When I first began to seriously realize myself as transgender, it started as an out of body experience. I was doing something I had only ever performed once (with a partner whom I was passionately in love with) and had previously felt an unknown source of unease about. I was acting as a top for anal.
Throughout it my perception of my body as though a camera were on a tripod behind me recording us. Definitely not an affirming thing to which I felt directly connected. It felt voyeuristic and created this gap in my sense of self where sexual orientation no longer was the central question. And before that night I had only ever desired sexual intercourse that, now looking back, expressed potentially both my gender and sexual identity in one.
Vaginal penetration felt pleasurable, especially when I pleased my partner effectively. But my body is no longer feeling up to maintaining this masculine role now that the mask that is slipping. And as you might guess, I am glad to see it slip. Though it has pushed me to wonder, “why not earlier?” I can remember thinking I should have been born a girl since I forever, but I didn’t ever consider how those thoughts connected to my perception of my body. What affixed this false conception of self to me for so long before I finally recognized the dysphoria for what it was?
The crucial question that helped me unravel this, “how did I identify my gender before that night?” Or rather, “how did I conceive of my gender?” What about myself told me that I am a cis male. In actuality nothing did, merely that I had presumed society around me had provided enough “encouragement” to be what my body externally presents as. So when I became sexually active and found what I enjoyed most, I rationalized my unease about what I preferred in bed and how people interacted with my parts as some part of my sexuality.
But I remember feeling embarrassed and a little angry the first time somebody touched my genitals in a sexual manner, and just having no clue why. The first exploration into a reason why was that I was attracted to male-identifying people as well, and that I felt confused about that. So I came out to people in my social circle and my then budding relationship with a woman as bisexual.
While now I identify as pansexual/queer, I think my identification then never included reflection on gender, which could be another good reason for why the term bisexual is problematic for the trans community. Any lens with which I could truly understand myself was only available to me much later on in life, when I actually met other trans people, read books about other people’s experiences, and saw more trans people in the public sphere. Primarily dating a genderqueer person who’s primary partner was also trans was what really allowed me to escape my socially-derived role just enough to get a better view of my own identity, as it was the most personal method for exploring my own unexamined notions.
Now, one of the ideas I have seen posed and considered myself is that gender is itself a spectrum. No one person commands all presenting aspects of it, no one body displays all the same characteristics of an established gender, and the questions people pose to trans people should also be posed to cis people. We live in a society in the U.S. that categorizes out of ease rather than accuracy resulting in everyone at some point feeling excluded from parts of ourselves. And thus gender the concept begins to outweigh gender as a reality when people police each other and socialize outmoded concepts.