He Knew I Was Trans Before I Did — and Used it Against Me
“You’re not trans, are you?” he said. “You have to tell me. Tell me. Tell me.”
“You’re not trans, are you?” he said. “You have to tell me. Tell me. Tell me.”
Trigger warning: This piece describes sex, gender dysphoria, and sexual assault.
When I met him, I was telling people I was asexual. It was a true enough label at the time; I was young and consumed with gender dysphoric feelings that made it hard to imagine actively desiring someone and remaining present with them during sex.
I had fallen in love with men before, and had found myself longing to merge with them, to become one with them utterly. I’d even had a few fun sexual fumblings as a teen, in the back of busses and behind old buildings in my neighborhood, my hands on guys chests and their tongues deep in my throat. When it came to my own body, though, it was like my groin was hidden behind painful, stinging white noise. Being with someone was all about them, about being close to them and getting to turn all my attention onto their body, without ever having to pause or become conscious of myself.
At that point in my life, nothing turned me on more than the idea of being subsumed completely within someone I admired. I wanted to erase myself inside of them, to occupy their bodies and haunt their hearts. That was the kind of idea that aroused me, more than actual bodies or sex. My body was just a tool that I used to secure that outcome.
When I met him, I was a college student and looking to abandon my virginity, regardless of whether my asexuality was compatible with that fact. He was a class clown type of a guy, full of quips but also incredibly smart. I had a long history of toying with guys like that. They always liked me and I always knew the exact right things to say to undermine and upbraid them. That was how we flirted. It was easy. It felt like a ride that moved along rails. All the steps predetermined, set into motion without needing me to drive.
And soon we were fucking, late at night on the top bunk of my dorm room, not being considerate enough about stifling the sounds. I fell in love with him quickly. The sex was mediocre and we didn’t actually have all that much in common, but there was a powerful, drunken addiction to him that formed inside me nonetheless. No man had ever let me get this close to him before. I could stare and stare into his face all evening, my brain forming primordial attachments.
Until that point in my life I had always been highly independent, and chronically single. When I conjured up images of my future, it was always alone, a cold-blooded professional staring melancholically out the windows of their office. Now I could not think of anything but him. I wanted nothing but to be around him, even though every moment by his side made me feel more confused about who I was, and more weak.
For years I’d fantasized about occupying the body of a man, possessing him with my soul, but instead this guy probed a finger into my brain and took ahold of me. In the years to come, I’d discover he had been following a playbook, that he had a system for identifying and taking advantage of a particular kind of self-conscious, dejected “girl” who wasn’t really a girl, but didn’t know that about themselves yet. At that time, all I knew was that our bond was magnetic, and that I adored him painfully, in a way that erased who I was. Since I hated myself, that was perfect.
It helped that he was a little gay and had a lot of feminine qualities, which I have always found appealing in men. He was very emotionally expressive and sensitive. He loved literature and art. He cried a lot. He gesticulated wildly and feyly with his hands. When he had a few drinks in him he would make out with boys at parties.
I remember being at a frat house, watching him passionately kiss a cute Sociology major with a perfectly cut jaw. I knew about the stereotype of girls making out with other girls at parties for male attention. But I’d never seen this. I’d stand in the corner and watch him suck face with guys and smile approvingly, feeling smug and contented like a kitten full of milk. A lot of straight girls would have been threatened or grossed out to see their boyfriend flirting with men and getting touchy with them. But I never did. It was one of the only times I felt alright.
He liked that I was gender non-conforming too. He told me he loved my short, self-shorn hair. My tomboyish attire, wide striped t-shirts and low slung jean shorts that went to just above my knees. Sometimes he’d ask me to tie him up and be dominant around him. I was always the big spoon. If we crammed into a car with lots of friends, he would sit on my lap, not the other way around. He was the emotive one with a lot of anxieties that needed soothing, and I was stony and resilient. This was how we liked it. I felt seen in my strength.
But for all his tender and queer qualities, my boyfriend also had a terribly mean-spirited streak. After he had more than just a few beers, he would toy with me like I was his prey. He’d ask me to kiss him then push me away, making faces of disgust. He’d pull me into his arms then call me stupid and useless. Sometimes it would get downright disturbing; on more than a few occasions he laid out on the floor pretending to be unconscious just to see how I’d react. If I tried to get him to wake up he’d be furious, if I did nothing he’d be wounded, because I didn’t care. Being around him made me feel insane. He kept putting me in scenarios that made no sense, and so my whole conception of reality had to collapse around us.
A few months into dating, a girl he used to know friended me on Facebook. Shelly. She sent me a series of long and very effusive messages. She was so glad he was happy. He was such a great guy. She wanted to know all about me. Oh hey, we both were on the debate team in high school!
I looked at her photos. We had similar a similar body type and overall vibe: low maintenance, unassuming beauty that we put absolutely zero effort into. She was sporty, with long blonde hair that she always tied back. She did a lot of skiing and skateboarding and camping outdoors. I looked at debate team photos of her in a suit. She seemed to be spunky and filled with a bright inner light.
I asked him about her. He shrugged and seemed put out. They hooked up once at a party and then she got a little intense he said. She was beautiful but kind of crazy and not all that smart.
Her story didn’t line up with his story, but I dismissed the cognitive dissonance. I was already terrified of coming on too strongly to him. I didn’t want him to be disgusted at the immenseness of my needs. Though I fantasized constantly about being by his side forever, and I’m sure he could see the extent of my obsession in my eyes, I felt like I had to downplay how pathetic I was. I didn’t want to be anything like this poor sad girl who was doing her best to be kind.
Of course, he kept calling me pathetic anyway. And he kept inviting me over to his dorm every single night, then criticizing me for wanting so much of his time. Instead of going home for the summer, he decided to move into a studio with me and take a full course load of classes. I was delighted. Until he began railing on and on about how I had stolen his summer from him, kept him from enjoying himself drinking and travelling the country with all of his friends. There was a special bond between men that I was denying him, he told me. He needed friends who were guys, like him, who could understand and connect with him in ways I never could.
This statement made my incandescent with fury and sadness. I felt trapped in a body that’s only value was in the pleasure it provided to him, and consumed by a social role I could never escape. He noticed how much it drove me crazy to hear, how statements about how “guys were different” made me pace the house and sob and hit my forehead against the wall. So he started saying it more. On the rare nights he did go out with male friends, I languished on the floor crying violently — or I went out, driving despondently and putting my body, my damn “female” body, at risk.
One night we were both drunk and sitting on a park bench on campus, and he was doing his usual routine of pulling me in close and then pushing me away.
“I love you so much,” he told me effusively. “It is like nothing I have ever felt for anyone else. I feel so close to you, I have never felt this way about a girl before. I would love you no matter what you did or how you looked. I’d love you if you were trans.”
The air was sucked out of my lungs. The world went completely quiet. We were looking at one another. My eyes were bugging out of my skull. He looked at me and his bleary, love-struck gaze morphed into something different. Angrier.
“You’re not trans, are you?” he said. “You can tell me. Tell me. Tell me. Are you? You’re not, are you?”
In my memory, I just shook my head, dumbfounded, the way you have nothing to say when you get unexpectedly caught in a lie. His assertion was impossible to disprove. And I didn’t really want to disprove it. He was drunk and spiraling, a thing he often did about all kinds of random-seeming conjectures that (I realize now) were meant to make me feel insecure. With this one, he could tell he was really onto something. I was utterly disturbed.
“You can tell me. Are you? You have to tell me if you are.” Anger rising in his voice. I don’t remember how the interrogation ended, only that it went on for a long time and that I was wordless. If it was like most nights we spent together, we probably stumbled home drunkenly, him continuing to throw the questions at me, and me shaking and sobbing silently in his arms, feeling like my brain was about to explode.
The sex got worse. He desired my body, but the way he wanted it made me feel sick. I had the perfect feminine shape, he said. I looked so curvy and fertile. Didn’t I want to have a baby? Wouldn’t I like to make a baby with him? I had such child birthing hips. I was shaped like a fertility goddess. He said he couldn’t resist me. Being naked around the house started feeling dangerous.
When he touched me in the night, my vision clouded and my stomach rotted and I went somehow both stiff and limp. Being touched between my legs felt like painful static and I went blank to get away from it. I need to get out of here, a voice started calling out inside me. I need to get far far away.
We made a video together once, during this period. We’re in the attic of the house we rented together, and he is behind the camera, telling me to strip. I look absolutely dead in the eyes, my face completely dropped, all the tension in my jaw, neck, and shoulders. I move slowly, resentfully, revealing my body to him, each article of clothing dropped bitterly to the floor. I never look in his direction. When we begin having sex I am scowling and moving jerkily, resistance tight in every movement. I have never in my life looked more unhappy. Though his face never appears on screen, he can frequently be heard grunting and moaning with delight.
I listened to the voice inside of me and did get far away. I moved to a new city, for graduate school, though he and I spoke frequently on the phone. If I told him about anything positive that had happened in my life, like getting a new job or dating a new guy, his voice would turn dark and he’d tell me I was becoming less and less attractive to him. Any time I saw him in person, he tried coercing me into having sex. Sometimes I gave in. Other times I made him leave. It didn’t matter. My head was in a confused cloud and my body was my enemy for days afterward. The trauma of sexual assault is not the actual act. It’s the fact someone is willing to do that to you.
Things calmed down after started dating another girl, one he was all too happy to tell me about. She was incredibly feminine and had very conventional, even hyper-gendered expectations. She wanted him to always be the one to plan their dates, to “man up” and choose what she should order at restaurants. He told me he found this off putting. Said he liked independent, masculine women like me. Still, there were some similarities. She was definitely his type.
“Oh?” I asked. “And what is exactly is your type?”
“Hot girls with really low self-esteem,” he said, all pretenses dropped. “So I can manipulate them into liking me.”
After he said this, he chuckled a little bit. It was half self-deprecation, half a flex about the attractiveness of the girls he could pull, and his ability to exploit them. He’d always taken a dim view of his own attractiveness. So maybe he really believed he had to seek out insecure women in order to stand a chance of being desired. This wasn’t true — he genuinely was quite attractive and charming. But that didn’t change that his strategy was what it was. He’d laughed after saying it, but it wasn’t a joke.
The three years we’d dated played on a loop in the back of my mind as he and I continued our phone call. All those strange, confusing nights of mixed messaging. All those little remarks about how I carried myself and looked. All the interrogations. Before he and I even met I was very lonely and sexually disaffected, and eating disordered and depressed on top of it. I was in the cold and dark and he’d shone on me a warm beacon of attention. Everything had just happened, without even having to try. He hadn’t been a beacon, he was a weakness-seeking missile, and from the day that we met, my vulnerabilities had been plain.
I stopped replying to his emails or taking his phone calls. Through mutual friends I heard details: he had dumped the very feminine girl and was hooking up with a fun, Rockabilly-styled bisexual “girl” we both knew. She was passionately in love with him for a while, and then he dumped her. A few months afterward I ran into her. Her hair was shorn super short and she was wearing thick coveralls. Then she started taking testosterone.
They became a beautifully punky, androgyne type. They were much better off without our mutual ex, but also embittered about the time they’d given him.
Hmmm? I thought. That’s unexpected. I didn’t think feminine “women” who dated men could transition. I thought it wasn’t allowed, that it would never make sense to anyone. I began to interrogate that view.
I remained Facebook friends with Shelly, his high-school ex-girlfriend. In the past few years she had been kicked out of school, lost a series of jobs, and floundered with an addiction. She was very unhappy and very much caught in a mess. Her family was looking for her; they posted concerned messages on her wall wondering where she had gone. One less-than-entirely-supportive relative said she was deluded about this whole trans thing. Hmmm?! I thought. Another one?
I was already in the middle of my own transition by then, no longer in denial any more. I had done a lot of learning and self-reflection and realized I didn’t have to pretend to be a straight woman anymore. I was a gay man, with a bit of a nonbinary flair, and always had been. That was why I’d felt so uncomfortable in my body, and it was also why I had longed so deeply to merge with the men I admired. I hated myself and became obsessive in my relationships because I wanted to be like the men I found attractive.
Everything about me made better sense when viewed through this lens. Even this former relationship with an emotionally manipulative man, who had always been conflicted about his own queerness. He had been drawn to me because I had it all. A perfectly “feminine” body, a perfectly masculine outlook, and plenty of self-loathing made me easy to use. Almost every “woman” he had dated appeared to have been the same.
My ex’s “hot girls with low self-esteem” were, for the most part, actually trans.
As my own transition began unfolding, Shelly’s did as well. There he was with a bald head and thicker eyebrows. There’s him posing in an open ski jacket, a bare stomach, and a binder flashing underneath. He was so handsome now. Seemed so solid and rooted in himself. He got sober and began doing sports again. He was nothing like the desperate, suspiciously happy “girl” who had messaged me years before. And I was no longer the unhappy “woman” that he had messaged.
It’s funny how people can recognize your queerness long before you come to know it yourself. When I was eighteen and still enveloped in misery and self-doubt, my ex identified me as a vulnerable trans person he could effortlessly manipulate into adoring him. The scam went off without a hitch. He took advantage of my misery and availed himself to the body I was so mentally detached from. In one of our darkest, most drunken nights together he even named explicitly that I was trans, and berated me for not being ready to admit it. I am chilled to look back on it — yet also, oddly validated.
It’s terrifying to me now, thinking how he sought out several other closeted trans masculine people like me, used us up, and then left us to sort out why we’d been so effortless to abuse. It’s also a tragically common story. So many gay men come into themselves after being assaulted by a closeted, self-loathing abuser who recognizes that our confusion and alienation make us an easy source of gratification. In a lot of ways, I have a very classic queer coming-of-age story. But it is only because of society’s pervasive homophobia and transphobia that this is so. Perhaps if neither of us had been taught to hate ourselves so severely, it never would have played out that way.
I ran into my ex one more time after we stopped speaking, at a mutual friend’s wedding. By then I was confident enough that he was scared of me. I danced with my friends and screamed with delight and drank hungrily from the open bar while he clung to the wall all evening. I was slowly becoming someone that did not need his approval, who loved themselves rather than reaching out despondently for a man they could recognize themselves in. I felt at home in my body, sensual and present. When I looked in the mirror, I could see myself — and he could no longer look me in the face.