10/27/2021 It is powerful social coercion to have all your peers treat you like you're evil and outcast you for something like thisRead Now At 14 (in early 2010s) I came out as a (straight) trans man. Over the next two years my group of friends formed and there were about 10-20 queer identified people in this group, most of which were trans or nonbinary. Pretty much everyone was bi or pansexual.
At a party when I was 17, a gay male friend hit on me. I was confused about why because I thought I didn't look male at all (I was very dysphoric about it) but I was deep in queer theory so took the validation of my identity. He kept pushing and trying to kiss me but I rejected him because I'm only interested in women. When I said this, he got sad and said he'd been questioning his identity and feeling very "femme", so that shouldn't be an issue. I said I'm still not interested and it got awkward so I moved somewhere else. Later on, another friend came up to me and said I upset him, questioned why I wasn't interested, and got it out of me that it was because he was born male (I even said I would if he transitioned!) For the next hour I was relentlessly questioned by the group, called transphobic (trans man at the time), and just generally insulted. All for not wanting to hook up with *one person*, who said for the first time that night that they were questioning their identity. I was terrified at the time and feel sick looking back on the event. This wasn't just emotional manipulation by one person, this was group bullying with the intention of coercing me into having sex with someone! They kept saying "you don't have to have sex with anyone, but your reasons for not are transphobic" (paraphrase), as well as "analyse your genital preferences" stuff, which at the time made me feel awful and trapped. It is powerful social coercion to have all your peers treat you like you're evil and outcast you for something like this, the "you don't have to" means NOTHING. I left the party early and lost in total about 20 friends from that event after it spread. After this was when I began questioning what I believed around gender identity and sexuality, especially where it was at odds with how my own sexuality worked. I searched online for similar experiences and found loads of lesbians talking about similar pressures. I posted about the event on tumblr and started getting called terf in anonymous messages pretty quickly. Ironically this led me to radical feminism and my eventual detransition (desistance?). One thing I want older LGBT people to understand: this is not fringe online stuff. This is the *mainstream* belief system in young queer circles. Comments are closed.
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