A Long-Distance Relationship Shaped My Sexuality as a Trans Man

Cosmopolitan

2 days ago

Welcome to Love Transcends, a special project by Cosmopolitan that celebrates the resilience, wisdom, hope, and joy of the trans community as its members navigate romantic love. Through in-depth interviews and personal essays, trans people share what it's like to date, hook up, break up, and fall in and hold onto love in the midst of sweeping anti-trans legislation and attacks on personal safeties and freedoms of expression. Click here to see the entire collection.
My freshman roommate's side of the dorm was girly and beachy and so unlike mine. I had Scotch-taped a few photos of my friends to the wall. She unpacked short skirts and dainty silver jewelry and countless beauty products I wouldn't know how to use with a gun to my head. I liked how the close quarters put us in contrast, my boyishness stark against her Brandy Melville backdrop. On our first night, she asked me if I'd had a boyfriend in high school, which was a polite way of breaking our summer-long text tension.
'Actually, I'm gay,' I told her, because calling myself a lesbian had never felt right.
'I'm bisexual,' she confessed. Our disclosures hung there like someone had thrown a ticking time bomb in the room and run down the hallway.
And so the first few weeks of college were us playing footsie under the dining hall table, her FaceTiming her friends to make fun of my enormous laundry pile of hoodies, me pretending to care about her essential oils, and us finding any reason to be in the same bed. We made out for the first time watching Gone Girl on her laptop in her lofted twin XL bed. The second time in the gender-neutral bathroom at the end of our hallway. The third in the back of an Uber coming home from a frat house off campus. And before we could get to a fourth, I shut down.
Because I'd been closeted in high school and opted out of dating altogether, I had no idea what kind of person I would be in a relationship. From the ways I had yearned for unattainable women over the course of my life, I imagined myself as a doting, devoted partner. Someone who'd be waiting outside her class with her favorite kind of sushi and have an ongoing text thread with her mom. But here I had this living and breathing bisexual dreamboat who wanted me, and I couldn't stand the thought of us going any further than the backseat of a Civic on a Friday night. I all but moved out, spending every night in my best friend's room and only coming back to change, fundamentally erasing the first girl I ever had a real option of dating from my life.
That was only the beginning of a series of classroom crushes and mutual friends and Tinder dates where I realized over and over that to have a girlfriend also meant to be a girlfriend.
My body was allergic to the concept before my brain was able to make sense of the reaction. And so, rather than the doting lover I'd imagined myself to be, I became a goofy mascot in the social scene, prone to 2 a.m. hookups. In my uniform of men's surf shop t-shirts, I walked around the Theta Chi backyard with an uncapped fifth of Tito's, talking about loving women. I was someone guys could talk to without feeling the need to perform and a gay best friend to the girls. And for those who were bi-curious and looking for a guide or crush or experiment, I was happy to be a best friend with benefits.
I was a frequently visited stop on the journey of girls figuring out if they liked girls—all while I was gradually, and unbeknownst to them, realizing I wasn't one. Because the women I was seeing had previously only dated men, their interest offered a glimpse of what it'd feel like to be one of the campus bachelors. Experimenting with bisexuals was affirming to me in an almost algebraic sense. They like boys + they like me = I'm like a boy. But in reality, they were experimenting with me for the opposite reason. They craved a girl. Someone who understood them rather than a fuckboy frat guy. I loved being able to give them a taste of the emotional intelligence they'd been longing for, but why did I have to be a woman to offer that comfort?
I met Lily senior year, while that sense of my shifting self was still half-baked. A drunken make-out in a bar bathroom stall led to what I sadly have no choice but to call a situationship. She was two years younger, and I was her first queer experience. She liked that I could get her into the bar before her 21st birthday, and I liked that she saw me as someone who could get invited anywhere—a power that made me feel manly.
On sleepovers after a night of drinking, I was capable of being intimate and affectionate without pause or fear. Coming home after a long night in the library, though, I felt like every second we lay beside each other was an hour of playing the floor is lava but her body was the floor. More and more, I'd lean on tequila shots and mind erasers to have sex because the alternative meant being aware that I was her new, fun, experimental lesbian experience.
Going to college parties with a beautiful girl and falling in love and having sex was everything I'd fantasized about as a closeted teenager. This hypothetical her was able to give me all those things. But in each of those scenes, written and imagined, I'd cast myself as her boyfriend. I imagined us sleeping together, a woman and a man. The reality was that in her bed late at night, Lily would open up to me about how she didn't know if she was attracted to men at all. She was falling for me instead.
In all of the times we had sex, I never took my shirt off. She didn't ask about it until one night after we finished her hands were under my shirt and her fingertips were indecisive about where they could and couldn't touch.
'Is this a regular sports bra that's just really tight?' was how she worded it, though we both knew what she was asking. Yes, I said, lying about it being a binder.
And I kept lying until I broke up with her. I was graduating, I said, I wasn't ready for a long-term girlfriend, I had things to figure out. Truth is, I broke up with her so I could delay the process of figuring it all out even longer. I broke up with her so I could enjoy the beginning bliss with another experimenting bisexual until I figured anything out at all.
It had become a pattern: I'd spend three months getting to know a woman. And then I'd crank down the dial. Hours and then days elapsed between texts that I previously replied to in seconds. I booked out-of-town weekend trips to avoid the expected sleepover. To this day, I cringe thinking of how my avoidance stopped them from pursuing and finding the beautiful transcendent queer experience they ached for and me from accepting the deep discomfort I felt in my body.
Though I was cutting my hair shorter and shorter, dog-earing dozens of pages in trans memoirs, and opening up to a few trusted people about my desire for top surgery, I was still too afraid to acknowledge within myself the fact that I wanted to transition. But at a certain point, my conscience knew that instead of vanishing, I had to try and communicate about this.
My early attempts were disconnected and performative. The girl I dated after Lily was in my poetry workshop. I daydreamed about her constantly, in the way I always did, seeing myself as this beau who could charm her into loving me. These daydreams never had an ending, much less a happy one. I broke up with her by letter. 'I want to be able to give you what you deserve,' I wrote. 'I want to have sex with you and enjoy it and feel present without insecurities invading. I hope you can understand why my brain intercepts the chances of that for me right now.'
Giving up on dating was safer, I told myself. It was increasingly impossible for me to picture love and sex in my life without seeing myself as a man, and so I was ready to find peace in a life without love and sex at all.
And that's what I told the next woman I met. We matched on a dating app and quickly began to text around the clock about Survivor and Lena Dunham. When I felt myself start to care about her, I knew I needed to cut off the romantic expectation. I didn't want to trick another woman into thinking I was emotionally available. I made a disclaimer that I had zero intentions of having a serious relationship or even of hooking up, though I'm sure it was obvious that the yearner within me still had hope.
'I really don't want to overstep, but I think you would find a lot of peace in a relationship where your gender is affirmed,' she wrote back. For the first time in my life, a woman wasn't coming to me looking for an answer about her own sexuality. She wanted me to know it was safe for me to find my answer with her.
Her friends made up every letter of the queer alphabet and on FaceTime sleepovers before we met in person, she'd share her screen to show me pictures of them. Being with her meant proximity to the type of people I wanted to be around, the type of person I wanted to be. The morning after our first night together, we lay in her bed and her fingers traced the waistband of my sweatpants, knowing just how far they could go. No questions asked. No answers needed.
The silk of her fingertips on my lower abdomen stirred something in me far deeper than the countless drunk college hookups. After those, I'd always made sure I had an escape route the next day. I had to call my mom or go to class or do an early interview for a made-up job. I had to disappear.
On the way home that morning, I texted her paragraphs. I told her I felt like a teenage boy, both because of how little it took for her to turn me all the way on and because the last time I felt the hope of being a romantic partner was when I was writing imaginary stories in high school. She replied, inviting me the next weekend. Without hesitation, I said yes, and then again, until I was her boyfriend.
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