One of the more frustrating things about being trans: when it comes to relationship movies, neither straight stories nor gay stories have ever really resonated with me all that much.

It kind of goes along with the fact that I've generally felt awkward in both straight and gay relationships, as well. This is a huge part of why I identify as "queer", because my trans ness really informs the way I relate to people, especially in this sense.

Pre-transition, I couldn't figure out why my relationships never quite worked. I later had a therapist explain to me that straight men were expecting someone who behaved like a straight woman, not like them.

And lesbians were expecting someone who behaved like a lesbian, not like a man. Relationships with bi/pan/queer folks of all types have generally been the ones that have worked the best for me, both pre- and post-transition, but they can be hard to come by.

Being a fairly binary-identified trans man, my interests and behavior are generally fairly firmly in the "masculine" box, but my reactions, choices, and interactions with people are HEAVILY informed by the 30 years I spent as a woman, pre-transition. I can't turn that off.

As a result, I'm kind of a hybrid, and that has a pretty profound effect on how my relationships tend to look. And I've never really found a movie, tv show, or even book that really depicts the way I experience relationships all that well.

With "straight" relationship movies, I identify strongly with both halves, generally, and that changes the way I feel about the film, and the way I interact with it. With "gay" ones, I actually have an even harder time, because I actually haven't had most of those experiences.

The same thing could be said of my real-life experiences, as well. Women are always kind of taken aback when I take their side in an argument, or agree that a guy is an asshole/etc, instead of taking the side I'm "supposed to". It sometimes makes people uneasy.

But I also find myself trying to explain men's viewpoints to women from almost a third-person perspective, because I know both sides of that coin fairly well at this point, while identifying with neither of them all that solidly.

All this boils down to gender being far more influential and pervasive in the way we interact with the world, and thus are depicted by it and the media, than most people realize.

Pre-transition, much of the gendered nature of the world and our interactions with it was invisible to me, outside the typical "men like X, women like Y" type stuff. Transitioning put everything into a high-def perspective, and I can't turn it off.

I really loved Sense8, because I felt it was one of the first/best depictions of relationships that didn't really conform to any extant "standard" that Hollywood/TV usually stands by. But there's not been all that much, outside of that.

Media, please make more queer stories that aren't "queer stories". Have queer characters in your story, but don't make the story about queerness. It's really not as hard as it seems.

This thread brought to you by a Twitter post I saw of screen caps from relationship movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 500 Days of Summer, and Call Me By Your Name.