Quote Originally Posted by desertrider View Post
I know there is a notable component of the LGBT community that's fairly uncomfortable with bisexuality. I think bigender is probably more acceptable here, but it's still hard to wrap my head around myself sometimes, right?

I think it's more like when you're not one thing or the other, and you can feel kind of fluid about it, then it lets in a lot of room for doubt. Especially when you haven't committed years of heart and brain power to knowing yourself, I was sort of repressed about it before, and society was ok with it that way, and family was ok, and really, most importantly, I was ok too, I didin't think about it very often, I'd dress at halloween, whatever. I was kind of an ally, I read about generic lgbt stuff, have some friends that were, etc, but it wasn't super personal.

Then it kind of clicked for me more last year, but I keep occasionally coming back to wondering is it just a game for me? Pink fog? The phrase "college phase" keeps coming to mind, but then I always get the real strong urge to tell that voice in my head to f-off.
You bring up a number of difficult issues.

There are a number of identities, both gender, and sexual, that are commonly erased in the LGBT community - you mentioned the big two:
- bigender people
- bisexual people

There are some others:
- polyamorous or other non-monogamous relationships
- bdsm / kink based relationships

By the way, if you don't think these things are erased by the broader gay and lesbian community, consider that they spent $300 Million last year promoting marriage equality. Now look - I'm all for marriage equality, it's absurd that two people who want to be married can't because of someone else's prejudice. However, this is a bunch of money spent to make the point that "two men = family, two women = family, just like a man and a woman = family."

Presumably people who don't fit those structures are just weirdoes - they're certainly not going to talk about them.

It's the same with the narrative about transgender people. You want to know who you are going to see on TV? Someone like me - who's totally binary gender aligned, just opposite of their assigned at birth sex. You won't see stuff about gender queer, bigender, gender fluid, nor any of the other very real and very valid identities that exist. (To be fair, most of the trans people I know who are activists really do try to consider non-binary people. We do, but we could be better. The broader gay and lesbian groups though - lol, no freaking way, many of them barely understand someone like me, and folks, I'm just a girl - it's not complicated.)

Please don't internalize these messages. I know it's hard not to. Your identity is VALID - and it's what you say it is. And it's OK if it takes you a while to figure it out. That in no way invalidates your narrative.

I am struggling with this myself currently, in terms of my sexual orientation. I am a minority amongst minorities - I'm bisexual, poly, and kinky. It's ironic, because in terms of gender identity, I'm highly binary aligned - I'm strongly female identified. I am strongly motivated - it is like a biological imperative - to conform to a fairly standard view of femininity. I'm a girly-girl, in so many ways just like my younger sister. I'm a fairly conservative person in many ways. But my sexuality is nothing most people I know will understand or accept easily. Indeed, people with those attributes are apt to be viewed as kind of evil. ("She's cheating on you, man!" "OMG, what she does is disgusting!") And I can tell you that as I've come to realize these things about myself, it's a real struggle to accept them. But those attitudes aren't true - I am not an evil person.

And neither are you, Summer, for being who you are, nor are you fake. Be the best and most authentic version of you that you can be. Be open, be who you really are.

What most of us here really are, are simply people who don't fit in well with the norms and structures setup by our society. There should be no shame in this, but unfortunately, shame is a primary control mechanism for our society. So most of us feel plenty of it.

To answer your specific question about transition - I realized that I felt fake, that my entire life as a man was a lie. Indeed, in many respects, I feel now like one of the replicants in the film Blade Runner - who believed themselves to be just regular everyday people, only to discover they were only two years old, and all the memories they'd ever have were artificially implanted in their minds to better control them. Now obviously I know the things that happened to me were all too real - and often quite unpleasant. But at this point, they don't even feel like things that make sense anymore.

The only person who can determine what, if anything, is fake about your life is - YOU. All I can suggest to you is to do what I've tried to do, and be rigorously honest with yourself, and even when you think you understand something, look at it from other angles, compare it to your history, run it by people you trust who will call you on lies you might tell yourself. This is a process - it is no simple thing, because it involves understanding that ideas about our lives that others take to be axiomatic aren't quite true for us.

I've been at this for over two years now - some 27 months to be precise. And I don't believe I'm through it all yet. But I am getting there, I believe. And I hope you do too.