No transsexuality is not a sexuality, I hope that’s clear to everyone. Sexuality, even asexuality, is about sexual preference in intimate (sexual) relationships, and transsexuality is about a severe incongruity between a person’s physical sex and the person’s gender identity. This post isn’t about my transsexuality, but foremost about my sexuality, and of course the impacts of my transition on it thus far.

I’ll start with that last thing the impact of my transition on my sexuality. In the run up to starting hormones I’ve always considered the possibility that my sexual preference for women wouldn’t hold entirely and that there would rise a preference for men. This hasn’t happened, maybe not yet, but clearly any preference for men is absent. What has happened these past months is that I’ve become more confident in my sexuality as a lesbian. There’s still certain physical hurdles, but participating more in the gay and lesbian scene has brought me much closer to having an intimate relationship (to a degree) than was the case ever since my ex and I broke up in 2003. So aside from acknowledging that certain men can be kind and have beautiful eyes, nothing has led me to believe that I can fall in love with men. Sure maybe that would have been different if I sticked to the straight scene, but remember before I started transitioning my sexual preference has always laid with women. There weren’t even crumbs of attractiveness towards men in my past.

I grew up in a 99% straight world, and I grew up holding on to the safety I thought being a boy handed me. You could say that this included being attracted to girls. The fact is that before and after becoming aware of my condition at age 10 I have always known that I (as a boy) was honestly attracted to girls. Alongside being attracted to girls I experienced a kind of jealousy towards them being able to be themselves. I wanted to be a girl, to be myself in fact, but I didn’t discover myself as the woman I am until a few years ago, so I looked at those girls and imagined how it was to be like them. Now all I want is to be myself, but what stayed with me was the feeling of being attracted to girls without experiencing the jealousy like I had in my teens.

Being attracted to girls never confused me, it felt really natural, something I didn’t need to struggle with like many lesbian girls. I could uninhibitedly be attracted to a girl, and although I hardly acted upon it until age 18 because of my shyness and insecurity, I didn’t need to come out for my sexuality. The sense of my sexuality feeling natural to me now continues to be existent during transition. Before I was confident enough to come out for my gender identity and transition, I as a guy then, fell in love with a girl. I had put energy and effort in looking like the guy I could credibly make others believe I was, and feeling confident about it to live my life like that. So combined with my desire to fall in love with a girl, I got into a heterosexual relationship. Although I came out about my gender identity to her in the first year of our two year relationship our relationship continued its heterosexual style. Despite my foolishness to grow facial hair since I was 17, and continuing that up til age 21, my ex-girlfriend experienced me as feminine during our relationship in different aspects. She even told me some friends of her thought I was quite feminine. Well of course this was pleasant to hear and know, but it couldn’t keep us together, and I guess we never really thought about how our relationship would be if I transitioned. It was after this heterosexual relationship and two little flings hardly worth mentioning that I decided that what I really wanted was to transition. So my transsexuality slowly came to the forefront and my sexuality went into a state of slumber. I didn’t feel comfortable being in a relationship as long as my gender situation was dubious to those girls whom would get to know me. I was uninteresting to straight girls, because of my outward feminity, and I was even more uninteresting for lesbian girls, because I wasn’t clearly a girl either. This was all in my own perception, but I still believe there’s a lot of truth in the perception I held for about 4 years. Beside that I also told myself that I above all needed to invest in myself before I could give love to someone else again. So sexuality became an issue far from my mind.

Nowadays, 8 months into hormone treatment I can say that I’m perceived as the woman I am by the people around me. My sexuality has to my perception not changed radically in any way, but did I before transitioning make others believe I was heterosexual, now I am obviously lesbian. Not the dyke type, neither the girly girly, still feminine though .Of course loving an other girl still has to be brought in practice, but undoubtfully I am attracted to girls, and being in a relationship with an other girl is only a matter of love and time.