to lesbian, or not to lesbian.
aka a long word vomit reflecting on my queer identities.
(* Names for the story below have been changed.)
I remember the first time I was called a lesbian was in 4th grade. There was this boy, a grade older, who was best known for his fluffy dark hair, his legendary prowess in Four Square, and the girls' liking for him.
One day in class, he pointed a single, child-sized finger at me. I was dressed in an oversized shirt and athletic shorts. He said blankly, still pointing, "you're a lesbian." It sounded half-confused and half-venomous, like he wasn't sure if he should be questioning me or insulting me.
"You always pretend to be a boy." His voice rose with the triumph of his killer argument, "you kissed Ava behind the slide!"
Ava, who he said had been his crush since the beginning of this year. Ava--clever, sporty, sunny, and beautiful Ava. Ava--who had asked me to kiss her during a game of truth or dare, curious and giggling. Ava--my best friend at the time, who cuddled me as we slept on a mattress at my birthday sleepover. Ava--whose kiss I enjoyed more than I should have.
For the rest of the year, "lesbian" became synonymous with my name. My peers would hurl that word at me like an insult, but I didn't particularly understand why it was an insult. So I liked girls; shouldn't everybody like girls too? Liking girls was cool, I thought, until my mother told me I would get over this so-called phase when I turned sixteen. I didn't bring it up with her, or other people, again.
It's been almost a decade since that baby's-first-queer-flagging situation, and today I still wrestle with whether or not I can call myself a lesbian, and really--what lesbianism means to me.
My entire life I've been queer (in the dictionary definition) amongst my peers. I hate to sound all; "I'm not like other girls", but I quite literally wasn't like the girls--because I was a boy. When I realized this six years ago, I thought things would be easier; I'd be reassured in my identity and I would never have this conflict with myself ever again.
But this conversation never stays dead. I've jumped across different labels ever since my first queer realisation. I was a cishet girl, then a possibly cis bisexual girl, then a bisexual transgender boy, then a possibly gay transgender boy, then a bisexual grey-asexual transmasculine person, and now a lesbian greyace transmasculine bigender butch boygirl (I know, try explaining that to your grandmother). Even in the LGBTQ+ community, away from the restrictive boxes and binaries of cishet society, I kept reidentifying myself every time I noticed the last label didn't perfectly encapsulate my experiences in a way that was understandable and acceptable to others.
Nothing felt truly fitting, and I was hesitant to label myself anything that other LGBTQ+ folks would find confusing at best, or offensive at worse. I somehow felt queer even within queerness.
The first part of my dilemma are the matters of attraction. I identify as a lesbian, yet feel conflicted about my primary attraction to (exclusively) fictional men. I love fictional men, and the vast majority of my crushes have been fictional men--hell, my entire website was originally dedicated to a male RPG character. In real life, however, I really only feel attracted to women and what few relationships I pursued were all with women. In the past, when male friends confessed that they had a crush on me (which I was completely oblivious to), I guiltily disappointed them with rejections. I could admire their kindness, their masculinity, their passion, and sometimes their physical appearances--yet I could not for the life of me ever imagine dating or hooking up with them. My heart belongs to a woman; I can only see myself marrying and raising a family with a woman in the future. Does that still make me a lesbian? Does the fact that I can appreciate a well-written, charismatic fictional man change that?
I’ve also wondered if my fixations on these fictional men, and occasional eyes for real-life men wasn’t attraction at all, but something deeper and maybe a bit creepy depending on how you looked at it. Maybe I didn’t want them; maybe I wanted to be them. Many of the characters and people I gravitated toward were the archetypal masculine men who embodied the traits I wished for myself. I wanted Leon Kennedy's handsome looks, his wit, his determination, and his physical and mental strength. I found myself ogling at my cousin's hairy and muscular arms, toned from years of bouldering/rock-climbing, wishing I had the same physicality. I thought I had a crush on a fellow student in my senior geography class, because I could appreciate his kind, soft-spoken demeanour yet sharp and bold humour. I think in this way, my gender dysphoria and gender identity can sometimes complicate how I define my sexuality. If I found them appealing, was it because I was drawn to them romantically, or because they were men I wished I could be?
And speaking of, it's time to talk about gender (egad). I identify as male, but not male in the same way a cisgender man may feel male. I feel male in the same way a butch lesbian may call himself a man, daring to defy gender expectations by straddling the line between both sides. I feel male in the sense that I have created my own maleness that is separate from what patriarchal society has conceived; the kind of maleness inspired by the smart, empathetic, and gentle masculinity I saw in my father, my brother, my grandfathers, and others. Those statements make perfect sense to me, yet still feels unexplainable when I try to justify it to others. I exist in this paradox of gender, where the words "boy" and "lesbian" do not feel like a contradiction, but instead like a natural coexistence. The world, however, does not always understand it that way.
There are days when I feel at peace with everything, and then there are days when I wonder if I am "queer enough" for the labels I have chosen or if I am "allowed" to call myself a lesbian when my experience doesn’t fit the neatly packaged definition. But at the end of the day, language is meant to serve me, not the other way around. I don't need to fit into a single, rigid box. I don't think that my contradictory labels are failures of self-categorization or misappropriation of queer identities--they're evidence of the complexity that makes me human.
Maybe in a few years I'll change my labels again. Maybe I'll never find the perfect word that encapsulates everything I am. Maybe I am not meant to. And that's okay—revolutionary, even. To exist outside neat categorisation is to challenge the very systems that created those categories in the first place.
Maybe the beauty of queerness is that I get to be my own definition.