I Thought Being a Gay Man Would Save Me From Womanhood (It Didn’t)
Queer theory transformed me from a depressed, weird, intellectually curious child into a brainwashed teen who disfigured her body.
It’s been seven years since I had my breasts removed. Eight years since injecting testosterone. Almost eleven years since I learned about the concept of “gender identity”—a discovery (if that is the right word) that set me on the road to believing I was transgender.
It was 2014. I was 16 years old, in my sophomore year at a Midwestern American high school. I’d started writing a satirical memoir about being mentally ill. The plot began with me in a mental hospital, afflicted by thoughts of suicide. But that book never got finished because I never found a way to give it the happy ending I wanted.
Growing up, I didn’t think I was a “normal” girl. In retrospect, I wasn’t abnormal per se. I was (among other things) inquisitive. I thought the world was a phenomenal jest, some incomprehensible stack of cosmic coincidences that religion couldn’t explain.
At age 10, I began suffering from depression and severe mood swings, bringing an early end to my childhood. By 11, I was experiencing an altered state of consciousness, as hormonal imbalances destabilised my brain and body.
It later turned out that I had cysts on my ovaries, which disrupted my menstrual cycle. When a woman’s hormones are out of whack, everything in her life is out of whack. (The condition is formally called Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. It’s the most commonly diagnosed endocrine disorder in females.)
After multiple rounds of testing and psychological evaluations, I was diagnosed with what I regard as an absurdly classified condition—Pervasive Developmental Disorder (Not Otherwise Specified). “PDD-NOS” is a diagnostic label given to patients who exhibit clusters of autistic traits, enough to disrupt their daily functioning, but not enough to be diagnosed with Asperger’s. It has since been placed under the broad (and now uselessly broad) “Autism Spectrum.” In fact, I’d always thought of it as Autism Lite.
*Correspondence: agostino.carboneuniroma1.it; Tel.: +39-3492886584
My parents didn’t know how to help me. They took me to doctors, who prescribed common birth-control medication, Paxil, and Prozac. But expecting an autistic adolescent who rarely brushed her teeth, bathed, or changed her clothes to take powerful antidepressants on a regular basis while systematically monitoring her symptoms went about as well as you might imagine. I barely remember seventh grade, which I experienced through a Paxil-induced brain fog.
My dad had a temper. In clinical terms, you could say he was emotionally hijacked. His amygdala was oversensitive, and so he was easily triggered. He went into what I call “red-outs,” a combination of a mental blackout and “seeing red.” He would say the cruellest possible thing, whatever would hurt you the most. Unfortunately, I was an easy and accessible target. Many kids face bullying at school, but I had to deal with it at home. And the abuse ruined my self-esteem.
I joined Tumblr when I was 14. The social-media site helped me find like-minded girls with the same taste in music, and gave me an outlet for my dark humour and poetry. I adopted 1980s-era heavy-metal fashion, adding home-made spikes and studs, a Rob Halford-esque leather cap, and a denim jacket with band patches that my grandma sewed on.
I inevitably learned about transgenderism from my new online friends, along with the broader theory of “gender identity.” Amid this digital environment—populated largely by socially progressive lesbian and gay people, most of them embracing liberal feminist critiques of oppressive gender roles and stereotypes— rejecting one’s birth sex felt like a logical step toward enlightenment. It seemed illuminating to explore the “true” nature of my gender identity, a process that fit in well with my non-conformist instincts.
It seemed illuminating to explore the ‘true’ nature of my gender identity—a process that fit in well with my non-conformist instincts.
On Tumblr, my naïve and vulnerable brain was exposed daily to ever-more radicalised theories of human identity. I also became jaded to the casual romanticisation of substance abuse, mental illness, antisocial behaviours, kink, and pornography that suffused this social ecosystem. All of it was supposedly justified by the larger project of deconstructing the social and physical norms that were holding us back from liberation.
It all seemed so creative. And for the first time since elementary school, I felt socially accepted by a set of peers. I affectionately labelled our six-person friend group, “The Queer Stoners”—being comprised of one openly gay boy, Dustin, two bisexual boys, Terrence and Kieth, two bisexual girls, Heather and Lilly, and me—the straight girl who was somehow deemed the “faggiest” of all.
But that’s okay. We used “faggot” as a term of endearment, a subversive-seeming verbal gesture that vaguely echoed rappers who use the N-word. The great attachment void I’d experienced seemed like it was starting to close.
In sum, online discourse conveyor-belted me from being a depressed, somewhat weird, intellectually curious child with liberal values to a brainwashed teen who identified as “queer.”
The internet didn’t cause my low-self-esteem, nor any of my other pre-existing psychological vulnerabilities. But it did cause them to coalesce into an identity that I imagined to be permanent. I was socially encouraged to interpret my fractured self-concept as an identity crisis rooted in gender. The discomfort I was experiencing in regard to my body was presented as proof that I was trans.
Online discourse conveyor-belted me from being a depressed, somewhat weird, intellectually curious child with liberal values to a brainwashed teen who identified as ‘queer.’
I started to embrace the idea of being “weird.” Instead of unobtrusively going about my business, I flaunted my quirkiness, wearing the gaudiest shirts from the men’s section of Goodwill. I had a friend pierce my ear—not both, of course, because that would be too feminine. Instead, I pierced one ear seven times and put studs in each slot. I also got a new hairstyle, then tried out a succession of homemade hair dyes.
I saw all this as a fresh reckoning with life—the dawn of a new age in which I’d find genuine friendships, authentic love, and a trove of new adventures.
But when I started browsing Craigslist personal ads at age 15, what I actually found was a cesspool of strangers looking for low-stakes romantic and sexual encounters (even if I didn’t know it at the time). My friends and I would get high and make parody ads from the point of view of cannibals and other sociopaths, using random photos we sourced from the internet. But when my own (real) ad attracted the kind of male attention I never got in real life, it was exciting.
Unsurprisingly, few of these men interested me. But I kept trying, making accounts on Instagram, Tinder, OkCupid, and Meetup—to no avail.
Part of the issue was my androgynous presentation. I wore my hair in a variety of boyish styles, never used makeup, and felt uncomfortable with clothing that flattered my female curves.
I smothered my large chest with a sports bra and wore oversize men’s clothing. When I looked at the styles on sale at Forever 21, where my younger sister shopped, everything looked tiny and tight—like clothes for children. Performative femininity struck me as an expensive con—especially the endless lotions and pampering products. The lingerie at Victoria’s Secret struck me as gross.
I wasn’t ready for adult female sexuality. I wasn’t ready for the responsibility of being a woman, a mother, wife, temptress, girl boss, or any of the other archetypes. So I leaned into being a weird kid overwhelmed by neurosis and loneliness. Even once I became an adult woman, I wanted to stay young, the way things had been before puberty.
My autism—this was a word I now embraced—gave me a degree of licence to wear my heart on my sleeve and reject social conventions. But as the years passed, no matter how much I rejected my femaleness and sexuality, I never stopped being a woman.
I gradually recognised that I had a lot more female-typical attributes than I’d realised. I was highly emotional, sensitive, caretaking, nesting, drawn to animals, introspective, and interested in human relationships. Although I also had some male-typical personality traits, there was no doubt that I retained a recognisably non-masculine character.
But I stuck to my “queerness,” which gave me a vocabulary to denounce sex stereotypes and rage against social norms and hypocrisies. It taught me to pursue happiness in the form of an outsider—a more profound kind of happiness, I thought, than the sheep-like normies could ever imagine. Queer theory instructed me that demanding acceptance for my weirdness was a political duty. My Tumblr comrades and I weren’t going to just forge new identities. We were going to make a better world for all the other queer people.
At the same time, we thought we were funnier than everyone else—a conceit expressed through the sneering jokes and memes we’d direct at anyone outside our silo. Even that word I used to describe myself—faggot—was a sort of in-joke.
A gay man, my friends and I believed, wasn’t just a biologically male person attracted to other biologically male men. The term applied to anyone who identified as a man and who was attracted to other people who identified as men. It was hilarious to us that the normal world didn’t “get” this.
What the word “faggot” really signified, in the way we used it, was queer heterosexuality. It described the fact that I had a sexual and romantic attraction toward men while also rejecting any sense of womanhood.
This is an important distinction: I didn’t identify as “a man,” but rather as a gay man. My confused teenage brain had mapped onto a fantasy male identity based on a facsimile of a gay male stereotype: a soft boy, a faggot, a feminised man, a sensitive human being worthy of love who was (like me) attracted to males.
My confused teenage brain had mapped onto a fantasy male identity based on a facsimile of a gay male stereotype—a sensitive, feminized human being worthy of love who was (like me) attracted to males.
Gay masculinity was the best of both worlds, as I (subconsciously) saw it. I could be my true self—sardonic, creative, raunchy, clever, bold, sensitive, romantic, angry, horny, unruly, and offbeat, and still love and be loved by men.
By a process of magical thinking, an alchemy of desperation and longing, I came to believe that I should have been born into a male body. The idea of being a gay man became a beacon of hope, an alternative reality where love and acceptance awaited me. All I had to do was unburden myself of the artificial shell of femaleness that encased me.
I consumed gay male pornography and sought hook-ups on Grindr, interpreting the sex as narratives of intimacy and connection. The fantasy of being a gay man became a complex coping mechanism, one that allowed me to escape the harsh realities of my real existence. But ultimately, I only pushed myself further from the authentic connection and self-acceptance I desperately sought.
I also endangered myself. Engaging with strangers on Grindr was like a game of roulette. With each spin, I gambled not just with my physical safety but my fragile mental well-being.
I was meeting men in the graveyard hours, often under the influence of pills, alcohol, and marijuana. Then during the day, I would go through the motions of student life as a young, queer-identified college student. I enrolled in gender studies, and pored over the history of black racism in America. I also visited the campus LGBT centre, though was disappointed by how awkward I felt there.
When I was 19, I asked my Sociology of Sexuality professor—a female-to-male transgender man—for advice about my persistent mental-health issues, which seemed connected to gender dysphoria. She suggested I go to an LGBT-friendly facility in Chicago where I could access testosterone for free.
I drove two hours to the clinic, sat in a waiting room with a crowd consisting mostly of gay men getting tested for sexually transmitted diseases; and, an hour later, walked out with a prescription for testosterone.
I was excited as I anticipated the masculinising effects I’d achieve with the hormones. My number one desire was to grow facial hair—a beard, specifically—and to be hairier overall. (I’d never shaved my legs, and generally liked having a hairy body.) I also wanted a male voice, and was looking forward to the changes in body fat distribution, which I believed would yield a slimmer, more muscular shape.
At first, the testosterone gave me an increase in energy and confidence, though that’s probably due to the placebo effect associated with the initial thrill of embarking on the process of transformation.
But soon, I was experiencing suicidal ideation—a recurring problem during my youth. So I checked myself into a mental hospital for the third time in my life. While there, I journaled about Terrance, on whom I’d (unsuccessfully) fixated my romantic longings. I wanted to be free from this fixation, and from everything else that hurt me, including my father, gender dysphoria, autism, loneliness, and anxiety.
I resolved to turn things around by taking a semester off from college, doing outpatient therapy, and pursuing transitioning to fully become my “real” self. I wish that I knew then what I know now. But at the time, surgery seemed like the next logical step.
I started researching doctors who could perform a double mastectomy. Eventually, I found a surgeon who operated out of Madison, Wisconsin. And in August 2017, I had my breasts removed, leaving me permanently disfigured.
The remainder of my transition and detransition story would fill a memoir (which I am in the process of writing). What I am aiming to focus on in this piece is the specific fantasy I had of inhabiting gay masculinity as a straight woman.
I’m not proud of this delusion. Yet it’s not as uncommon as some readers might think. While many who identify as trans are homosexual teenagers grappling with same-sex attraction, many straight girls are now calling themselves “gay boys.” Based on my online experiences, I’d say that more teens who adopt a trans identity are heterosexual than homosexual.
After detransitioning at age 22—which is when I realised my identity issues stemmed from childhood trauma—I gradually accepted my heterosexuality. I am now content in my female body, despite its damaged state. And my dream is to become a wife and mother. (Turns out I was more “normal” than I was taught to imagine.)
Queer theory played a huge role in creating my delusions, as it strips confused youth of the language and logic they need to see reality for what it is. In the Alice in Wonderland world of queer theory, language is self-referential—because everything is defined in a circular way. Instead of “man” describing something tangible (an adult human male), it becomes “anyone who identifies as a man.” And so the only way to know if you are a man is to experience the sensation from within. Anyone who attempts to categorise you based on observable criteria is expressing an invalid idea.
Some conservative culture critics harshly describe queerness as “revenge of the uglies.” I can’t help but agree. A girl who feels othered and undesirable as she is can adopt a queer or trans identity, and thereby seek to escape to a world where looks are said not to matter. And if one is rejected, it must always be motivated by “transphobia” instead of personal shortcomings.
The adage of “hearts, not parts” convinced me that if I identified as a gay man and loved someone, there was no reason why they shouldn’t love me back… as a gay man, regardless of my female body—which had become a subject of resentment and even shame to me.
I learned the hard way that “queering” oneself is (at best) a semantic exercise. It doesn’t lead to any kind of endpoint of acceptance or emotional growth. Rather, its purpose is to validate a posture of defiance and alienation. You embrace the idea that nothing in the “normal” world is wholesome or redeeming. And so the only path to sacredness lies in rejecting everything about that milieu—including, most tragically, the body one uses to navigate it.
If allowed to grow up naturally, girls will find their place in society, no matter if they are straight or gay. Pretending that a girl can become a gay boy is cruel. And I regret that I had to go to such extreme lengths to find value in my womanhood.
){kind=link}