My earliest memories of identifying as female have to do with beauty. I longed to be a fairy tale princess like Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty, and felt that I was ugly because I was dark-skinned. I hated boys because my brother was cold to me and the boys at school teased me. Then I fell in love unrequitedly with a boy who had shown kindness to me at the age of 12, an obsessive crush that lasted until I was 19.
I only hated my face until I hit puberty, when I started hating my body. I was flat-chested and thick-thighed, and I had eczema all over my skin, which took a long time to heal through eating bitter melon and turmeric root. I longed to be tall so that I could be a model, and was frustrated that I was never able to grow beyond 5 feet 2 inches.
Not all the girls in the schools that I went to shared my experience of self-hatred, at least not to my knowledge back then. I was dealing with depression from the age of five triggered when we moved from Canada to Bangladesh to live with my father's side of the family. They mistreated my mother and tried to deprive us of our inheritance when my father died. I did not like the primary school where I studied because the classes had sixty students in each room and it felt overcrowded. The middle school where I studied was a rich kids' school and was hideously snobbish. My external circumstances improved at the secondary school to which I transferred, but I was haunted by depression, made all the worse because there seemed to be no external cause for it. I remember that I was obsessed at the time by the political turmoil of the 1990s - I devoured newspapers and magazines and listened regularly to the BBC.
I had my first bipolar episode at the age of eighteen, although the doctors did not know that it was bipolar. I flunked my A-levels twice. I ended up studying at a community college in Seattle - I loved the discussions, but had lost the ability to read difficult material and write essays with my first episode. I had a second episode on my 21st birthday, where I was formally diagnosed with bipolar and put on medications. As a result I gained a lot of weight, which did a number on my self-esteem. On top of that I couldn't even do well in school anymore like I had in my teens, although I did get good grades in a couple of poetry-writing courses. I felt a failure as a woman, I couldn't even take care of myself, I was terrible at cooking and cleaning.
I'd first read of the term "lesbian" from the reading the book An Encyclopedia Of Murder. There was an entry on the Parker-Hulme murder case on which the movie "Heavenly Creatures" was based, which used the term "lesbians" to (mistakenly) label the two teenage murderers. Bangladeshi English-language newspapers used the term "gay girls" as a euphemism for sex workers. My mother had taken psychology courses in Canada and owned a textbook called Psychology Today with brief essays by Isaac Asimov. In that book I learned about trans people, then called transsexuals. There was a short story called "Mosquito" in an issue of Omni magazine whose narrator was a trans woman sex worker. I'd read Neil Gaiman's The Kindly Ones, where one of the characters was a lesbian dying of AIDS and her former lover was a drag queen.
I always found drawing girls easier than drawing boys. I used to obsessively draw pictures of a woman using as a reference a photo of a Prada model in an old airlines magazine. It was basically because of that I identified as bisexual in my teen years. It was my way of solidarity, of being an ally to a community whose oppression I'd become aware of in the media, in the struggle for gay marriage equality and the shadow of AIDS. At the time I was resistant to the idea of LGBTQ people having separate cultures, I believed that they were identical to straight people other than in who they chose to marry.
When I arrived in North America in the 21st century I was shocked to discover that gay activists like Dan Savage condemned bisexuals and feminists like Germaine Greer condemned trans people. At the time I had a saviour's complex towards sex workers, but even that was tempered and eventually healed by my on-going belief that people have a right to live their best lives as long as they don't harm others, in the same way that religious people have a right to non-harmful beliefs. I do see a contradiction in the way in which some people criticize people altering their body through diet and exercise while supporting the right of people to alter their bodies through hormones and surgery. Of course, the opposite tendency can also be observed in fitness discourse. Germaine Greer once said that the tragedy of manhood is that a man is never man enough. The perniciousness of TERF ideology is that a woman is never woman enough.
I first became aware of Vancouver's queer music community when I released my song "Racefail" on the first Shoutback compilation, and when I met up with other QTIPOC performers at the fundraiser for victims of the Filipino earthquake in December 2013. I identified as queer out of a longing to belong, and felt like a fraud for doing so. A young non-binary friend called me a queer elder, and I thought, "If I'm an elder, shouldn't I have my life together?" The queer man with whom I was in love with at the time told me that there was nothing more queer than feeling that you weren't queer enough. Then one day I asked a cis male friend to interview me on his radio show, and he said that he worried his dudebro audience would be hostile to a gender-fluid performer. My first thought was, "All these years I've been feeling that I'm not queer enough, and now you're telling me I'm too queer?!?" My second thought was, "Mmm, gender-fluid, I like that."
In my adult life I've always fancied queer men, with the exception of my best gay male friend, because he was a bear, not a twink. We recently had a conversation about how women who fancy men fancy Neil Gaiman and men who fancy men fancy China Meiville. So I asked, "Does that mean Arnold Schwarzenegger is a gay male icon?" He responded, "Fuck yeah!"
Unlike some of my AFAB friends I do feel comfortable in female-only as well as non-binary spaces. I like having a female body, and at 40 I feel far more comfortable in my skin than at the age of 27. I no longer feel alienated by my predominantly polyamorous queer community. I identify as ferociously monogamous, fiercely polyplatonic. I've finally realized that while I don't want to have romantic relationships with queer women, I do want to have deep friendships with queer women and non-binary folk. I've never had a long-term romantic relationship with a man, but I have had great friendships with gay and genderqueer men. I've finally discovered the language to describe my experience. I'm not queer in terms of my sexual orientation, but I am queer in terms of gender.
I'm sympathetic to TERFS, anti-feminists, and homophobes who fear the destruction of binary culture and folkways. My sympathy ends where they attempt to forcefully impose western binary notions of gender upon people who wish to opt out. My sympathy ends where they scapegoat queer, trans, and non-binary folk for the sins of cis het men. My sympathy ends where they accuse queer, trans, and non-binary folk of being abusers not for anything they have done but for their very existence.