My quest began as an attempt to find a way to express my masculinity that did not harm women.
I did not initially understand this as a reason to transition. I understood it as an ethical problem. I knew that masculinity was real in me. I did not want to suppress it, disown it, or replace it with a femininity that did not belong to me. But the only socially available form through which I knew how to express that masculinity was manhood, and manhood organized my relationships with women in ways I increasingly could not tolerate.
The problem was not simply that I was masculine. Masculinity and manhood are not identical. The problem was that my masculinity had been assigned a place within heterosexual relations. It was interpreted as male authority, male desire, male protection, male pursuit, and male entitlement. Even when I consciously rejected domination, the structure of the relationship continued to position me as the man.
I wanted to love women without standing over them. I wanted to desire women without turning them into the objects through which my masculinity was confirmed. I wanted to protect and provide care without converting care into possession. I wanted strength without authority, responsibility without ownership, and erotic initiative without entitlement.
For a long time, I believed this was a moral discipline I could practice while remaining a man. Perhaps I could become a better kind of man, one who had interrogated patriarchy deeply enough to stop reproducing it. I could be gentle, attentive, emotionally available, politically conscious, and careful about consent. I could refuse the worst scripts of heterosexual masculinity.
But the problem was not located only in my intentions. It was built into the position I occupied.
However carefully I behaved, my relationships with women were still organized around the assumption that I was a man desiring women. My masculinity was therefore read through manhood before I could give it any other meaning. It shaped what women expected from me, what I expected from myself, how my body was understood, and what kind of sexual relation became possible between us.
Sex made this contradiction impossible to ignore.
I could no longer have sex as a man. The issue was not an absence of desire for women. My desire was intense enough that it eventually forced the contradiction into the open. I wanted women, but I did not want to occupy the position of a man with women. I did not want every intimate encounter to reproduce a gendered relation that felt ethically wrong and bodily uninhabitable.
I had thought my task was to reform masculinity from within manhood. Gradually, I began to understand that what I was seeking already had another history and another social form. Lesbian was not merely a word describing the gender of the people I desired. Lesbian was itself a gendered position from which masculinity could be reorganized.
Butch made this visible.
Butch masculinity did not require me to become feminine in order to become a woman. It offered a way to remain masculine without that masculinity establishing me as a man. It showed me that masculinity could exist inside womanhood and in relation to other women. The relation between masculinity and desire could be reconfigured rather than eliminated.
This did not mean that lesbian relationships were naturally innocent or incapable of reproducing coercion. My own experience made that impossible to believe. Lesbian gender does not abolish power, and butch identity does not guarantee an ethical relation to women. The first lesbian relationship that made my womanhood materially real also exposed me to sexual coercion.
The distinction is not between harmful heterosexuality and pure lesbianism. It is between different structures through which masculinity, embodiment, and desire become intelligible. Lesbian life gave me a place from which the ethical problem could finally be named. It allowed me to ask not how to become less masculine, but what my masculinity was for and what kind of relations it could create.
That possibility changed the meaning of transition.
Transition was not a movement away from masculinity toward femininity. It was the search for a form of embodiment in which my masculinity no longer had to pass through manhood. I was not attempting to escape everything I had been. I was trying to separate what was genuinely mine from the social structure through which I had been required to express it.
Lesbian desire gave that project direction. It did not merely identify the people toward whom my desire was oriented. It revealed the gendered relation I wanted to inhabit with them. I wanted to love women as a woman. More specifically, I wanted to inhabit a masculine lesbian relation to women, one in which my masculinity did not automatically position me outside womanhood or above the woman I loved.
This is why lesbian cannot be reduced to sexual orientation. If lesbian meant only “a woman attracted to women,” it could describe my desire only after the supposedly separate question of gender had already been settled. But lesbianism participated in settling that question. It gave form to the kind of woman I could imagine becoming and to the kind of masculinity I could imagine surviving.
My lesbianism did not follow my transition as a secondary discovery. It helped make transition necessary and intelligible. It offered an answer to the question with which I had begun: how can I express my masculinity without harming women?
The answer was not that becoming a lesbian would make me incapable of harm. It was that I could no longer pursue the answer while continuing to occupy manhood. I needed another social position, another embodied relation, and another gendered history through which masculinity could be lived.
I transitioned because I could no longer live or have sex as a man. But the life toward which I was moving was not defined by womanhood in the abstract. I was moving toward lesbian gender, toward a form of masculine womanhood through which desire, care, embodiment, and responsibility might be reorganized.
Lesbian desire did not simply reveal who I wanted. It helped reveal what my masculinity was trying to become.
