Transheterosexual Ostracism in Queer Spaces:
by Tigris
Published: 01/06/2024
Last Updated: 01/06/2024
I've never written on this topic outside of ranting on more casual terms, so I don't expect it to be perfect. I lack the right touch to be a proper queer essayist. However, there's a definite dearth of writing on this topic given the low numbers of transhets like myself and I wanted to say my piece. Transheterosexuality, or transhet as I will continue to use, refers to a transgender person who experiences sexual attraction to the opposite gender. A transgender woman attracted to men, a transgender man attracted to women, and nonbinary people who consider themselves straight would be examples.
The main 'pushbacks' so to speak seem to come from general ignorance of our existence and similarly ignorant equivocation of straight trans people with cisgender straight people's life experiences. For many within the queer community, the concept of being both transgender and heterosexual seems to be unthinkable. I believe this would come from the modern trans community having a large majority of people with non-heterosexual sexual orientations (so the culture of the trans community is based on this assumption), trauma-fuelled wariness or a compensatory dislike of the opposite gender after transition leading to aggression towards fellow trans folk for siding with the enemy, and not believing anybody in their right mind would 'choose' to be straight. This is combined with the general communal repulsion to Straightness as a nebulous concept that has had a role in various exclusionary behaviours in the past: bisexual people in relationships with a different gender and asexual people are two groups I recall being aligned with straight people to doubt or outright mock their place in the community. Along with the general framing of all forms of heterosexuality being non-queer, embarrassing, and unimportant through jokes intended to 'turn the tables'.
I also wonder if fandom's focus on putting all characters same-sex relationships (not a bad thing on its own), usually in the form of disregarding bisexuality and maligning/ignoring the woman in a canonical relationship, and balking at the idea of enjoying M/F pairings regardless of if characters involved are queer, has shaped quite a few people's values. As in, they view queer people who are not in relationships like this, who talk about different-gender attraction, as lost souls in need of pushing towards the light. They feel more justified in this behaviour because of popular jokes on the sexuality of fictional characters. This is most clear over the internet, where uninvited doubting, 'headcanoning', and joking about strangers' sexuality/relationships with the view that being (exclusively) attracted to the opposite gender makes you a better person is extremely popular, even when this involves transhets as a target. It's also common to do this using stereotypes: any trans man who looks young or feminine or behaves in a way considered effeminate must be gay (and if he is openly straight, he is in the closet), for example, despite the various obvious issues with this reasoning.
Think about how you would feel if your identity was speculated on, doubted, mocked, and never taken seriously not only by your oppressors but by your own marginalised community that was meant to be a sanctuary. Being straight and trans is a strange experience where nobody at all seems to truly accept you except your own. You are made very alone, ashamed, and repressed even in spaces where you are supposed to be free to be yourself and where you are essentially fighting the same fight. You are simultaneously too queer (your heterosexuality is taken as 'basically gay'; cishets call themselves 'super straight' to make sure you know you're not desirable) and not queer enough (your heterosexuality is taken seriously by other queer people and as a form of privilege, you are no longer allowed to discuss your sexual orientation as punishment for fraternising with the enemy).
I hear from some bisexual people, too, that they avoid discussing being attracted to the opposite gender around a queer friend group out of fear of being mocked. They focus entirely on their same-gender attraction so they can fit in with the community that treats it as the only acceptable option. I've heard bisexual trans men avoid relationships with women they are attracted to, or talking about sexual attraction to women, because they don't want to be treated as a straight man (and therefore as a hostile force) by their community; they prefer relationships with the same gender because if they are not in them, they will lose their friends and community's respect. Surely this reflects the issue with how these sentiments affect queer people?
It creates the feeling that being transgender is second-best to being gay, that a heterosexual transgender person is 'incomplete', 'assimilationist', or 'not really queer' while a gay person is less likely to be seen this way. It silences transhets into never contributing thoughts on their attraction and the intersection of being transgender and heterosexual to the conversation out of fear of being shot down for being off-topic and talking over gay people, despite also being cast out of the conversation by cisgender straight people. Transhets have formed a very small community online that is more fraught with depressive and hopeless posts about feeling cast aside by other queer people and isolated from others than the positive posts I wished to find. I don't believe this is intentionally done by most, but in a way, the hierarchy reminds me of some sentiments of the 'drop the T' movement where anti-transgender campaigners criticise the inclusion of trans people within the queer community with the aim to create a space only for (cisgender) people who experience attraction to the opposite sex. Oftentimes the trans experience is belittled or said to be much different, and less important, to being gay, and therefore should have its own community. While I am not at all making the accusation that this is bigotry to the same degree, it does showcase the view of trans experience as an add-on to the 'main event' of being gay that is not only present in anti-trans individuals but even pro-trans and trans people themselves.
As with a lot of discourse topics, especially over the internet, certain queer labels are treated as completely equivalent to non-queer counterparts in discussions of privilege or discrimination, despite the inherent difficulty in fitting transgender experience into the boxes provided by cisgender readings of privilege and oppression. This is mostly done as a misguided attempt to hammer down a belief of being the same as a cisgender person in terms of gender and to extrapolate from models of oppression in cisgender society. While transgender people are their gender, the trans experience is not the same as a cisgender one. This does not cheapen it because there is no reason to view being cisgender as superior or more authentic. Trans manhood is conflated with cis manhood, for example - since trans women are discriminated against on account of their gender, the opposite is assumed to happen for trans men to balance things out, despite this being untrue in real life. Targeted abuse of trans men is often said to be illegitimate because (cisgender) men cannot be oppressed. Those who discuss this topic, or transmasculine strife in general, are compared to conspiracy theorists or misogynistic men's rights activists.
The same is often said for heterosexual trans people: you cannot be oppressed or discriminated against because you are straight; you are assumed to benefit from 'straight privilege' that disqualifies you from community discussion of sexuality. This is often used to belittle transhets by 'validating' their sexuality in a way that insults them: a transhet person being rightfully frustrated or upset, or bringing up the discrimination they suffer because those who are homophobic will not in fact respect trans heterosexuality as straight, will have their pain waved off with something like 'straight people want gay people (queer community as a whole) to cater to them as if the whole world doesn't lmfao.' All of these assumptions are purposely obtuse readings of the situation and refuse to see the larger picture, leading to a cyclical argument over semantics and schemas and not real experience, structures, and solidarity. It ignores the fact that there is not one single overarching experience for an identity label. We are all downtrodden, ignored, and have our rights taken away. I see no reason to reject trans heterosexuality on the basis of terminology and aversion towards heterosexual love alone when transhet individuals face the very same struggles of homophobic hate crimes, marginalisation, rejection by peers, conversion therapy, and marriage and adoption rights being taken away. Trans sexuality is scrutinised no matter what form it takes, creating divisions amongst us is futile and only creates isolation. We became a community to avoid this.
I have always been majorly sexually attracted to women since the age I felt what I considered true attraction. I grew up as a butch lesbian, I dated girls, I had sex with girls; I received all the dirty looks, social exclusion, and the changing room revulsion that came with being known for this. My parents were not unaccepting, but I still struggle with my sexuality being recognised and without attraction to men being assumed of me. Once I explored gender and adopted a male persona, especially on the internet, and I gained an IRL queer friend group and attended in-person queer groups I became much more unstable in my sexuality. I noticed that when I transitioned and retained my attraction, now heterosexual, I received a lot of doubting, belittling, and pressure to change from these peers. I was the token straight boy, 'for now'. It was free game to make fun of my attraction to women, to joke about me getting 'character development' eventually. I witnessed a lot of jokes about heterosexual relationships where the only way that it didn't mock me directly was if I misgendered myself and didn't see myself as a man attracted to women. I became upset over jokes and thinkpieces from queer people on how men's (my) attraction to women is inherently predatory, dirty, and immoral, especially if the attraction is sexual. If I was vocally upset over this behaviour it was joked, again, that I must just have internalised homophobia, or I was closeted. People instantly assumed that I would have a boyfriend or attraction to men, that I would join in gushing over a guy, that I was here because I was trans and gay, never just trans. Both non-queers who saw me as a lesbian and queer people who saw me as straight frothed at the mouth to question and belittle my own orientation.
Everyone else was gay, so why wasn't I? I called myself bisexual for a while to quell the shame and imposter-syndrome I felt. I faked an attraction to men in the way one would pretend to support a football team to be accepted by a group of coworkers. I'm not proud of that. This is not an uncommon transhet experience, unfortunately, a poll concluded that 41.3% percent of straight trans people have tried to deny their sexuality in some way after transitioning due to community pressure (I wish I could find better statistics than Tumblr polls but... alas). It wasn't until rather recently that I have firmly labelled myself as transhet, as straight, and found some solace in my tiny community. I believe my attraction to women is not separate from being transgender and is in its own way queer, but even if it was not queer I would still wish to be able to exist in queer spaces and talk about how it intertwines with my experience being transgender without feeling that other people are rolling their eyes only because I call myself straight in it.
I'm not fond of talking about it like this. It makes me place the 'straight guy insecure in his sexuality and masculinity' view on myself to negate my feelings, even if it is wholly expected that this treatment would bother me. I sometimes wonder if the lack of transhets advocating for ourselves in the wider queer community is down to this: being afraid of not being taken seriously and being maliciously validated in our sexuality by being spoken down on as whiny and 'straight people trying to be oppressed'. I just think you should keep this in mind the next time you see a pride month post that uses only 'straight' or 'het' to signify non-queer, or something that boils down to Gay Good Straight Bad. It should be obvious that straight people, cisgender or not, are not morally corrupt, just as gay people are not morally pure. You cannot respond to interpersonal homophobia and transphobia by recreating these behaviours in some weird sense of justice; you cannot create a world without prejudice and bullying by directing it towards different groups. It would do a world of good for not just transhets but many other queer people if you kept in mind that M/F relationships are not foreign to the queer community, not inherently 'privileged', and these queer people are the first affected by an insult or generalisation when you are talking as if they are not in the room to hear it. If trans people are inherently queer, if trans people belong in the community, it should be enough to simply be transgender. We should be able to be respected without snide remarks, jokes, or being referred to under terms that deny our sexual orientation. We should have a place at the table inclusive of, not despite, our sexuality, and nobody should have to misgender, hide, or mislabel themselves to feel welcome in the community where this shouldn't ever be the case.