she was bi? Turns out she was, but I didn’t find out til later when I was too chickenshit and closeted to do anything about it.

During my fourth year of college, some friends and I drove up to Portland for a weekend. It was there that I met the first nonbinary person that I’d have a crush on. We started talking after I got back to San Francisco, and I found out they lived in Santa Cruz, and I thought, “how convenient?” We went on one date, and I was too afraid to cuddle with them or show any sort of affection while we watched a movie in their room. My skin felt on fire, which I hadn’t felt in some time, and I mostly tied to the abuse; this, of course, concerned me. I felt wrong and bad and needed to shake those feelings. Because I didn’t know how to pursue anyone, I waited for them to pursue me. This didn’t work out the way I wanted it to, but around the same time, I started going on dates with a really cute cishet guy. I ended up making it “official” with him, and we’ve been dating since June of 2013, so a year after I graduated.

Around December of 2013, a lot of the confused gender feelings and mentally ill feelings and queer feelings all came rushing back to me. I would take days off of work, telling my boss I was sick, and just sit in the dark and cry all day. Something was off. Femaleness didn’t resonate with me anymore, and it was hitting me hard. However, even though I was Openly Queer at this point, I was still in what appeared to be a heterosexual relationship with a cisgender man. I remember very clearly making a tumblr post that said “I don’t know what I am, but I don’t think I’m a girl,” and showing it to him as we laid on my fold out couch in the living room. I started crying. He held me until I stopped, and then held me some more. He told me things were going to be alright. A few weeks later, after ruminating on it some more, I had accepted that I did not identify within the gender binary - I was now other. I made a Facebook status proclaiming this, filtered to a select amount of people who I believed would get it; some did, some didn’t, and I felt the need to explain myself, so I did. In January of 2014, my boyfriend and I traveled to Austin, TX, where he struggled with my new pronouns as I struggled with a virus and the worst case of dysphoria I think I’ve ever had. It was my first period after I had acknowledged my identity outside of being a woman, and it hit me hard.

Eventually, my boyfriend came around on the pronouns. But people still viewed us as a straight man and a straight woman in a straight relationship, doing straight people stuff. This made me feel, and still often makes me feel, invalidated in my queer identity. I’m much more open about my pronouns and gender identity now than I was then, but I still can’t shake the feeling that maybe, just maybe, I’m faking it. I’m a fake queer. I’m not queer enough to hang with the Actually Queer folks, and I’m too queer to hang with the straight folks. I walk a weird line between not talking about my gender with my parents or at work, and being very open about it in social situations. I still just feel weird about it. I have never been in a relationship with anyone but a cishet man, I have never been in love with anyone but a cishet man, I have never kissed or had sex with anyone but a cis man. So I must be straight, right? No!

The moral of this really long-winded diatribe is to never let someone else’s view of queerness shape who you know you are. You are queer enough. You are nonbinary enough. You can move past your trauma and into somewhere open and understanding. You are not a fake queer, even if you feel like you don’t fit into a socially accepted queer narrative. And you don’t even need to identify as queer if that makes you uncomfortable. “Not-straight” is enough!

My name is Maira, and I am not a fake queer.