To be or to bed? That is the question.
The transgender confusion about wanting to be like someone or if it's just wanting to sleep with them.
It’s a feeling so unbelievably strange to not know if you are drawn to someone because you want to be them, or you want to get them into bed. Most transfolk I ask this tell of the forever inter-meshed confusion about their desire. The only thing I can take comfort in is the existence of such insta accounts as “siblings or dating”. An account of photos of people smiling for the camera, people who look uncannily like each other and you have to guess: if they are partners or in fact family. With such luminaries as Israel Falou, it comforts me that most human beings, trans or not, are intimately drawn to their ideal. Yes, my entire life I had a thing for heavily tattooed athletic women with witchy vibes… yes, this is what I am now… yes it makes me uncomfortable when I think about it too much. Not because I puts me in a box, but that it makes me worry that the love and affection I have had for my partners over the years wasn’t actually about them but about me.
Now that I am trans (I have always been trans just had different levels of understanding it) there is a clarity that exists for me. There was a friend of my wife and I that I thought I was developing feelings for. Whenever we would spend time together I felt this longing in my chest. This gravitation towards her. A pull like I was entranced. I surprised myself and for the briefest moment I wondered if I was falling in love with her. She was lovely, and stunning, and a delight. But again, like all the other uncomfortable thoughts, you push the feeling away and try not to think about it.
Later when I began actively transitioning and allowing myself to feel all the complex feelings I associated with it. When I began looking for how I wanted to present into the world I thought to all the magnificent women I knew and instantly they were the answer to the question. That I wanna look like her. Their long dark hair, fit and strong and athletic. It’s funny, I realised that this friend looked kinda like the women in my family. She looked what I expect I probably would have looked like had I been born into a different body. It wasn’t love, but it was longing. Longing for a body that was different, longing to have had the delightful childhood, the messy teenage years, the wild young adulthood. I wanted these things and I could see them all existing in this friend.
I’m blessed that I can point to one “object of desire” and see it for what it really was. But for the most part, with all the other lovers, crushes and secret admirings, I will never really know if it was love or want. You can’t. The two feelings are so closely aligned. It is perhaps a little easier for trans folk to parse considering the nature of how our bodies and our styles change. That when we transform it casts things in new light. Either way I call it longing. I don’t know what type of longing it is, but it is longing nonetheless.
–S