Transcripts / Shame
This is the transcript for the video essay “Shame” by Natalie Wynn, originally published on Feb 15, 2020 on the ContraPoints YouTube channel. This transcript is intended as a supplement rather than a substitute for the original video. For references and sources, watch the video here.
I
All right children, it's a new decade, and it's time to face the facts. How do I put this delicately? Your humble hostess is a total lez. *sigh* 😔
Shame! 🥺
You're probably worried this is a coming out video, and I'm sorry to tell you that it is. But it's so much worse than just that.
You know, one coming out may be regarded as a misfortune; two looks like carelessness; and three, well, at that point you're just doing it for attention. And I do love attention, I wanna be very clear about that, but I also happen to be gay. Some gay people love attention. It's been known to happen.
There comes a time in a woman's life when you have to take a step back, look yourself in the mirror, and admit: this is some high key lesbicious behavior. And I'm gonna talk you through how I got to that point.
So, storytime! I fell in love with my best friend. Storytime! Telling my boyfriend I'm a lesbian. Storytime! My parents walked in on my Taco Bell mukbang. *EXPOSED* *GRAPHIC* The tea is piping hot! ☕☕☕
For a long time on this channel my official story has been that I'm bi. I'm super fucking bi. But I haven't dated women since I transitioned, and for a while there, I got pretty deep into the straight lifestyle.
This really started in 2018. By that summer I had privately convinced myself that I was a fully heterosexual woman. And we're gonna circle back to how I reached that conclusion, but I'm starting in the middle of things, I'm like an epic poet. Hail Muse! (Heyhowareyou gorg!)
So, at the beginning of 2018 I became close friends, I'd even say best friends, with a woman whomst I'll call... Joanne. Light of my life—can we get some melodramatic music please? You're gonna wanna pour yourself a glass of something nice. I want you to fully enjoy my pain.
So my friendship with Joanne got very intense, very fast. It was that kind of friendship where you develop your own private language of references and in jokes, and you drive everyone around you crazy with your unintelligible banter. We'd call each other pretty much every day and we'd talk for hours. And I don't think I've ever called her and not been laughing or smiling in the first twenty seconds, which is very unusual for me, because I am a weird, and I don't get along that well with so many people.
One reason we got so emotionally close is that we're both trans. And there's a kind of intuitive understanding and a sense of humor that I can share with another trans woman that I can't really have with anyone else. Oh, and by the way, Joanne also happens to be just angelically beautiful, which I did notice every time I looked at her.
And from the beginning of this relationship, it wasn't sexual, but it wasn't exactly platonic either. We'd get drunk and make out, we'd sleep in the same bed and cuddle. Straight girls do that right? Gal pals! 🙂🙃
I remember one of the first times I hung out with Joanne, we got our nails done together. And that night we were barhopping, and she took my pretty hand in her pretty hand and we walked down the street together holding hands. (This is garbage and I want to die. I hope you all know that I'm in agony.)
Later we were at a bar table with friends, and every time one of us needed a drink we'd run off to the bar and she'd secretly kiss me. Ugh, it's still one of the most magical gay things that's ever happened to me.
Joanne had a boyfriend at the time, but he didn't care. A lot of men think girls kissing is hot, but they don't take it seriously. They don't think it could ever mean anything or lead to a real relationship. Gal pals! 🙂🙃
Just kill me. Take me out behind the shed, put me down humanely, and just buy a new YouTuber before the kids get home, and they won't notice.
So this very intimate friendship went on for about a year without me acknowledging to Joanne or to myself that I was falling in love. So, not only was I in denial about being in love with her, but at the same time, I had basically convinced myself that I only wanted to date men. So how could I possibly think that? Well, the short answer is shame. Why is no one talking about the shame?
I was so ashamed of my attraction to women that there were days I thought the shame was gonna crush me to death. Oh, I wanted to be straight so bad. And let no one say I didn't make a strong attempt.
There should honestly be a statue of me sucking dick in the town square, with the inscription, "Here knelt Natalie Wynn, attempted heterosexual."
I'm a bronze star lesbian. Well, if we're really being honest, I don't think I get a star.
Oh I was desperate to be straight. I tried prayer, I tried electric shocks — all the classics, all the hits.
The idea is if you shock yourself every time you think about women, you start to associate the two in your head. So now I'm a lesbian and I enjoy electric shocks. I know it’s supposed to hurt, but I just feel like I'm on a road trip with Cate Blanchett.
So at some point the shame was just too much for me, and it literally broke my brain. I no longer wanted to be straight, I simply deluded myself into thinking I was straight. Maybe a little bi (A little bit).
By that time I'd started dating men, and I got into a serious long-term relationship with a man. And at first I explained away my feelings for Joanne by telling myself, “female friendships are just really intense, that's probably why I feel so strongly. And everyone thinks women are beautiful, so it's only natural I'd notice that.” And, you know... spend a lot of time thinking about it.
So this nonsense went on until the beginning of last year. And then, two things happened. First, Joanne started dating a cis lesbian. 💔😫😭
Fuck my drag, right?
I think before that, I always knew she was bi, but some combination of self-interested denial and biphobia allowed me to write off my initial crush on her as, “I just have a thing for my straight best friend. Like, who doesn't?”
But that's a very self-serving narrative because it quarantines your feelings inside the safety of unattainable fantasy, and it wards off the pain of potential rejection. Because that way it's not really me she's rejecting, it's just that she's just not that into women. But once she started dating women, I couldn't tell myself that anymore. And the jealousy hit me so hard I couldn't ignore it.
Second, around that same time, Joanne decided to visit me for a few weeks (it was a long distance friendship), and about halfway through that visit, I cracked. One morning, I woke up next to her—gal pals! 🙂🙃—and I looked at her pretty fucking face, and I had the thought, I wanna wake up next to you every day of my life. And that is a pretty alarming thought for a petite heterosexual biogirl to have about her gal pal.
Oh, never in my life have I fallen so deeply in love with someone. Like, what the fuck is this? What am I feeling? I was experiencing an intensity of emotion that has no right to exist outside of 19th century Italian opera.
So I confessed my feelings to Joanne, and—Love Confession Gone Wrong! *Devastating*—she did not reciprocate my feelings.
Nurse! My pain is at a 10, I need more pills!
Needless to say, my heart was shattered, I cried a sea of tears, blah blah blah. I'm sure we all know how that goes.
And here’s the thing: if we'd taken a three-month friendship break right then and there, I might have recovered. But we couldn't keep away from each other. She wasn't in love with me, but she must have been in something with me, because the truth is we were never just gal pals.
And I was beyond reason, like, I probably would've started one of those lesbian couple joint Instagram accounts, that's how tragic this got (those are great by the way. Pay no attention to bitter queens).
So for the rest of 2019 Joanne and I kept talking, kept visiting each other, and I just repeated this heartbreak again and again and again.
Now, if she had reciprocated my feelings, I probably would've come out as gay last year. Because the heat of a romantic relationship has a way of evaporating shame. But rejection and heartbreak are shameful in themselves, and they only made the situation worse.
So I spent most of 2019 going in and out of denial, until finally, last October, I got super fucking canceled on Twitter (as discussed in my last video), and at the same time, Joanne realized that she was gonna have to be the one to enforce a friendship break, otherwise I was never gonna get over her.
So there was this combination of things, being politically canceled by Twitter, being romantically canceled by Joanne, and also losing her as my closest friend, which sent me into a catatonic, rock-bottom kind of depression.
Now, of course, depression is a terrible thing, but I think it can also serve a purpose. Because depression brings your life to standstill, and in the quiet of that standstill you sometimes feel outside yourself. And with that comes a new perspective.
So last December, when I was lying around drinking White Claw all day and binge-watching Orange is the Bluest L Word, I actually didn't feel so much shame anymore, and that gave me a new kind of clarity. I looked back on the last couple years and I saw that I'd been avoiding the obvious.
So, that's what it took for me to finally face the fact that I am a… I am a gay.
Not clickbait.
II
Adam's a great guy and all but... I want Lilith. 🍎
Shame! 🥺
Ok, let's circle back and talk about how a wholesome homo like me wound up in the clutches of the straight agenda.
Well, it starts with denial, and there's two sides to gay denial.
First, there was the period where I repressed or explained away my attraction to women. “Female friendships are just really intense, straight girls have girl crushes too.” And second, I experienced and acted on what I genuinely thought was sexual and romantic attraction to men. And to be honest, I'm still kind of struggling to make sense of all this.
Maybe I'm not quite ready to make this video, but I'm afraid that if I don't, the shame will overpower me again, and I'll slide back into denial. So, while I'm still thinking semi-clearly, let me talk you through the struggle. Because like most queer people, I find nothing more fascinating than an in-depth analysis of my own personality. She's a Libra!
So in 2017, I started taking feminizing hormones. Most people are aware of the more obvious effects of that, like it makes you grow breasts... at least in theory (I just added progesterone, we’ll see if that does anything). But the lesser-known thing is that it has some pretty major effects on your mood and your sexuality.
The first few months I was on hormones I actually wondered if I was now asexual, because the libido I had known before was just gone. But I'm very much not asexual; it just took me a while to adjust to an en-do-cri-no-lo-gi-cal-ly female sex drive.
One of the differences for me is that it's not as obvious now whomst I'm attracted to. Just looking at an attractive person, well… Let's put it this way, it sparks my interest, but it doesn't light my fire. It's not the instant inferno that is testosterone-fueled lust. Instead, it's a slow burn that has to be built up.
Some people call this “demisexual,” which is a term I'm ambivalent about, but I think the concept it describes applies to me. Like, I form little crushes on people based on watching their YouTube videos or whatever, but I don't feel intense sexual attraction to anyone until I get close to them as a friend.
So I have a hard time getting too excited about casual dating, you know? Can't I just find a new best friend, fall insanely in love with her, and then get gay married? I know that's not how this works. I have to play the field.
I also think it's a reason I don't really like porn that much. Because sex without context is just mechanics to me. It's boring. The build-up of desire, that's the interesting part, and the struggle between desire and shame—I shouldn't, but I want to. That's how you build a plotline, kids.
I'm also guessing that this kind of slow-burn sexuality is more common in women than in men. And I wonder if that's a reason why gay men tend to know they're gay at an earlier age than gay women.
When you have teenage-boy testosterone levels, it's harder to be agnostic or mistaken about who you're attracted to. Whereas, there's a lot of gay women who don't realize they're gay until they're in their 30s, or even later. And thank god for them, they make me feel less bad about my wasted youth.
So it's hard for me to use visual sexual interest as a guide to my sexuality. Because I do feel aesthetic attraction towards beautiful people of any gender, and it can be pretty intense in its own right.
I guess the difference for me is that looking at a beautiful woman is more emotionally captivating to me than looking at a beautiful man; which can be moving in it's own way, but it's more like the way I'm moved by, I don't know, the Parthenon. You know, it's sturdy, symmetrical, has impressive columns. And that's not to say it's totally asexual. I mean, I'd fuck the Parthenon. I'd fuck it so hard.
I admit I do have some kind of erotic fascination with masculinity, and maybe that stems from my pre-transition sense of having failed at masculinity, so I'm mesmerized by the real thing.
There's something about the contrast between me and a masculine man that's sexually intriguing to me. Like, I've sometimes pleasantly gasped at the feeling of hairy, muscly arms enfolding my smooth, fragile body. Eee!
Or maybe it's more Freudian. The masculine man as daddy, the archetypal father. The symbolic power of the phallus. Penetration as the ultimate expression of desire and possession. There's a lot of sexual connotations to manhood, and I think that's why I can look at a sexy man and create plausible fantasies in my head, where I'd absolutely enjoy letting him do things to me.
And I can find things I like about male bodies. Like, they're very warm. I love it when you get under the covers with a man and he warms you up. But that's when the lesbian voice comes into my head and says, “But are you attracted to men? Or do you just like being warm?”
My attraction to women is very different. I look at a beautiful woman and it's just like, Oh nooooo. You're gorgeous, you're beautiful… This is going to destroy me! 🙂
You know, it can actually be painful how beautiful a woman is. I've never once been in pain over male beauty. But around Joanne, once I was open about my feelings and things got bad, there'd be moments I'd have to just look away from her and be like, “Don't even enter my line of sight right now, you're too beautiful, I can't stand it.”
There's a kind of sick masochism in wanting someone who doesn't want you back. It's insatiable, like an addiction. And on the flipside, there's an intense erotic thrill in being desired. I think that's what got me interested in men in the first place. It's that they were interested in me. And that's pretty interesting. I've felt desired by men in a way I've never truly felt desired by women.
You know, a man will glower at you with that agitated, carnivorous desperation.
Fuck me up, king! 😩
God that's hot. Gets me every time.
But notice how excitement at the attention and the flattery of being desired is not the same thing as attraction to men. There's a difference between “I want you” and “I like that you want me.”
But for a long time, I confused one for the other. And one reason I was able to do that is that the normative sexual role for women is to be pursued, possessed, desired, seduced, dominated by men—it's all very passive. And in most of the sexual encounters I've had with men, I've taken a very submissive role.
Sometimes I just submit to the glower and let him do things to me. And I do think that the thrill of being desired is a valid thing to want. I like that feeling myself, and I do genuinely enjoy taking on a more submissive role sometimes. But you have to go about it thoughtfully, because if you don't, sexual submission can be a way to avoid confronting what your desires actually are.
It's freedom from freedom. And if you're ashamed of your sexual orientation, and ashamed of your transsexual body, and ashamed of having any sexual feelings at all because of stigma about trans women being fetishists, then relinquishing responsibility for your own desires by letting someone else take control, can be the only way you can enjoy sex at all. And for a while it was almost the only way I could enjoy it.
And I was able to convince myself that that was normal, because the sexual situation of a lot of cis straight women isn't really that much more liberated. Like, I read 50 Shades of Grey years ago, and totally identified with the fantasy. And later I thought that was evidence that I had normative female desires, nevermind that I was identifying with the midlife crisis fantasies of a repressed English housewife longing to be brutalized by a capitalist tyrant.
I mean, not to shame women who genuinely do enjoy a healthier version of that fantasy; I think a lot of women pointlessly suffer under a kind of feminist guilt about that. But what makes me different is that for me, submission to a man was simply the only way I could enjoy sex without shame. And that's a lot of what I did for a couple years, even though my real sexual attraction is to women. Whereas, even in the most patriarchal situation, straight women are ultimately attracted to men, and sexually aroused by male bodies.
Or are they? Gay men certainly are, and gay women are just rhapsodic about women, but a lot of straight women are just kind of “meh” about male bodies and men in general. What is that about? 🧐I just... I just do not understand straight women. I don't think I ever will. And that's okay. I'm just gonna accept my bewilderment, and move on with my lesbian life.
Now what I've been giving you so far is a retrospective analysis, an autopsy of my romantic failings of the last two years. But you have to understand that when I was living through this, I experienced it all very differently, because I didn't have these insights. So I wasn't thinking, “Oh, I'm not really attracted to men, but I enjoy the thrill of being desired by them, so I'm gonna pursue that to distract myself from how ashamed I am of my attraction to women.” No, subconsciously I put my attraction to women on mute, at least until Joanne ruined my life. And I genuinely thought I was attracted to men, which was a lot more than just a frivolous sexual fantasy.
I had a serious long-term boyfriend for a year and a half, who I had very genuine feelings for. Plot twist! Storytime!
So my ex-boyfriend, let's call him Chad — oh and he was a Chad, like full Giga-Chad fantasy—you know, he was very masculine, taller than me, objectively attractive, very charming. Straight women used to tell me all the time they were jealous of me for being with him. And obviously I loved that. To me, Chad represented almost an ideal of manhood, a sort of archetypal romantic lead who swept me off my feet and fulfilled my sick fantasies of being a heterosexual woman.
Now you probably think I'm gonna say that he was just an abstract fantasy to me, but that once it came to actually dating, I realized I didn't like it. But honestly, it's more complicated than that. Like, at the beginning, I was the one who pursued him. And I still think of him as the one genuine boy crush of my life.
When we started dating, it was really exciting. I never had a boyfriend before, and he'd never been with a trans woman before, and we had this adorably heterosexual energy together, like holding hands in the park. It was cute!
This would be a better lesbian story if Chad was a cad. But he wasn't. He was great. He took very good care of me; he was never ashamed to be seen with me, or of his friends and family knowing he was dating me, which, if you're a trans woman, that's a huge deal. He was a lot less ashamed of me than I am of myself. And when I was with him I was not ashamed. And that meant a lot.
So, I really wanted this to work. Like, if I was gonna be with a man, he was the one. And for a year or so, I thought it was working. I enjoyed the time we spent together, I missed him when he was gone, I told him I loved him and I meant it.
But what happened is that by the end of the first year, the initial excitement died down, and while Chad was ready to keep escalating the relationship, I was realizing that something was very seriously emotionally wrong on my end. There was something missing. And when I realized I was in love with Joanne, I was like, “There's that missing feeling.” And I started to understand what my problem was.
Then, last Fall, I posted to Instagram an aloof picture of me with the caption, “Do I actually like men? Or do I just like attention?” And I didn't mean anything serious by that. I was just joking around.
You know, you can post something like that, and a bunch of straight women will respond like, “Yeah, fuck men!”
What is their damage? Well, they're stuck dating men, that's their damage.
But a few people left comments saying, “Oh, are you making a video about comphet? You should make a video about comphet.” And I was like, “What the fuck is comphet?” So I googled it and I learned that “comphet” is short for compulsory heterosexuality. Basically, it's the idea that heterosexuality is socially required of women, and it's so bound up with the conventional idea of what it even means to be a woman, that gay women often mistakenly believe for years that they're attracted to men.
And this Google search led me to a reddit post called the "Am I a Lesbian Masterdoc", and I'm reading through this post like, “Oh no, this sounds terribly familiar.”
"Compulsory heterosexuality is the voice in my head that says I must really be het even when I'm in love with a woman."
"You have every reason to be happy in your relationship with a man, but you just aren't. Everything is going really well, but something is missing and you can't figure out what."
So next thing I know, I'm doing tequila shots at 3 a.m. and taking "Am I a Lesbian?" internet quizzes that were clearly designed for 13-year-olds. And I'm fully a 31-year-old transsexual taking this quiz like, “It's true! Samantha was right! I am a total lez!” 😭😭😭
All the cis gay people watching this video probably wanna kill me right now, 'cause y'all figured this shit out in high school and I'm sitting here in my 30s like 😭😱😰
Well, can I be a melodramatic baby gay for 30 minutes of my lifetime, please? Is that alright with you, the gays?
So, to be honest, I still experience comphet thoughts and fantasies. Like, for a long time, I've had what seemed to be romantic fantasies about marrying a man. But after a lot of introspection, I've realized that this is not really a fantasy of private happiness and fulfillment. It's a fantasy of social prestige and acceptance.
Like, can you imagine if I got married to a tall, handsome man, at an opulent wedding with lots of photographers posting to Instagram? Ugh, I'd be queen of the trannies! I'd be a super heckin valid uwu.
But I don't actually wanna be married, I wanna get married. I wanna have a wedding. Basically, I wanna wear a wedding dress. I want attention, okay? Please pay attention to me.
So I can totally deconstruct the fantasy, but it's still really hard for me to let it go. I cling to the reassuring conformity of heterosexuality. Because there's a level of gender instability and deviancy that's inherent to homosexuality. And until recently, I wasn't secure enough in my gender to handle that.
Lesbianism is a very advanced form of womanhood, and I think I needed to go through the more 101 straight girl experience before attempting anything as difficult as that.
I still have a hard time imagining a happy future for myself as a woman partnered to a woman, and I think that's partly because good lesbian representation in media is so sparse. The best we have is a Showtime melodrama from 15 years ago which I do like (and I like the new one too). But after that, the runner up is maybe not the lesbian representation we need… it's a YouTube show about two drag queens whomst we ship, UNHhhh with Trixie and Katya.
Well, I don't ship them because I have a fully lesbian parasocial internet crush on Katya Zamolodchikova. Don't laugh at me! She's smart, she's funny, she's beautiful, everything I'm looking for in a woman. Sure, some haters and losers will probably try to convince me that Katya is in fact a homosexual man posing as a woman, but you know what? This is a super fucking vulnerable moment in my life, and I don't need this right now!!
I need to be touched by a real woman. I'm losing my goddamn mind. 🤡
It's so deeply embedded in our culture that marrying a man is the end goal of womanhood. And it's not just Disney movies, like, it's the Bible, it's Greek mythology, German fairytales, Victorian novels. The whole weight of cultural history is telling you that what it means to succeed as a woman is to marry a man. And if you're already super dysphoric and insecure about your gender, then to reject that possibility… ahhhh it hurts. It hurts so bad.
But whenever I think about having a long-term partner—not the wedding day but the 1000th morning waking up together—I can only imagine her being a woman. My brain wants a good man to take care of me. But my heart wants a high-maintenance diva to ruin my life. And once I knew that for sure, I thought it would be wrong to stay with Chad.
And this man was like my hinge, he was holding me together. But last December, I broke up with him, because I'm a lesbian, which at least is a good reason.
I'm having a hard time you guys. Leave your pity in the comments.
And I'm starting to regret eating that fruit too. I feel like shit. I think it's the loss of my immortal soul weighing on me.
I could really use a couple Advil and a vodka tonic. I think I might throw some clothes on too. Where's that snake?
III
Ugh, I already miss my heterosexual nails. I know these are too long to be gay, but baby steps, okay? This is hard for me. Getting my acrylics removed? Traumatizing. I feel like I'm detransitioning!
One of these days I will do the lesbian manicure with acrylics on eight fingers. I just have to find the courage to walk into the salon and say, “Hi, I'm a homosexual, please. I want two short nails so I can fuck pussy.”
Shame. 🥺
Let's talk about the shame. Before I was transgendered, I really only dated women, though two of those “women” later turned out to be trans so, I guess we had some way of finding each other.
And attraction to women was never really a problem for me before the transgendering, because I was raised in an alternative lifestyle where men are supposed to be attracted to women. Crazy, I know.
Not that I'm a newcomer to shame, because, oh sweaty, I was doing plenty of things that men are not supposed to do. And before I transitioned, my shame was centered around my being, at the time, a gender non-conforming man, which in my early YouTube videos I dealt with by caricaturing myself and basically leaning in to the public humiliation—one of my classic techniques.
But now, my shame is centered around my failure to be a socially acceptable woman, and the most glaring aspects of that failure are my male past, my sexual orientation, and the severed human heads in my refrigerator.
Killing all those people was not my most feminine moment, but I was having a bad skin day, what was I supposed to do?
There's two problems that kind of multiply together. One, I'm ashamed of being trans. Two, I'm ashamed of being a lesbian. And whatever one times two is, I'm really ashamed of being a trans lesbian. Ew.
It's difficult and risky for me to admit these feelings, because visible queer people are supposed to perform pride. Why is no one talking about the shame? Because we're ashamed of the shame. But we shouldn't be. The shame is a natural result of shaming.
I grew up in a media era where trans women were usually represented as vomit-inducing monstrosities who deserve the violence they bring upon themselves by existing. And I started my transition in the first year of the Trump administration, where there's been constant vilification of trans people in the press, invading women's bathrooms, forcing our insanity on children, and destroying Western civilization with our authoritarian pronouns. It's hard to express just the daily humiliation of being a trans woman under these conditions.
Then there's the little jabs people throw at you, like what my laser technician recently told me: “You must be very courageous to transition, because that is not socially acceptable.” And then she went back to blasting laser beams into my asshole.
And of course there's the Internet, where I used to spend most of my life before the sadness took over. I'm sure we all know that people on the Internet are a wretched, wretched hoard of bigoted attack helicopters.
And the whole point of this channel is that I try to talk sense to these people. I talk to the TERFs and the conservatives and I try to empathize with their point of view and provide a rational response. But a side effect of all that research is that I've acquired a burgeoning vocabulary of self-loathing.
It's seeped into my brain and become a part of me. And this lifelong buildup of shame has become a wound at the heart of my existence, and all I can really do about it is compensate by wearing fancy clothes.
I may be trash, but I am majestic trash, I am resplendent trash, I am couture trash! And I just bought a mid-century, gold-trimmed, Venetian blown-glass decanter, which helps me forget the shame and self-loathing that plagues my every moment. 🙂
Now, I'm guessing that a lot of people will be confused about why I'm so ashamed of being gay when I've already come out as trans, which seems like a bigger deal. To paraphrase what some people have told me, “You're already a transgendered, and a freak's a freak, so who cares what kind of freak?”
Well, first of all, I would like to propose a sociological theory.
Tiffany's Law: All freaks have a deep psychological need to feel superior to a different type of freak.
And trans lesbians are pretty close to the bottom of that pecking order. Who's even left for me to feel superior to, the goddamn Belgians?
Second, coming out as trans wasn't as hard for me, because I did it incrementally over like eight years. At first I was like, “Well, I'm just a man who wears makeup sometimes,” and then I was like, “Actually, it's not just clothes and makeup. I'm pretty gender non-conforming in a lot of ways.” And then I realized I'm not a man at all and I identified as non-binary, and then I started taking hormones, and two months on HRT I woke up one day and said, “It's fine, I'm literally a woman.”
So by the time I came out as a trans woman, that was actually a step up in terms of social acceptability from where I was before. When I was a genderqueer genderfuck, I felt like I didn't fit in anywhere. Whereas, when I started transitioning to female, even though at first I had a lot of the same problems, there was at least a goal in mind—some possible future where I could lead a normal-ish life as a woman.
So the moment I started identifying as a woman was the moment the comphet voice entered my head: Sure I've never been very attracted to men before, but maybe I'm attracted to them now. I'm a woman, right? I've always been a little bi curious and there was that time I kissed a boy when I was drunk. Maybe I can make this work. Let's choose some boys to be attracted to and get started on this.
Of course I wasn't as self-aware as that. My way of explaining it to myself was, “I guess hormones just magically changed my sexual orientation to the socially acceptable one, that's super crazy!”
Shut up, you goddamn lesbo!
God there's so much pressure on trans women to be extremely gender conforming. And even more so if you're a “representative of the community”. You feel like you have to be a Stepford wife or else cis people are gonna throw us all in camps.
And, early in my transition, I kind of worshiped straight trans women. Like, I looked up to them and I wanted to be just like them.
Now back then there were a handful of trans lesbians on YouTube trying to make the case to the masses that being a trans lesbian is a legitimate thing. But in 2017, sweaty, the masses were not having it.
I watched those women get eaten alive. And as a result of my witnessing that at a super fucking vulnerable moment for me, I internalized the message that a trans lesbian is just not an okay thing to be if you wanna be tolerated or respected by anybody other than a handful of communists. So I began my transition with essentially no role model of a widely respected and admired trans lesbian.
And it doesn't help that most forms of transphobia are harsher on gay trans women than they are on straight trans women. Like, take this trope that trans women are men who transition to creep on women in bathrooms. In response to that, it feels really good to be able to say, “I'm not even attracted to women. I'm just a petite heterosexual biogirl. I'm surely not some kind of six-foot monster who likes women.”
*sigh* 😞
Shame! 🥺
It does make me feel like a monster sometimes, like a mutant that has no place in society. And this shame has actually made it more difficult for me to accept that I'm a gay woman, than it was for me to come out as trans in the first place. It's like I made a kind of subconscious bargain where I traded my sexual orientation for my gender identity, and so I finally transitioned only to spend the next couple years living with a different kind of denial. And that denial got pretty deep and pretty dark.
This is painful and incriminating to admit, but not all of my shame came from external bigotry. Some of it came from my own judgment and disgust toward things I saw trans lesbians doing. Like this anime cat girl shit which clearly gets under my skin, and not just because these people have been harassing me for three years.
You see it all over trans Twitter and Reddit, this queasy combination of the hypersexual and the infantile: I'm a heckin' catgirl lesbian cumslut. Meow meow girldick nya nya! Here's the 97th picture of my own legs in thigh-high stripey socks uwu.
What is that about? Is this how women act? Cis people are gonna see this! They're not gonna let us into women's spaces if we act like that!
Now I'm not proud of having these judgmental feelings. But I confess to periodically sinking into these morbid, guilty binges of cringing at embarrassing trans lesbians. And if I was a different type of YouTuber I could've turned this into content.
At my worst, I would sit there telling another trans person, “Why are trans lesbians so cringey? They're making things harder for the rest of us girls.” And that's the real darkness, isn't it? Not even having the decency to openly despise yourself like an honest American. No, just sitting there in absurd denial of who you are as a person, disparaging your own repressed identity to anyone who will listen.
And I'm ashamed of that too. I'm ashamed I sunk that low. But all you can do is try to get better, and I'm trying to get better. I've broken free of the denial, and now I have to break free of the shame. Because shame is literally ruining my life.
I told Joanne that I was working on a video about shame, and she said I might wanna mention that one of the reasons she didn't wanna be with me is that she'd be ashamed to date another trans woman. She said that she feels like relationships between trans women are freakish behavior on the outskirts of society with no attempt to integrate.
These are very painful words to hear from the woman you're in love with. But I understand why she feels that way. Joanne gets validation from dating cis men or cis women, but I can't be the hinge that connects her to mainstream society. And it's maddening to me that she feels that way, because I would have chosen her over every cis woman in the world. But I'm just another worthless freak without the authority of society behind me, so my love doesn't count.
Shame! 🥺
It poisons the soul.
You know, who you love, just like what gender you are, is such a basic part of your humanity. And shame about that cuts to the core of your being. It's not that I'm ashamed of what I did, it's not that I'm ashamed of how I feel, it's that I'm ashamed of who and what I am.
And living in that state of mind is garbage. It's basically hell. Even after I realized my sexuality, I considered just shoving that shit back down and never coming out, because I have all these fears about it.
I'm worried people will take my gender less seriously, I'm worried cis women and straight women I'm friends with will get weird about it, I'm worried I'll die a lonely useless lesbian and that I should've just married a man 'cause at least then there'd be someone to kill spiders and fix the fucking sink.
I'm worried I'll lose my straight male audience on YouTube. Although, I mean, love you boys, and please keep the attention coming 'cause I need all the validation I can get right now, but, I will be fine without you. And in any case, when has a woman's being a lesbian ever stopped a man from taking a swing at it?
I actually thought about marrying a man anyway, just sacrificing my sexual orientation to regain that safe, comfortable, shameless feeling I used to have when walking down the street holding Chad's hand, feeling like I'd succeeded as a woman.
But if I don't deal with this now and work towards accepting myself, then I'm just gonna be in the same situation in ten years when I'm 41-years-old and married to a man and having these same feelings.
So it's time for this to stop, because literally the only good thing about being gay is doing gay shit. And as long as I'm ashamed of my sexuality, no one's gonna wanna do gay shit with me. As I like to say, “If you can't love yourself, how in the hell you gonna prop up your narcissistic delusions?”
So I'm trying to stay positive. Maybe everyone hates trans lesbians now, but just you wait. We all know how trends work.
In 10 years being a trans lesbian will be the coolest, hippest, chicest thing imaginable, and all the people who talk shit now will forget they ever said a word. That's right, even the straight trans girls will be making out with each other just for the clout, like, “We can be lesbians too! We're edgy!” Oh it's gonna be Madonna and Britney at the 2003 VMAs all over again, mark my words. And among cis lesbians, oh, it will actually be a sign of prestige to have a trap waifu.
I can dream, right?
One you've tasted one forbidden fruit, why stop there?
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