A Brief History of a Trans Dyke
By: Kay Timmons
Tags: Lesbian, Transgender

I came out as transgender in the Spring of 2016 after a decade and a half of struggling with my identity. The first time I remember questioning my gender was when I was in kindergarten or early grade school. I put on a skirt belonging to my older sister, thinking it was a pair of shorts, and was promptly ridiculed by my father. I thought the rule that boys weren’t allowed to wear skirts was stupid, and I started to wonder if I was even a boy. The 1990s and early 2000s were a wildly transmisogynistic era in American media. Sitcoms and daytime talk shows were rife with trans women being the butt of cruel jokes. I watched plenty of both due to being a latchkey kid. This also gave me plenty of opportunity to experiment with my sister’s clothing, a secret I guarded closely for years. As a teenager I leaned heavily into performative masculinity. I grew a beard, piled on muscle, and was generally an obnoxious bastard. I again started to question my identity as a teenager, this time latching on to the label of genderqueer, which in the mid-late 2000s was the dominant term for nonbinary people. I kept this identity entirely repressed until I decided to come out.

I finally started to learn about how people work in college. Sociology, psychology, and anthropology opened my eyes to things not being as black and white as mainstream culture had made them out to be. I loved learning about people, especially about sex, sexuality, and gender. I screwed around and dabbled at a community college for a few years before transferring to a rather esteemed public school. My final awakening came that fall. I was living on campus in a suite, and rooming together with five dudes was incredibly unpleasant. One night I was kept up sobbing as I finally accepted my identity, not as a man but as . . . something else. I tried to repress it again. I developed an extremely unhealthy relationship with alcohol, dropped out, and moved back home. The next five or six months were a hellish mash up of day drinking depression mixed with copious amounts of caffeine to keep me from passing out. I even tried to join the damn navy in a last ditch effort to, I don’t know, “fix” myself.

I didn’t think I could be trans. I mean, I didn’t even like men. The only times I had seen trans women were in grimy and exploitative settings. Through television, as I mentioned before, or through pornography. I had spent years sublimating my own feelings about gender into lust. I had only seen trans women be the butt of a joke or used as sex objects by men, and that made a serious and lasting impact on me. I spent so long in the closet thanks in large part to the fact that I don’t like men. I tried to like men. For years I thought it was the only way to be trans. I had heard so much about Harry Benjamin’s typology this and Blanchards typology that and I internalized it. I had been indoctrinated into the belief that the only real transfemininity is predicated on making itself sexually accessible to men. The first year and a half after I came out I fluctuated between identifying as a lesbian or bisexual. Then I downloaded Grindr.

I had been on other dating apps with men of course but had never really been interested. I was only on Grindr for a day, and might I say, men are disgusting creatures. I had of course been hit on in real life but the sheer brazenness that men operate with over the internet when they can send pictures was the shock I finally needed to cement my identity as a lesbian. The last lingering shreds of the very unique kind of compulsory heterosexuality that affects transfeminine people were held together mostly by the quite frankly fetishistic obsession with twinks and “femboys” in “mainstream” transfeminine culture. I thought that I could be into a man if only he looked like a woman. Bitch please. When I realized that people into men are actually enthusiastically into them it was like a lightbulb went on in my head. People that are sexually attracted to men are actually enthusiastically into them. There’s no grudging acceptance. It’s not something that you just tolerate, and no, you can’t be both bi and a lesbian.

I am so much happier after accepting myself. Lesbianism is a beautiful sexuality with a unique and vibrant culture. I love my lesbian siblings for opening my eyes and for being such good friends (and lovers). I was finally able to express my sexuality in the way that I wanted. Compulsory heterosexuality sees us as passive and submissive objects intended for the use of men. I’m anything but those things, and take great pride in being a sexual being removed from the pervasive gaze of men. I found a home with the uniqueness of lesbian gender identities. I now consider my gender and sexuality to be one and the same. I am a lesbian, pure and simple.