Three years ago, on trans day of visibility, me and my girlfriend of two years broke up at 2 am in the morning on a park bench. It was a mess with lots of sobbing and snot and declarations of love.
But we couldn't be together — because I wasn't a lesbian.
Not anymore.

Not just because I identified as a man at the time.
I didn't feel attracted to women at all anymore.
In fact I didn't feel attracted to anyone anymore.
We both agreed it would be unfair for her to be trapped in a relationship where my heart wasn't quite in it the way hers was.

At the time it was all a tragic mystery. I really loved this girl. I had had to fight for us to be together before we started dating, and I really, really wanted to be attracted to her so badly. She was amazing, just my type and I still wanted to spend my life with her.

I could remember being very attracted to her in the beginning, but something had changed and replaced it with a weird sense of fear.

I felt ashamed and disgusted with myself whenever I thought of us touching.

I got anxious when she came too close and I felt pressured whenever she asked me touch her.
And more than anything, I was afraid of sleeping with her.

That didn't make any sense to me. I really loved her.
I concluded that I must have been mistaken about my sexuality.

I knew other transmen who had "switched" sexuality as they began transition and thought that must be the case for me as well. That I was now living as my "true self" and that being a lesbian must have been part of my wrong former identity. That it was "comp het" for me as a man.

I was convinced I must be attracted to men instead. Being in transition & admiring male bodies all the time, it even felt true. I had never been comfortable with the idea of being with a man before — but I became convinced that I must have just been too dysphoric pre-op and HRT.

And so I tried to make myself seek out men and all I'll say on that is... It didn't work out.
I could enjoy the thought of being with men... if and only if I imagined myself as a different, male person, and even then it felt strangely empty.
It felt completely removed from... Me.

Meanwhile I still had comically nervous reactions to even just reading the word "lesbian". I didn't want to have anything to do with that anymore. I didn't want anyone to see me as one, least of all lesbian women themselves.
And I still felt ashamed thinking of myself with women.

What always came up for me when I imagined that... was how disappointed my imaginary female partner would be that I wasn't actually male. There was a sense of pressure that I had to make up for that lack of maleness somehow.
That obviously didn't feel good at all.

And at the same time, I also couldn't bear being seen as simply a female by that imaginary woman. It brought up a similar feeling of shame — that I would be second-best to a male, that being with me as a female would be like "foreplay" to the main event of being with a man.

I didn't connect the dots until about 1 1/2 years later, around the same time when I first started to doubt that transition was truly helping me the way I had hoped it would.

I'm sure it's obvious, but I was deep in internalized homophobia.

By that point I had so many messed up ideas about lesbian sexuality — that lesbian sex didn't count, that all women would prefer a man when it came down to it, that two women couldn't ever be as intimate as man & woman. That there was something bad & fake about lesbian sexuality.

I have some ideas where those thoughts came from. What's important is that I realized that they must have come from somewhere, and that they were in contrast to the romantic feelings I had for women.
It also made me realize what was behind some of what I experienced as dysphoria.

Dysphoria and how I felt about my sexuality were completely entangled.
Being disgusted by being a lesbian made me want to be a male even more, and trying & failing to become a man disconnected me from my sexuality and made me feel even more ashamed of what I was & wasn't.

When I broke up with my ex-girlfriend I had just had my mastectomy. I couldn't even lift my arms properly. And on my mind were all the other surgeries I wanted, and felt I needed, to be happy.
I looked at my body as a collection of random body parts, most of which distressed me.

That I didn't feel sexual attraction back then, or at least struggled to actually physically want it, makes perfect sense to me now. How could I have?
Back then I tried to ignore I even had a body most of the time. Wanting someone to be intimate with it was completely beyond me.

Now I'm a lesbian "again". Have always been, of course, but now I actually feel connected to that part of myself.
I'm really glad I made it (back?) to this point, but there's also sadness over what was lost along the way. Both in terms of time and energy (mine and my ex's!)...

And literal body parts.

I still feel pretty disconnected from my body most of the time and I'm sure part of "why" is that I still avoid it a lot.
But I'm not as ashamed to be a female who is into females anymore.

This date will probably always remind me of being on the way back home, heartbroken, confused, still in bandages and already preoccupied with planning more surgery to fix a body that didn't actually need fixing, and just of how lost I felt.

The me from back then would be reeally surprised to meet me now and see how all of it unfolded.