Chapter 3
Sex Crash
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Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body. Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.
1 Corinthians 6:18-20, NIV
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You could say I came very close to living an entirely cisgender and heterosexual life.
I'm drawing a blank trying to think of a single example of an LGBT+ acquaintance, or even fictional character, who I was aware of as a child. My social world was small and conservative, as was my media diet. I didn't even watch the sitcoms or procedural dramas in which LGBT characters would appear as the butts of jokes or victims of crimes. Somehow I knew that gay people existed, but it was a completely theoretical knowledge, a total abstraction.
My sexual awakening did not force me to confront any sort of queerness. On the contrary, it seemed to solidify, to a frightening degree, that I was a man, interested in women. My relationship with porn, more than anything else in my entire life, shattered my sense of wholeness. It crushed my faith in myself and in God. Porn combined my boiling curiosity about femininity with a testosterone-fueled horniness to create a terrifying brew of compulsion that felt wholly impossible to integrate into my social and psychological identity.
Of course, I no longer blame "Porn" itself. My identity was frail, lacking in antibodies and relying wholly on the hermetically sealed chamber of innocence. I had no tools, no conceptual frameworks, no way to incorporate any sexual feelings into my self-perception aside from deferring them to a theoretical Christian marriage in an inconceivably distant future (my parents are "against" dating).
Back when I was beginning to come out and transition, these experiences created a lot of shame and hesitation. I was afraid that if someone were to look too closely at my life that they'd see pathetic and fraudulent motives: my transition as a self-castration by a man too weak to face his own sex drive. And I'm going to be honest, it really is chill and pleasant to have a lot less testosterone horniness. It does make me feel better about myself, and part of that could be attributable to some unnecessary sex negativity still clinking around in my brain space.
But I no longer worry about that stuff very much, because it's so clear that transitioning has been a holistic good for me, touching every part of my life. Transitioning has helped with dysphoria, it's widened my emotional experience, it's opened the door to new and wonderful relationships and forms of intimacy. Being gay and nonbinary and a girl... it's all so good.