What I Am

For me I find it amusing how so many people don’t get me being attracted to women. I get this blank stare which is usually followed by then why did you transition if you are attracted to women?

I’m a lesbian and a transgender woman—and those two aren’t mutually exclusive
The Daily Dot
By Ana Valens
January 12, 2018

It was sometime during my first half-dozen dates with my girlfriend when I first became conscious of my body as a queer one. We would hold hands, walking through Manhattan, cuddling up against one another on the subway. But if it was late at night, our interlocking fingers would separate within seconds. We never knew who we were sharing the streets with when it was dark. Because when you’re a gay woman, signaling your queerness can be an invitation for violence.

I had been thinking what my body meant as a trans body for a long time. I knew I looked like a woman to the rest of the world, and I certainly had the secondary sex characteristics to prove it. But I felt caught in an endless feedback loop: knowing my body was a woman’s body but still struggling to fully accept myself as a woman.

Thinking of my body and my identity as a “lesbian” strangely helped me to solidify my relationship with my womanhood. During those first few months of dating my girlfriend, I really began to own the term. There was the fact that I was seen as a lesbian, much to the approval of other queer people who walked past us on the street. Then there was the fact that I was a trans woman in a relationship with a trans woman; it didn’t matter whether I had breasts or a penis or looked feminine from hormone replacement therapy. I was a lesbian. We were queer women. We knew each other’s bodies for women’s bodies.

But for some trans women, calling themselves a lesbian remains an uphill battle. And even now, I still struggle to accept that I can be both a transgender woman and queer. Sometimes, it feels like “lesbian” isn’t my word to use.

I hang out with a lot of lesbians and as far as I know they are accepting… but would they date a trans woman? That is the question.

This is because lesbian women are primarily seen as attracted to cisgender women. The L Word shows lesbianism as purely cisgender, more often than not shrugging at trans experiences, and indie faves like Blue Is the Warmest Color put a spotlight on cisgender lesbians while completely avoiding trans ones altogether. Sometimes, it’s even cisgender lesbians themselves who are pushing the point of view.

“I am a lesbian who doesn’t want to date trans women,” one Reddit user wrote on on r/offmychest, a subreddit for anonymous confessions. “If you’re pre/non-op, you have a penis, and I’m not into penises. If you’re pop-op, you have a neovagina, which is not, in my eyes, identical to a natal vagina.”

That is the thing, I know that they accept me as trans but do they accept me as a woman? That is the million dollar question.