Where are all my transhet sisters?
I love the queer community and I feel like the more I work on myself, the less accepted I will be as a queer person.
For example, I joined a queer friend-finding app recently which didn’t have an option to label myself heterosexual. At first I went stealth and didn’t list my sexuality, and I got lesbians calling me a tease. I made a public post about being transhet and I mostly got messages from weird cis men.
I’m going to look for friends only under the trans umbrella for now, online and irl.
To that end: I like pop music, knitting, and politics. Please tell me your favorite online communities and people to follow!
It’s hard. It’s something I struggled with for a long time. It felt like I had finally got to the point where I could accept and celebrate my queer identity, only to effectively lose it a couple of years later.
I’m panromantic, but heterosexual, and for a long time, I used the labels straight and transhet, as a way of trying to push back against the whole “a guy dating a trans woman is gay” thing, but eventually, I let go of the label, because I just couldn’t deal with the assumptions people made about my queerness. These days I just call myself queer.
Similarly, I felt invisible when I was out in public with my boyfriend. We both just looked like a regular cishet couple. I’d spent most of my life telling myself that’s what I wanted, only to discover it really isn’t what I wanted, because it erased another part of me that was important. It felt like stepping out of one closet and in to another.
Unfortunately, I don’t know what the answer is. At the moment, I’m in a poly relationship with another woman and an enby, so my queerness is right there on display, but when I was in mono relationships with men, it was hard to lose it.
That’s exactly how I feel! I think it’s compounded by living in a rural area. I want to fit in not only because that’s my childhood dream but also for a sense of safety. I’m not sure what the answer is either. Maybe this is just a stage of transitioning or maybe it’s possible to form strong bonds with allies, eventually, the way it seemed to feel easier with queer people before. I just know that I feel lonely at the moment and the queer community as a whole has seemed more distant to me.