Before I Came Out as Trans Most of My Relationships Were A Lie

They wanted romance but all I really wanted was friendship

Photo by Monstera Production (modified by author)

Sometimes I envy the trans folks who have had such a strong awareness of their gender identity from a young age.

I suppressed my gender identity for so long without even realising it. There were a few moments of questioning in my childhood and teens, but I quickly pushed those confusing thoughts away, ignoring them for years.

I didn’t come out until my early 30s.

I wonder what my life could have been like had I had the awareness and the confidence to come out when I was younger. But there were no role models, no real discussions of trans or gender-nonconforming people for me to learn from – no way to understand myself.

Instead, the only glimpses of transness I ever saw were transphobic tropes in movies or gawkish late-night documentaries examining some poor woman’s transition as if probing alien life. No wonder I subconsciously suppressed my identity: society gave me all the signs that I should, that being trans was neither acceptable nor ‘normal’.

I think the way I suppressed my identity was also partly due to being autistic and having ADHD – the former being another thing I didn’t learn about myself until I was much older. I think my gender identity just became another thing to ‘mask’ along with my autistic traits and the aspects of my ADHD which only ever seemed to upset others.

Being a neuroqueer kid growing up in an overwhelmingly (in both the quantitative and emotional senses of the word) straight, cis, neurotypical society sucked.

But even with all that masking, there were signs of my true gender identity. Behaviours I engaged in without even realising what I was doing, let alone why.

One of these things was the nature of many of my ‘romantic’ relationships – I write it like that because really, many of them weren’t romantic at all. Not for me at least. It’s something I feel guilty about to this day, though now I at least have some understanding of why this was the case.

Not as she/they appear

As a teen, people thought I was a straight cis boy – and really, so did I – and so as soon as I hit puberty there was an assumption that any interaction I had with a girl was necessarily about romance or sex. This wasn’t just an expectation of my male friends, but one that girls, and many adults imposed on me as well.

Society’s norm of compulsory heterosexuality or ‘comphet’ — the assumption that everyone is cisgender and heterosexual, and all the norms of gendered sexuality that assumption entails — said so.

As a teen, I often found it easier to talk to girls than boys and usually did so with zero romantic or sexual motivations. When others would tease me afterwards, or on the couple of occasions when a girl would suddenly kiss me or indicate they wanted something more than conversation, I was utterly bewildered.

It seemed I could no longer just be friends with a girl without it being about dating; comphet said so – everyone said so.

My experience of comphet and my confusion were shaped by being a subconsciously-closeted trans girl – as well as being both bi/pansexual and on the asexual spectrum, just to make things even more complicated.

The negative feelings I had about certain body parts confused me even further; I now realise that was an aspect of my gender dysphoria which impacts my desire to have sex. At the time it was just another thing I didn’t understand, couldn’t explain, and just learned to put up with and ‘mask’.

And so, like a lot of young people do in the face of peer pressure I just went with it.

I slowly bought into the comphet norm – and the stereotypical expectations of how I should behave if I was a cisgender, heterosexual boy: as if my only interest in interacting with women was for sex.

Of course I wanted a romantic relationship with every girl I got along well with. Of course the only reason I liked talking to girls was because I wanted sex. I was a ‘boy’ after all.

Except I wasn’t.

Peer pressure

With hindsight and a better understanding of myself, I now realise that so many of my ‘romantic’ relationships were really just about fulfilling a continued need for female friendship.

In retrospect it’s obvious. But as a closeted queer teenager – a pretty confusing time in most people’s lives as it is without dealing with all the above – I was clueless.

I often went through the motions of romance and sex (both metaphorically and literally). I even put on a good act of being the typical ‘dominant male’ partner sometimes, like I was supposed to. I occasionally behaved in ways I’m now ashamed of, because I thought that’s how I was supposed to behave.

Other times I was pressured to engage in sexual acts by partners who had no reason to think I wouldn’t want to do those things – because they saw a boy, and all boys want from girls is sex, right?

There’s that comphet again.

It was pressure from my friends and my girlfriend that eventually made me agree to have sex for the first time. I remember male friends literally talking to me as if I was treating my girlfriend badly because I hadn’t yet had sex with her. What kind of man was I? Well, that’s just it – I wasn’t.

I still don’t remember my first time to this day – I had to get blackout drunk to go through with it, to get over the dysphoria and all the other confused feelings I had – or didn’t have.

I had no excuse not to want sex that wouldn’t hurt my girlfriend’s feelings or shatter the illusion that I was a straight cis boy (not a pansexual, asexual trans girl) – I had to maintain the lie for myself as much as for my partner and everyone else.

I wasn’t gay after all — despite often being accused of being gay (and back then, and even often now, it was an accusationin the negative sense) because of certain mannerisms, interests (or lack of appropriate interests), or because when I was younger I preferred the company of girls.

That those things could be a reflection of my gender identity rather than my sexuality wasn’t even a consideration. In cisgender society, the possibility of transgender identity is often rendered culturally unintelligible due to ‘compulsory heterogenderism’ (a social norm which is related to comphet) and the erasure of non-cis identities.

Plus I was attracted to girls — but of course, the idea that I could be attracted to both boys and girls, or people of any gender, wasn’t even something I or others considered; polysexual identities such as bisexuality and pansexuality are sadly often erased in both the straight and gay communities.

Living a lie

And so for years I kept entering into romantic and sexual relationships for the sake of female friendship, leading on my partners, in a sense, and kidding myself at the same time.

So many of those relationships ended ‘out of the blue’ when I just couldn’t pretend anymore, or when I couldn’t understand why things just didn’t feel right. Some of them went on for far too long just to be considered ‘casual’. We imagined futures together – except I couldn’t actually imagine those futures; I never could imagine a future as a man — another sign of my real gender identity I ignored.

That’s what I feel guilty for. I ended up hurting my partners because those relationships were essentially a lie — even though I did love some of those people, just not romantically, not in the same way they loved me.

If I had been out sooner – or, in a parallel universe where I was born a cis woman – could I have had lasting friendships with these girls? I mourn the friendships that could have been – friendships I desperately wanted, even if I didn’t realise it.

I also could have been saved from forcing myself to have friendships with cis het boys. I do have some male friends I appreciate and I’m still close to, but many of my male friendships were really just problematic, toxic relationships I forced myself to endure because I thought I was supposed to.

Many of these ‘friendships’ involved bullying, especially in terms of the abuse I received for displaying any behaviours perceived as feminine or ‘gay’. These were the same people imposing comphet on me. Those ‘friendships’ probably contributed to my being closeted for so long. Only recently have I realised the trauma some of those ‘friends’ have left me with.

The real ones

Thankfully I did have some genuine romantic relationships with women – but really these should have been a wake up call.

Specifically, I’ve had several relationships with lesbians or bi girls that tended to only date women by choice. That is, girls who only went out with other girls both before and after I was in a relationship with them; one of them is literally married to woman now.

I was the anomaly – except, again, I wasn’t.

When people brought it up we would just laugh it off, somewhat confused ourselves. Again, the idea that this could be a sign that my gender identity was something other than male wasn’t a consideration — despite the big queer elephant in the room (this is another example of the compulsory heterogenderism I mentioned above).

But now, years later, it makes so much sense.

Ironically, at least one of these partners used to tease me – and on a few occasions, berated or got angry with me – for being ‘too feminine’ in my speech and mannerisms – for not acting enough like a ‘proper boyfriend’.

These somewhat confusing relationships I had with lesbians weren’t something I had really thought about until I heard the trans femme podcaster Margaret Killjoy talk about similar experiences prior to her coming out as trans on the podcast Stuff Mom Never Told You. Apparently this isn’t an uncommon experience for trans women who are lesbians or bisexual.

And it wasn’t just my actual relationships, but crushes queer women had on me too.

When I came out to a female friend from university that I hadn’t seen in a while, her immediate reaction was “ah, that’s why I had a crush on you”. I had known her as a straight woman, but since we’d last spoken she’d come out as a lesbian.

I was literally the only ‘boy’ she had ever had a crush on. Except, yet again, I wasn’t.

Appreciating what I have now

These days I’m making up for lost time; I’m so grateful for any friendships with women I’m lucky enough to have now.

I cherish the openness, warmth and caring those friendships bring me – and allow me to provide in return. All things I clearly craved in my friendships when I was younger but I couldn’t have because of the queerphobia I internalised.

Most of all I appreciate the very real romantic relationship I have with my current partner, who knows and accepts me as an asexual, pansexual trans woman (even though I wasn’t out to her when we first started dating), and who is patient and thoughtful when it comes to my issues with dysphoria and sex.

If there’s a moral to this story, it’s that my being closeted for so long shows that young queer folks need positive role models and representation that can help them understand themselves and avoid the kind of self-suppression I put myself through for so long — hurting myself and others in the process.

It also highlights the harmful expectations placed on both men and women around gendered behaviours and sex: the way that men are told they can’t have the kind of caring relationships women have with each other, lest they be considered ‘gay’ or ‘not masculine enough’ — as well as enforcing the belief that all women are good for, in terms of cis/het men anyway, is sex.

I understand why I did all that now. Still, I don’t think I’ll ever quite get rid of the guilt for the people I hurt, nor the sense of frustration for the time I wasted pretending to be someone else and the potential friendships that I lost out on having as a result.

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This article was originally published in Prism & Pen