I don’t have a nice concrete coming out story or gender affirmation story. I covered most of my earliest thoughts on gender and sexuality a couple of years ago.
What I didn’t talk about was knowing what I didn’t want. I had heterosexuality patterned in front of me from the jump. If I think about relationships I knew about before about the age of seven we’ve got married couples, a specifically not married couple, not yet married couples, divorced couples and multiple cheating relationships.
The women I most admired were the ones who usually had the poorer reputations (this was in rural Lincolnshire in the eighties, promiscuous behaviour in women was always a bad thing). I was a kid so they were all Mums, and honestly they looked like they were having a better time (by and large and not in every way) than the well behaved married women.
It did not look fun to be a married woman. It looked like hard work to be a single Mum but it did look better than being married – I don’t think I was aware in Infants of physically abusive relationships exactly. I do wonder if I could have given you a fair description of coercive control though. The reason it struck me that it looked better to be a single mum was that it looked like that way you’d have more control over your life as a woman.
I was by and large preparing myself to have to put up with being married since it looked like that had to happen to be a grown up. I didn’t like the idea, it looked like monogamous heterosexual relationships were about restricting all the possible freedoms you could have as an adult in order to look ‘normal’.
So I suppose, although I don’t have a nice standard pattern coming out story, I did know that to me straight and monogamous felt fake.