CW: slurs

hugely! before I figured out my gender stuff, and I was living as a girl, I was out as "pansexual" (something I'm not really) and exclusively dated girls or femme nonbinary ppl. although I was openly attracted to men + had crushes on boys my age, I couldn't and wouldn't do heterosexuality. and I tried to use the fact that I dated girls to align myself more with (straight) guys, trying to convince them I was just like them. in a way, my sexuality at the time was the closest I could get to expressing my gender.

however, in a way that is somewhat contradictory (because I feared/abhorred heterosexuality), being with girls always felt "straight" for me, and my attraction to men always felt "gay". eventually I realized this was because i didnt feel sexual attraction to girls, but it did feel normal for me to be in relationships with them.

might also be worth mentioning that I grew up in a household that was very hostile to gay men, but had none of that hostility toward gay women. so I internalized a lot of that in some painful ways, and I believe that kept me in a place where my way of expressing my masculinity was by being a butch-ish woman dating femmes.

anyway, I was nonbinary for a while, and that was tricky, and it opened a lot of doors, but it was also the time when I was performing femininity the most. that's something that I still havent quite figured the reasons for tbh

when I did start to transition to male, the fact that my attraction to men always felt very gay to me was a strong indicator that this was the right path. other things, like wanting a deeper voice, wanting body hair, wanting a change in sexual function, the fact that I always played boy's roles in drama class, etc. also helped confirm for myself that I was trans. and what happened was, the more male I felt, the more I wanted to date men exclusively (allowing also for nonbinary people who have a strong current of boy and/or fag in their gender).

I consider myself a gay-to-gay transitioner because of all this, and for me I think that no matter what, I need to be gay. I have some fleeting attraction to women, but I would be terrified to actually have sex with a woman at this point in my life, because it would feel too heterosexual and I would completely forget what to do.