Trans(*) can be transgender or transsexual people (I don’t have the right education to explain the difference) but also encompass people who have multiple genders, are gender fluid, or have no gender at all. It’s thought to be an umbrella term, but there are some people who are not cisgender or cissexual who don’t feel that the term is all inclusive of their own identity.

Sometimes the terms MAAB and FAAB (or CAMAB and CAFAB) are used to denote “male assigned at birth” and “female assigned at birth” (or coercively assigned male or female at birth), but some trans* people feel this places emphasis on the birth assigned gender and continues to define them as that gender instead of the gender they inhabit or are transitioning to. I have also seen GMAB, gender misassigned at birth, but again, some trans* people feel that it focuses too much on the assignment and not who they are.

Ok, I’m cis, this is where I feel I should stop talking because there is a ton of stuff I really don’t understand, and if I’ve bungled something please don’t hesitate to correct me because it’s really not my life experience. Gender is a deep and broad topic and I don’t even have a college background in queer theory.

By that I mean, I believe that I was born without innate sexual preferences. I was raised to be heterosexual and aggressively socialized into that sexuality, but I began to feel that it didn’t quite fit me. While I felt some sexual attraction to women and did fall in love with a woman, it was quite a few years later before I made a conscious decision to set aside my heterosexual conditioning and allow myself to accept and analyze any feelings I had about sexuality. In fact, I made an effort to try to see people of all genders without the heterosexual focus of my upbringing and ask myself if I had attractions or desires.

I could have simply lived out the programming that I was given, always feeling something didn’t quite fit, but otherwise assuming that I was straight. I made a conscious choice not to do this, to open myself up and explore. My sexual preferences are as informed by my intellect as they are by my feelings of affection and arousal.

Even this journey was much more difficult than it needed to be thanks to both “everyone is bi” and “no one is bi” because again, I was starting from a place of actually feeling no innate preferences. I was being told simultaneously that everyone felt like I did and acted straight, and that nobody felt like I did and acted straight or gay. I was probably twenty five before I came to accept myself as a fluid polysexual. Now today I couldn’t choose to solely enact my heterosexual programming and turn my back on other attractions. It’s a fact about myself that I can’t un-know. But it’s a fact I chose to know about myself.

I chose to be queer. And every time someone says “nobody chooses” I die a little inside for another layer of erasure from the queer community.

This is exactly the problem with this (and also with the dismissive “everyone’s a bit genderqueer/fluid/etc” genderqueer and fluid people get). I could never put down my annoyance with the idea in words- but that’s exactly the problem. Yes. Thank you.