General Discussion

I’m a pansexual female! No one in my family knows yet, because I’m too young to be in a romantic relationship. Any advice on how to tell them in the future?

I'm fighting whether to come out to my English teacher- he's pro LGBTQIA+
thing is- I've never told anyone else except my sister and my very dear and trusted friends. aka 5 people total. dhlfgdlfghlfjghldfg

Hello everyone! Hope you're all doing well and having a good day/night.

I'm Lucian, I'm 33 and I'm very firmly part of the LGBTQA+ community. I'm ok with all pronouns, but would be elated to be called He/Him or other more masculine pronouns(they feel more right than the others).

My journey started out early like around age 7 or 8. I would commonly have crushes on friends no matter their gender/orentation/presentation as I loved the person they are and their other aspects were of less importance, however not having the knowledge at that age as time in my life I thought that I was simply what I came to know as Bi when I reached highschool. However as it turns out I myself am far more complex on this that I thought and while I THINK I've narrowed things down regarding my identity(Non Binary/Genderfluid,Demi boy, Pansexual, ???. Honestly I'm a hodgepodge of things and I'm still kinda confused a bit. I've always had some disphoria(not per say hate or wish to get rid of parts of my body but at the same time feeling like parts of me are missing. I have found myself feeling some phantom limb sensations at times as well). I was assigned female at birth, and have lived as such for about half of my life even though I was raised fairly gender neutral(grew up on a mini farm, did a bit of everything that one would consider traditionally make and female roles on my family's mini farm. I was[and still am commonly] called a Tomboy, which kinda fits in a way if by that one can also mean demiboy). In relation to my feelings of disphoria, phantom limb sensations, I also get some euphoria when referee to as any masculine or more neutral pronouns. I am out for the most part, though as a general rule I'm a fairly privet person additionally where I live it's still currently as safe as it was to be out publicly(some residents are still totally broken from their candidate loosening this past election), so publically I'm in the closet(again).

I'm also disabled...long list there but some included are ADHD(Initiative type), Autism, Depression, Complex PTSD, General Anxiety, Panic Disorder, Arthritis, Fibromyalgia, visual impairment(Legally blind in my left eye and my right eye is following just at a slower rate), balance/mobility issues, and plenty more...

This all said I have some questions that I'd super appreciate any/all help with:

Can I feel like I should have both sets of sexual characteristics and be valid? I know I'm assigned female at birth, but I feel like having the other set is also correct for me. Would this count as being Trans in any way?

I look decently androgynous, but do wish I looked just slightly more masculine. Any advice/ideas to bring my inner masculine out a bit more in my daily life outside of clothing choices?

Is there any chance I could get some hugs and additional support please? I've been having it extra hard lately.

May I also please get any additional help on what labels I should at least consider reading up on more? I love learning, and want to be a better member of the community and also be able to better educate/help those who also seek to learn.

I'd also love to make some new friends too(so please feel free to send me a PM so we can get to know each other).

Anyhow, I'm super grateful that this thread is here and I'm happy that I can come here to chat. Thanks very much for being here.

Not sure who may need this today/tonight but:
You're all valid, loved, and appreceated! You make this world a better place simply by being here, keep going strong! You've got this! I've got your back! <3

i've been feeling very off about my name due to recently getting out of an unhealthy relationship and i don't know what to do. should i change it or should i try to reclaim it again? i'm starting to have a negative association with it but i loved that name so much and i felt like myself with it

Long text dump incoming. Brace yourselves.

So this isn't the first time I've posted on this thread, and the last time I did, I'm pretty sure I was sharing my story on winning the lesbian lottery and finding out how that was the case. Ever since, I've come to value my identity a lot. Not just in terms of who I like, but in terms of everything that makes me who I am. Personality, aspirations, presentation, what others think of me, blah blah blah.

Unfortunately, I also won the anxiety lottery, and it's been preying on my sense of identity for two years now. It was pretty hard to cope with in the beginning, when I had no clue what was going on and why I was hearing forced, unnatural thoughts that never would've come from, well, 'me'. Considering that, I've coped through it pretty well, and I've become more proud of myself as a result.

How the heck does this relate to the thread? My disorder manifested with intrusive thoughts that tried to convince me I was bi. Because of the state of mind anxiety puts you into, and because the physiological responses you get from arousal and fear are ridiculously similar, it tripped me up a lot into thinking I was into guys. So much so that I couldn't even enjoy hanging out with my guy-friends, and that I'd skip a heartbeat whenever I even saw the word 'bisexual'. To clarify things, it wasn't the idea of other people being into two or more genders that bothered me; it was the idea of me being into guys. It was bonkers, and the extent to which it ravaged me was bonkers too. Thankfully, I'm way better than I was when it started... but the story doesn't end there.

Gender. Oh boy. I identify as female, and have done so for the past however-many years of my life, but my internal locus has changed a lot over the years. Hitting high school, I turned from a proud little tomboy into a gender-dysphoric acne machine. I was very much ashamed of the way I looked: being round and overweight for the duration of my childhood had already cast a shadowy self-image upon me, and seeing the people I related most to at the time - the boys - grow lankier and get broader shoulders and deeper voices made me feel like I was missing something. Oh, and the acne certainly wasn't a help; I naturally produced (and still do produce) a lot of androgens. I hid my body with oversized men's clothing and got a burst of euphoria whenever someone called me 'he' or 'him'. At some point I wanted to wear binders, even though there was barely anything to bind. I don't know how I didn't take a step further and start calling myself a trans guy. Maybe I was too scared to - after all, I was only 12 or 13.

That slowly waned away over time though. For some people, that experience lasts until you transition. Apparently for others, it fades as you get further into teenhood. Although I still felt different to a lot of girls, I slowly began realising that I felt better hanging with people who weren't cis-male. Keyword: slowly, because old habits die hard. Remember the whole bi-anxiety thing? Irrational fears like to warrant irrational defences, and so I tried forcing myself to swarm people who I didn't fit in with anymore to prove I was still gay. Absolutely worst of all, I clung hard to my masculinity to prove that I was still 'one of the guys'. "Being attracted to one of the guys doesn't make you one of the guys", I told myself. I'm more ashamed of that than I'm ashamed of my seven-year-old self for thinking that being best (platonic) buds with a guy automatically made him your boyfriend. And I've been traumatised by that for years.

So, after all that rubbish, I still said I was a girl who liked other girls. Why then didn't I still fully relate to other girls? Granted, I stopped pretending to misunderstand them totally, and ended up finding them really easy to talk to, even if I didn't share their life attitudes or wear tube tops and hoop earrings like they did. Yet, I still felt out of touch with being called a girl. I preferred not having gender brought up at all. I started entertaining the idea of other identities - agender, androgyne, transmasc, demiboy and demigirl to name a prominent few - but nothing stuck. The only thing I gleaned was that I didn't give a hoot about pronouns. Yet, I still identified as a (cis) girl, despite not really feeling like one. Then the anxiety lottery came again, and before I actually decided whether being non-binary was for me or not, I became absolutely terrified of that outcome. I didn't get why. I was comfy with the idea of defying the binary. My best friends were agender and fluid respectively, and I certainly respected, if not vibed with that a lot. (If said best buddies are reading this right now, hello! You're awesome and I love you so much.) But the concept of me being an enby too? The voices in my heart disagreed, somehow.

Then I reached that point in teenhood where you're supposed to settle a bit and get a lot more self-confident and energetic... and seriously want more than handholding. I got to that stage, spent the summer holidays playing this really cool cyberpunk game, adoring it, and then consequently wanting to get a medium-length combover undercut. Intrusive thoughts still plagued me, and this time they were genuinely worse, because it wasn't an irrational issue made up entirely from thin air. Despite all that though, I was getting more comfy with the idea of femininity. I also realised that I used to have a lot of internal misogyny, which helped explained my past, complex identity. Yet, I still didn't feel like I fully fit into the stock standard idea of a woman. So what did I settle upon?

Here I am now, still plagued by the same intrusive thoughts whenever I don't get enough sleep or get bothered by some other GAD trigger. I'm a lot more self-confident and energetic, and moderately want more than handholding. I've realised that I now like she/her pronouns and being called a girl, as long as it's not condescending or it isn't laden with really traditionally feminine connotations. I'm just a girl who doesn't conform much. I'm still a tomboy, just like I was as a kid. This is what I've told myself for the past hour whilst writing this text wall, heart pounding and hands quivering from routine panic. Typing this has been therapeutic. Almost as therapeutic as it is to be called a lesbian.

I have yet to figure out why that's the case.

Thanks for reading.

@sgerj You're very good at telling a story. I'm sorry you had to go through so much though. I went through kind of the same thing. I am a bisexual cis woman. I have OCD, and my obsession was also related to my identity. Specifically, I began obsessively questioning my gender. I don't want to get into how miserable it was. But OCD related to identity is gut-wrenching and very destructive. I'm glad that you are doing better.

For a few years I always told myself that I was pansexual. I am not very well educated about every other sexuality, I'm just kind of aware that there are a lot more than bi, lesbian etc, and at the time of deciding my sexuality I knew even less.

That always made me wonder if I've developed into someone else. I've kind of felt like it's my responsibility to figure myself out, for my own sake, so that I can be comfortable in my sexuality and be able to label it clearly.. But then I realize that I already am comfortable in my sexuality, and that no one else really cares whether I am straight, lesbian or pan. So I am dropping the labels for the time being and from now on I am simply me. I like who I like and for a different reason every time.

Perhaps I will decide to put a label on that in the future, or I won't, but right now I don't feel like it's something I need to worry about.

[quote name="Aeopteri" date="2021-03-25 12:36:03" ] I’m a pansexual female! No one in my family knows yet, because I’m too young to be in a romantic relationship. Any advice on how to tell them in the future? [/quote] I'm not going to venture into any kind of specific life advice as while FR's good for sharing experiences and whatnot, we're really not the best place for more serious stuff. But on this particular question, I'll say this: You do what works for you. There is no "right way" or "proper method" to coming out. How you like and in whatever way you feel most safe and comfortable is up to you.