Ever since I’ve become super out about being trans, I’ve also become much more comfortable recognizing that I’m way more sexually/romantically fluid than I thought I was.

When I was still feeling disempowered about my transness, I felt this sort of impetus to only be attracted to women, as if by some convoluted logic that would somehow disaggregate my identity from the assumption that I was a cis woman… that if I wasn’t “trans enough” for people, being “queer enough” was a marginally better alternative.

It doesn’t make much sense to me now looking back at it. Obviously a queer cis person who dates someone of the other binary gender isn’t in fact any less queer than anyone else in the LGBTQIA+ community. Nor does my being identified as being solely attracted to women serve as emblematic of my transness as an AFAB person.

But for whatever reason, I was worried that dating a boy would necessitate my being seen as a girl. At the very least dating a heterosexual boy. I still do not think I could ever be involved with a hetero guy for the ways in which that would feel like a disavowal of my trans identity, but this is the same reason I have a lot of complicated feelings about dating women who staunchly identify as lesbian. I would not be comfortable dating someone who is only romantically and sexually attracted to women. The fact that the person is a guy isn’t the problem.

It’s a shame and problematic and sometimes I wish I could go back to my early queer years and call myself out for some internalized biphobia/bi-erasure. And the heteronormative, butch/femme assumptions in the aforementioned logic. How I denied my own attraction to a lot of masculine non-binary cuties and men.

While I still find myself gravitating towards women and femmes, people are just really attractive y’all and life’s too short not to queer it the hell up.