How I Owned Up to My Lesbian Identity

"Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex." Valerie Solanas

I'm going to start writing more about my life, and how I've came to know and love myself as a lesbian. I think it would be good for other people to read about, especially younger people trying to find themselves like I was and still strive for. I am not someone who studied how to be a good writer, so if it's a little out of order, I apologize in advance. Let me just start by saying, I've always been drawn to the wilder side of life and  the one to question authority and my situation since the time I was small. I used to think that because of these things (wanting to be where the wild things are) it made me manly, and that I must have been born wrong, which seems to be what all the popular kids are thinking and saying these days. The truth is women can be wild and that's who and what I am. I'm a woman. A wild woman. A thrill seeker! Or at least I was wild. I felt feral growing up. With society's female socialization, I grew to become more silent, passive and reserved. I'm a lesbian, and if that is the most wild or radical thing about me, fine.
It took a long time for me to be able to firmly state all of those things, but what helped me get there was through feminism. Radical feminism. That's not to be confused with mainstream or liberal feminism. Yes, there are many layers to feminism and I knew nothing about it at all until now. I want to say about 2 years ago. I did not learn it from family, friends, school, church, or any societal institution. I got to know it by myself. Nobody taught it to me, but with my own research. It was thanks to the women I read articles on and watched videos of who have not been yet silenced by the state and media or deleted off the internet. I didn't learn it from silence. I learned it from unafraid and loud women.

I was born in 1989 into a world where being a "wannabe" was frowned upon (here's looking at you, wannabe women and wannabe men i.e. transfolks), but I  would always wonder why I was never happy being born a woman. I hated it so much that I began saying to myself, "you're a boy," and declaring myself "he" in my head. I found myself sometimes correcting people only in my thoughts though. I mostly wore my brother's hand-me-downs, and could sometimes pass for a boy with long hair. I loved running around outside in the summer topless and free. Kids picked on my brother and I and said we were both born in the wrong bodies. My brother would be the one to ask me if we could play Barbies. I mainly held onto Ken, G.I. Joe or a stuffed animal. This was the early 90s. Now, a person's preferred pronoun is currently protected by the law in places like Canada and the UK, and it'll be the law of the world soon. Growing up, I really disliked, what I believed to be FACT at that time, despite all the activism and feminism that had already happened prior to my knowledge and existence that I was completely ignorant of then, was that I wouldn't grow up to be the hero or the winner of my own story or my life's movie. My own life. I wouldn't be the main character of the book written about me. For me, to be the heroine in my story was a fairy tale in itself. I'd always be looked at as the princess, prize or trophy, the baby machine to the nice, brave, pure-hearted, musclular, handsome bearded man.

I envied the male sex right at the start when I could see they were able to take a piss standing up, without exposing their entire bare ass and could even walk around dick in hand just relieving themselves. I remember when I first witnessed this, and when I tried to stand up and pee, I probably got urine all over myself and went home feeling puzzled. I was to be limited to hiding myself as best as possible and squatting from that day on. How inferior I felt even as a toddler. I liked that I was able to beat up boys as a child, but I remember my mother telling me something like, "he's going to be bigger and stronger than you one day and you're going to get hurt." I remember being so pissed about that. I didn't believe her. Then my 12 year old cousin socked me in the nose one day and sent me straight into water. We had been playing on our beach club's raft roughhousing. I was always a fan of play fighting. Well, I couldn't see the problems with males then, like war, murder, violence in general, rape, crime etc...I was taught that it was PEOPLE who were responsible. People as a whole. I was told by both men and women, that men and women are equal and it's both men and women who kidnap, lie, steal, kill, etc. We're never taught statistics until it's already too late, and we're all in our boxes where they want us. I mean I'm no scholar. I am definitely not even great at math. Statistics show that one female criminal probably adds up to a dozen male. I mean that's just me estimating, but that doesn't sound equal to me. True: both women and men kill, rape and murder, right? But who does more of it? On a global scale? Who is responsible for most of it? It's not us girls. I think most women grow up being jealous of men and their power. I certainly felt that. There's a feeling and hunger for competence right from the jump, and you want to be strong, and do well, but then your family pacifies it. I can remember my brother bitching to my father when he was told to do his homework, or chores, or something and why I sometimes could slide, and my father said to him loud and clear that I would just be able to get a man some day, and to me, at the time I wasn't offended, I was just happy to be able to slack off then. I would find some sort of privlege in that, ignorantly, and when the glow of receiving this knowledge wore off, I continued resenting my own sex so much, because I could feel the world around me trying to keep me from doing certain things, yet expecting me to do others that I didn't want to, such as being pretty, and if you ever asked why, the reason being most of the time usually ended up being, "because you're a girl and this is what is expected." The way mothers treat their daughters and the overall treatment of women toward each other is horrific sometimes, and it's all because we are mirroring the way men treat women. It would take years to find the truth. About 3 decades or so. So, for all that time I struggled with these secret feelings and thoughts. I tortured myself.

I grew up in Catholic school where you felt it necessary to hike up your skirt to be accepted by other students, and I fought with my parents a lot about grades and what I was doing (recreational drugs & alcohol) or not doing (extracurricular activities) and one time I left the house saying the most ignorant thing when my mother commented on my appearance. She replied with something that still sticks and haunts me today, because I thought she was right and sometimes I still think she's right. When she saw me, she asked me, "why do you look this way?" I couldn't even tell you. Maybe I had a bunch of bracelets on. Maybe my makeup was done all wrong and looked bad, and the skirt was rolled up. I just replied with, "I want to look like a slut." I might have said it sarcastically. Regardless of why I said that isn't important. I said it, and she replied, "You need to study more, 'cause you're not even good enough to walk the streets." It's pretty hard not to develop some self-hate when your own mother makes you feel incompetent at being a hooker. Or maybe I'm just playing victim and whining too much. I don't think I gave that much thought at the time. On the other hand, I think it might have actually hit me and it just sank in then I pushed it down with more teenage future ruining fuckery that day.

Years before social media, you remember? Being on the internet all alone? Haha. Yeah, I would be reading about people throughout history who went ahead and got sex changes, lived privately or in total secret, and came across some time maybe before or during high school, Boys Don't Cry on TV. That blew me away, because that was the first time I saw a woman trying to say she was not gay, but going for women. I understood what she was trying to establish. That she was really he, and at the time, I admired it, but the thought in the back of my head was always present: that no matter how much you change your appearance, you're still going to be what you were born. The self-hate intensified. If I could never change the outside to match the inside, then the only true way I knew I could be happy was that the inside must flourish. I had to take charge of my true self. I had to learn to love myself the way I got here. That's what's supposed to come out. We have to bring ourselves out to the world, not bring the world inside ourselves. Yet, humans selfishly want to take it all in to feed the self. So, I knew that, but didn't know how yet.

Years later, I eventually went onto following transmen like Aidyan Dowling and Buck Angel on Instagram, thinking, "I bet I would be so handsome on T." Eventually, it really didn't take me long to unfollow them though, because even before getting radical, I was getting creeped out at them trying to normalize waking up and injecting testosterone with a syringe as if it's a normal morning ritual like drinking coffee or shaving a beard. So, yeah. Thoughts like, "wow those scars under his nips, you can hardly see! How sexy and masculine those abs are. I could look like that." Then I'd be hating myself for thinking like that, because for the most part I always took pride in not taking much pride in my appearance at all. I never liked to go the conformist route. I experienced moments of vanity, but never felt right about it. It really is a performance to put on femininity. My energy is not very feminine at all. It's hard to say, really. For whatever reason, I always gravitated to things that were meant for boys and men.

Cosmetic surgery (that's what sex changes are, folks. Cosmetic. Not therapeutic.) could never have been an option for me. It costs a lot of money, for one, but I was never into superficiality. Transitioning, to me, right from the start, before ever knowing about radical feminism, was as shallow and basic as a woman who gets her tits enlarged or gets a nose job. It is the exact same thing to a different degree. Men tend to be less superficial, but when they are, they're called metrosexual or gay. How many levels of mutilation and body modificiation does a hetero man have to go through to not feel so fucking unwanted and hideous in this world? He just gets a toupee? Well not now! In this day and age, not only women, but men are spending thousands of dollars, worth a whole world of surgery to successfully validate their inner thoughts about their appearance and FEELINGS. Amanda Lepore is the most expensive living body walking the earth. Is that something we should be congratulating? This is something we should be viewing as unhealthy. I don't really like that much attention as a woman. Male attention is dangerous and there's no escape. When you transition to male (you don't really transition), you still get it (from gay men). As a lesbian, you still get it. There is no escape! Now I get dressed with a transwoman at the gym. Why do we have to sacrifice our own comfort and safety, us the many, just so some man can feel validated in his identity as a woman? Why are we sacrificing the many for the few? How does no one else think it's selfish of a man to invade female only spaces to make us all validate his identity with OUR OWN? Men are taking our spaces everywhere.

When I finally got sick of wasting time in heterosexual bars (your default, standard bar) where I was preyed upon by men I was not interested in, yet told myself I might be if I just "tried," or that I should just be happy and GRATEFUL I was getting any sort of attention at all, because I did not value myself or respect myself enough to say no, I began to explore what was around in my town, Manhattan. It didn't really take long, with social media to boot, to find people. I had found women who I thought were similar to me, but they were not calling themselves women anymore, but loving pussy was all everybody talked about. They were "bois." "Queer" folks. Henrietta Hudson, Cubbyhole and a "queer-core" music scene is how I got to come further out of the closet, but it  seemed to run short on the kinds of gays and lesbians mainstream media made funny or made fun of on TV. It was like blurry vision, and playing pretend. I had to enter these spaces and use my imagination. I thought to myself, "where was the place for me to go like The Planet on The L Word with a huge ensemble of lesbian friends to accompany me?"

Then I was dating someone of that nature, and it was a pretty rocky relationship, and what probably caused most of the problems was the kind of toxic self-hating thinking that's going on in this community. We bonded over our shared self-hate for being born female. Factor in drugs and alcolhol, and you've got a lot of unresolved childhood traumas and gender feels leaking out all over the place. Her friends were all into polyamory, and group sex parties, preferred pronouns, queer theory, etc. Nothing was gay, and nothing was lesbian. Just queer or trans. After that ended, I was so tired of words like "queer" and wanted to distance myself from that. I wanted to be with someone who could comfortably embrace herself as she is, and be proud or unafraid to be called she by others. I wanted a girlfriend who I could call my girlfriend. Someone I could call a lesbian and who calls herself one. I wanted to find others like me and was only scratching the surface. I couldn't find them. I was looking for lesbians. I was looking for women. I needed to figure out why they were gone. I went on Tinder and OkCupid and there was everything, but women. Okay, if there were women, they were definitely conflicted, bi, or straight. Anytime I saw women who I thought I could vibe with, they went by nothing. They went by "they" and the only women claiming to be women were not women. There was a shortage of lesbians. The only lesbians I saw were hetero males making a joke about loving women so much that it means he's a lesbian. Het men and transwomen "lesbians." So, I researced and yeah, there they were. Women, but they were no longer calling themselves that. Now they were calling themselves queer, genderfluid, genderqueer, nonbinary, two-spirits, trans, etc... A simple he or she is no longer specific enough in explaining how "queer" a person is.

An Instagram friend of mine who let me use this photo for this post. I told her I was writing about how I found radical feminism on my original search for more lesbians who seem to be lost in a sea of queerdom.

It must come from a culture that is raised on homophobia and misogny. I was guilty of this behavior myself. We all were. I can remember personally cringing at the word lesbian in high school, and almost everyone I knew was only going by bi if they were gay at all. Nobody said queer yet to my knowledge. We all cringed at the word lesbian. When my highschool crush and I got together, we were too immature for sex. At least I knew I was. There was a moment when we did discuss it, and I think she was a little afraid or grossed out at the idea of going down on me. I knew she wasn't a virgin. Not with men. Of course. I was. She was a senior and I was a sophomore. We would only make out, but our feelings for each other emotionally were really strong, but I didn't come out until many years later, so eventually, we parted ways. I always felt bad I was too afraid to be on that level with her. We never had sex. I think she was in a way uncomfortable about it, or she wanted me to be a top, and I wasn't able to yet.

I came to the conclusion later on that I was a self-hating woman angry that I was attracted to other self-hating women. Why were we all so self-hating? What were we thinking trying to opt out of our oppression? We didn't think we were oppressed yet. A lot of my friends currently still don't believe women are oppressed and they laugh at some of the newfound things I say. I suppose we thought if we dropped the pronouns and got a haircut that the period cramps and blood would go away. That men would suddenly start respecting us? That other women would finally? Our mothers? Fathers? I would cringe at the word, lesbian, because homosexuality was severely frowned upon for most of every gay persons' life so that leftover stigma is what we're all still coping with. I hated my own vagina and got grossed out at the thought of going down on another one. Until I did it. I had all the insults and thoughts I've heard from people and the media in my mind whenever I heard "lesbian." I could smell rotting fish (dirty pussy) when I heard lesbian years ago. The word queer is a slur, but it became an all new identity for bisexuals who didn't want to feel so basic anymore. Trans people come out of that in not wanting to feel queer or gay. It comes from their desire to be hetero and "in the right body." It stems from self-hate man-made by society and patriarchy with another sick fad on the rise, transracialism and wow now you can even identify as transpecies. South Park made a great episode addressing all 3 back in 2005 called Mrs. Garrison's Fancy Vagina. It would be considered hate speech now. I find all of this to be truly troubling. Does no one see the problem in doing that? Self-identifying as something they're really not? Are we seriously all living in adult kindergarten where now we must play pretend and feed crazy peoples' delusions BY LAW? Not only did I realize my true identity through these politics, but it also brought me into the world of social justice which was something I used to laugh at or mock. I believe Social Justice Warriors do go out of control with it, but being raised so red pilled doesn't allow me to take it too far. I don't want anyone's rights to be taken. I don't hate trans people. If I ever hated a trans person, it was because of the violent statements I've read on social media. I thought I was trans. I can empathize and sympathize with dysphoric individuals. Google detransitioned people, and hear what they have to say. That's what sent me on this journey. I wish trans people could find true peace beyond superficialty and without victimhood.