can we please stop making the only LGBT+ narrative we see “i always knew?”
like, i didn’t always know i liked girls too. i wasn’t having crushes on them or kissing them on the playground when i was five years old like you see on tv or read in books. i didn’t know for sure that i’m bi until literally this year (i’m 17 as of writing this). a former friend of mine is a trans girl. she didn’t always know. she didn’t realize she was trans until she was nearly eighteen years old. some people don’t realize it until they’re twenty, or forty, or sixty.
some people do always know. good for them! but can we please please please make it known that you don’t have to have always known for your identity to be valid? it makes it so difficult for people who are figuring themselves out later in life, because it feeds into this idea of “why didn’t i know it before? is this even real? if i haven’t known i’ve felt this way all along, how do i know i feel it now?” and that’s only making worse what’s already such a difficult time in life
give me eighty year old women who are just figuring out they’re lesbians. give me middle aged accountants who realize they’re actually trans. give me a guy who doesn’t know until he’s twenty-eight that he’s actually into dudes. god just please give us some other narrative, so we can be reassured that even if it took us a while to get there, our identity is no less valid than that of a person who’s known they’re LGBT+ since elementary school. stop telling LGBT+ people that that’s the only way they’re really LGBT+
This is especially important when you consider that older folks didn’t grow up with this vocabulary. It’s hard to say “I always knew” when your identity didn’t even have a name while you were growing up.
And there are so, so many of us who had to reason with, deny, or were simply oblivious to ourselves because of the cisheteronormative society we are raised in.
I had sexual attraction to women from a young age…..but I couldn’t identify it as such because I thought that wasn’t a possibility, so it never occurred to me. I didn’t know.
Sure, I always felt different growing up, and had a disconnect from femininity, but I want aware that I could be trans until I was 15, and even then I vehemently denied the possibility because wow, there’s no way I was one of /them/ right??
And Jesus, once I accepted my attraction to women, it took many years after that to understand completely that I was ALLOWED to be attracted to more than one gender. And I most certainly did not always know.
I may have always been myself inside, but I did not always know who I was or what I was able to be. And many of us have had ourselves buried deep down for a long time, and we are no less valid for digging our way out at different times, or not realizing there was something buried there until much later.
Until I was 30, the only trans narratives I ever encountered were “I always knew” or disgusting stereotypes. And I knew neither of those fit me. So I actively rejected the idea that I could be trans. It took stumbling across positive genderqueer spaces, identifying that way for a while, trying to bury it again, and then finally realizing that what I thought was my “masc” side was a defensive reaction before I figured myself out.
The narratives, the terminology; none of it existed when I was a kid. I didn’t know because I couldn’t have known. I knew I was disconnected from and kinda squicked/scared by masculinity, but that’s a long way from even questioning gender.