Trans men and lesbian labels: what is your perspective?
I was first a bit hesitant to go ahead and ignite this discussion because I’ve seen that this tends to get pretty heated way too quickly across many different online platforms but my curiosity and desire to understand has convinced me to do so anyway. Please keep in mind that I am not trying to invalidate anybody or grift, I am only trying to get a perspective that I wasn’t able to do so with my offline LGBT community and simultaneously be able to interact with you guys.
In the past couple years, I have noticed an increasing discourse around trans men (not trans masculine individuals) identifying as lesbians which seems to polarise the community and divide it into two major camps: the ones that either don’t understand or disagree with these two labels being able to coexist at the same time and to those who claim that this is indeed possible (read valid) and it very much depends on each individual how they experience their gender, sex, sexuality, and the relationship of the three. The most common explanation that I came across was that their pre-transition sexuality is something deeply engraved within their identity since this was (and still is) the label that they identified the most with and therefore it is something inherent to them. Although I understand that jumping from one label to the other is very difficult (speaking from my own treacherous experience of fully connecting with my sexuality and accepting my lesbianism) and requires a lot of soul searching and time, wouldn’t the lesbian label be a transitional identity in case of trans men who are only attracted to women and/or female presenting individuals? I guess to put the finger exactly on the question that I’m trying to ask here is that what is the exact dynamic between going through the process of transition and redefining your sexuality accordingly since terms as gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual are, according to definitions, are individuals who identify as women and are attracted to the same gender, and so on. Is there a piece that I am still missing here?
Having all that said, this brings me to another topic: labels can be constraining. Everyone has their own individual experience, and sometimes it’s the case that you cannot identify with any of them. Wouldn’t therefore be more appropriate to just not use them at all if they don’t fit, rather than bending them? I know that this took a bit of a linguistic turn lol but I feel like this might be relevant to my previous question so that’s why I decided to include it.
Once again, I hope this does not offend anyone and if it does, then I apologise in advance. I am super curious on what you guys have to say!!!