Background
I grew up in a liberal family in downtown Toronto. I was dressed in practical clothes that I could play around in outside – overalls, jeans, shorts and t-shirts, running shoes. I was surrounded by people of all types. I had a couple close family members who were gay and who had partners that were accepted as members of the family.
I am fairly introverted and luckily, so is most of my immediate family so I was raised in an introvert-friendly environment which helped me develop self-confidence. I don’t know whether it is my introversion or just my personality but I tend to figure myself out using introspection rather than trial and error type experiences. This is probably why I was a bit of a late bloomer, sexually speaking.
Sexuality
Throughout junior high and into the beginning of high school, as my teenage hormones started to make themselves known, I realized I was more interested in the girls around me than the boys. This was partly an innate sexual experience but I do remember thinking about what personality traits I liked in other people and discovered that the females around me had more of these traits.
So at some point in grade 9 I told my mom that I knew I liked girls but I wasn’t sure whether or not I liked boys. She asked me a couple of questions to help me figure it out and I came back a couple of weeks later to tell her I didn’t think I liked boys. This is how I came out to my family. I was also out at school around the same time.
The only time I remember being in the closet was when I went to undergrad and wanted to see what my dorm-mates were like before coming out. That lasted all of two weeks. I couldn’t stand it.
As far as I could tell I had three labels to choose from – queer (nice all-encompassing label but misunderstood by older generations that weren’t part of the reclaiming process and lacking the specificity I wanted), gay (general term for homosexual but usually applied to men), or lesbian (women who like women). I never liked the label ‘lesbian’, originally because it’s a noun instead of an adjective. It felt like I was putting myself in a category instead of describing a part of myself. Now, I don’t like the term because it is strongly female gendered both for me and my partner. So I generally used the label ‘gay’ but I was also comfortable with ‘queer’. More on my labels here.
I didn’t start dating anyone until undergrad, mostly because I knew all the queer kids in my high school and wasn’t interested in any of them and didn’t know many people beyond that sphere. I met my now husband in the summer after second year and we were married six years later in a lovely gay wedding on a beach just outside Halifax.
When he transitioned from female to male I had a brief re-look at my sexuality, decided I still liked the label gay because of its gender neutrality, and attempted to field questions from family and well-meaning acquaintances about whether his transition means I’m straight (more on this here). I also like saying I’m Jake-sexual. At this point I am a person who likes people who are similar to me. I am attracted to that sense of same-ness in my relationship and for me, this falls squarely in the homosexual category, regardless of gender.
Gender
My first experience of my gender as anything other than female was about a year after I came out as gay. I started having days where I felt like a guy. I already had mostly tom-boy type clothes, nothing extremely feminine, and didn’t particularly like dresses, skirts, leggings, makeup, or painting my nails. But this was different. I felt like a boy. So I wore my most boy-ish clothes and tried to make sense of what was happening.
There was a guy in my year named Ray who had a locker down the hall from me and on the ‘boy’ days I felt like someone was talking to me when they called his name. It just happened.
After a couple of days up to about a week, I would switch back to feeling like Meaghan, feeling female again, and go back to wearing whatever I wanted. A week later, I’d have another few days of feeling like I was a boy named Ray. I ended up separating my closet out into girlier clothes and boy clothes so I could just go to one side or the other depending on the day.
After about three months of this I was confused, frustrated, annoyed, and had no idea how to explain what I was feeling to myself or anyone else. This was before google, and YouTube, where you can search for ambiguous things and hopefully find someone describing a similar experience. So, March break of that year while we were at the cottage, I took a notebook and found a secluded spot to sit. I wrote a list of personality traits that I felt like described me when I was Meaghan, and a list of personality traits that described me when I was Ray, and I connected the ones that were the same (about half of each list) and decided that these traits were me. I couldn’t have two people, or spirits, or genders fighting each other for supremacy all the time. I needed some semblance of consistency and identity and these traits became the core of that. For many years I forgot about this three-month experience and left my gender alone. For the majority of the time it remained slightly female of center.
When I was in undergrad I was part of the queer group on campus. I met a few people who were gender neutral or questioning whether they were trans, four or five of whom either transitioned during that time or have transitioned since. I was exposed to new language about gender identity and expression and learned the basics of what it meant to transition. The non-binary label was not pervasive in society or even queer communities yet. I felt a vague envy of the people who presented as androgynous and identified as gender neutral or gender-fluid but didn’t delve into it more than that. My presentation became more masculine, or androgynous. This has fondly been termed my ‘butch phase’ by my older sister.
I was thrown into the deep end of the gender identity pool when my husband started questioning whether he might be trans. With my full support, he explored various aspects of his masculinity and eventually came to understand that he was male and began his transition. Throughout this process we learned all about physical and social dysphoria, binders, packers, how to navigate the medical and legal systems for transition, and had nearly daily conversations about gender (and still do).
As he started being read as male we were suddenly seen as a straight couple. This partly bothered me because it took away our visible queer identity but it also put me squarely in the ‘female’ box. This was uncomfortable enough that it was partly what triggered me to revisit my own gender identity. But now, I had the language to understand it and the tools to explore it.
My experience of my gender and process for exploring it are significantly different from what my husband went through but, seeing as we were both assigned female at birth (AFAB), many of the same strategies are useful, not to mention having a partner that intimately understands what I’m going through. So far my exploration process is mostly on a personal level (which I will now be sharing with you) but I haven’t ruled out the possibility of some component of social, medical, or legal transition in the future.
On the Horizon
Fairly recently we have also been trying to conceive. This in itself has been an interesting process for a number of reasons and is the other part of what triggered me to revisit my gender identity (see the Pregnancy and Parenting section for more recent updates). Hopefully, at some point I will be pregnant which I am anticipating will come with its own shift in gender and dysphoria, requiring new management strategies and tools. And then of course, there will eventually be navigating being a gender queer parent. Exciting times ahead!