Last night I attended a “masculinity group” organized by one of the bigger local non-profits that supports the LGBTQ+ community (& I am specifically using the reduced/reductive acronym “LGBTQ+” here, rather than the more expansive/inclusive acronym “LGBTQIA+”, because I believe that this organization, despite all the good it does, still has great shortcomings towards “I” & “A+” people).
Only half a dozen people attended the affinity group last night, all of us transmasculine. And the overall atmosphere was very welcoming and comfortable. It was the first time I had ever been in a space with only transmasc persons and it felt really nice.
However, an incident occurred that irritated me and hurt me deeply. One of the people in the group said, “before coming out as transmasc I was, or thought I was, a lesbian, like I think all of us here”.
While I know many transmasc people did indeed “live as lesbians” in their “life prior to transition”, the above blanket statement contains two assumptions which are very harmful to me.
The first is the blatant, explicit assumption that every transmasc person in the room last night had been, or identified as, a lesbian before coming into their transmasculine identity — which is probably the expression of an even broader (& wrong) assumption that all transmasculine people lived or identified as lesbians before coming into their transmasc identity.
The second, less explicit but equally painful, is that everyone in the room was allosexual — which is also part of a deeper and more wide-spread (& wrong) assumption that we are all allosexual & alloromatic.
Both of these assumptions are wrong, and they hurt me and anger me very deeply. The moment those words came out of the other person’s mouth, I felt totally alienated last night — alienated, invalidated, and invisible within what should be “my own community”, what should be a safe and inclusive space for me.
I am a non-binary transmasculine aro ace gay boy. I never in my life identified as a lesbian and hardly ever was in lesbian circles (except for the rare occasions in which I hung out with my oldest friend & her soccer-friends, who were mostly lesbians). And on top of not being, and never having been, a lesbian, I don’t even experience sexual or romantic attraction toward any gender.
I like being around guys, including cis-guys (which also feels like a “sin” in most queer circles outside of the gay communities), and I enjoy different types of intimacy with them but I’m neither sexually or romantically attracted to them — nor to anyone else.
Moments like last night’s blanket statement dripping with assumptions are painful and infuriating, and they remind me of how much work still remains to be done even within “our own communities”…
The Little Prince and the Fox 