I Came Out at 53. My Sexuality Came Out Later.
Estrogen redecorates more than the body.
This morning, I woke up to an article on Medium by The Land Of Green Ginger.
A Trans Woman Coming to Terms With How Transition Changed My Sexuality
It’s not a lack. It’s different. And sometimes more meaningful.
I’ve never told a story like this on Medium or Substack. After reading it, I was, to say the least, inspired.
So, after a long morning and afternoon of writing this and other things, here’s my story.
A pair of teenagers on the television was holding my attention on a Thursday night. I was fifty-six. I’d been on estrogen for two and a half years. The teenagers were fictional brothers named Conrad and Jeremiah Fisher, at the center of The Summer I Turned Pretty, which had premiered on Prime Video in June of 2022, and I’d ignored every recommendation to watch it for months before letting an Amazon algorithm wear me down.
What I hadn’t expected was the heart business.
Not theirs. Mine.
When Christopher Briney’s Conrad turned his attention to the girl, Isabella, at the center of the show, I felt it. When Gavin Casalegno’s Jeremiah grinned at his best friend’s sister, I felt it again. My chest did the thing a chest does when a stranger you can’t have walks into your line of sight and registers as someone you’d like to lose sleep over. The thing my chest had only ever done for women.
I sat up.
I’ve spent my entire adult life telling myself, and anyone who asked, that I liked women. The premise had survived two marriages. It had survived thirty years of gender dysphoria I couldn’t yet name. It had survived coming out as transgender at fifty-three, nine days after a Labor Day Sunday on Highway 11, I’ve written about elsewhere. It had survived two and a half years of hormones. The premise was the one piece of my interior life that had ever felt settled.
Estrogen, it turns out, edits things you didn’t ask it to edit.
Before The Hormones
I came up through the 1970s and ‘80s in a small South Dakota town, then a college campus in southern Minnesota, then a road life with a touring band. Every space I moved through was a binary I never thought I would escape. By every external metric, I was a man who dated women. A high school girlfriend. A college girlfriend. A first wife. A second wife, who’s still my wife and the spine of every chapter that follows. I didn’t notice men. Given my long-established gender dysphoria, boys in locker rooms made me nervous, and I read that nervousness as the wariness I’d learned of men in a house run by a patriarch I feared. Sexual attraction to men was not part of my vocabulary. The category did not occur to me yet.
In my thirties, somewhere inside a long depression I wouldn’t start to understand for another decade, I caught my eye drifting in a way that didn’t fit the story. A man in a meeting. A man at a concert. The noticing was brief, the noticing was vague, and the noticing happened often enough that I sat with the word bisexual for a few weeks one summer and put it back on the shelf. I was married. I wasn’t going to test anything. Whatever the noticing was, it was a footnote.
In September of 2019, I came out to my therapist as transgender. Nine days after that first appointment, I started spironolactone. A few months later, I added estradiol. Through it all, I assumed the sexuality footnote would stay a footnote. I expected to be a lesbian when I got to the other side. I told my wife I’d be a lesbian when I got to the other side. We were both planning around a known quantity.
The known quantity turned out to be wrong.
January 27, 2023
Three months after the Conrad-and-Jeremiah surprise, Taylor Swift dropped the music video for “Lavender Haze.” Her love interest in the video was Laith Ashley De La Cruz, a Dominican-American model and actor. A trans man.
I watched it twice.
The first watch was the kind any Swiftie does for any new video: I was hunting Easter eggs, admiring the wardrobe choices, and trying to figure out which song would get the next video. The second watch was different. The second watch was me sitting on my couch, realizing that the love interest at the center of the frame was not making my brain do the thing brains do when a beautiful person on screen reads as someone else’s beautiful person. He was making my brain do the thing brains do when a beautiful person on screen reads as beautiful, period.
A trans man. A handsome trans man with a jawline that absolutely cannot be earned through gym work alone, lying in bed next to Taylor Swift as she traced a galaxy across his back.
Hmm, I thought.
A few weeks later, I was halfway through an episode of Shameless when Elliot Fletcher walked into a scene as Trevor, the trans community organizer who becomes Ian Gallagher’s boyfriend in seasons seven and eight. Trevor is patient, articulate, frequently put-upon by Ian’s chaos, and, as Fletcher plays him, distractingly good-looking. I lost the plot. I rewound.
The pattern was getting hard to deny. Cis men on a screen. Trans men on a screen. The reactions felt the same, which was suspicious, since I’d spent decades being certain the reactions to one were impossible.
More than bisexual? I asked the ceiling.
The ceiling did not answer. The ceiling rarely does.
