Young Lesbians and the Fantasy of Transition—A Story of Desistance

By Maia Poet

In collaboration with DALL-E

As a 12-year-old girl in 2012, I was an early adopter of a trans identity. My fondest childhood memories include obsessively researching rare pituitary tumors, the human genome, and reading parenting books. My inborn drive to seek knowledge accelerated in intensity upon receiving an iPad for my 12th birthday. As puberty hit, I began to experience odd sensations in my body whenever my hand briefly touched the hand of my female classmate; my heart rate skyrocketed, I began to perspire, and my body warmed up to an unimaginable heat. A mere glance from a girl in my class would transform me from an eloquent, mini professor equipped with an arsenal of endless irrelevant facts, into an incoherent mess who was incapable of constructing a single intelligible sentence.

The gap between my intellectual capabilities and my emotional intelligence was significant. Instead of understanding these bodily sensations as a ‘crush’, I concluded that I was likely ill with one of three possible neurodegenerative diseases which I had found in online medical journals. Understanding that being in the company of girls made me feel awkward, I developed a strategic alliance with my male classmates, wherein we played pranks on the teacher in order to elicit laughs from the girls. My male friends began receiving attention from the girls, while I was left behind. I began to develop my sense of style for the first time and wished to adopt a masculine appearance to fit in with my male peer group. However, I didn’t have the cognizance or verbal acuity to express this to my parents. Having been exposed to the idea of a “sex change” as it pertained to males, I wanted to know whether it was possible for a girl to become a boy. I went online and found my answer.

My parents did not affirm me. Simply attaining a masculine appearance without medical interventions was a great source of tension and animosity in my house. Despite not being affirmed, the prospect of medicalizing into perceived heterosexuality remained my most comforting thought. The idea of becoming a man whose attraction to women and desire to wear dapper outfits were not deeply stigmatized, was such a tantalizing offer that from the age of 12, I staked my entire future on achieving it.

I decided to move far away from my progressive, American city to the heart of the Middle East in order to actualize my dream of living as a man. I had realized that in Israel, I could seamlessly begin a new life as a man even without medicalizing. The influence of religion and strict gender roles caused others to perceive me as a man, simply because they didn’t have the concept of a butch lesbian. As a speaker of Israel’s four most commonly spoken languages, I successfully assimilated into both Palestinian Muslim and Orthodox Jewish societies as a man. Very few of my closest friends knew that I was female. I loved my life in Israel so much that I decided to embark upon the torturously lengthy process of becoming an Israeli citizen, three years of which I spent as an illegal alien. I had no access to healthcare and was desperately trying to speed up my citizenship process in order to begin my medical transition. After all, people would stop believing that a guy in his mid-twenties could look so young.

My journey of desistance from a trans identity which lasted for half of my life, began in a bomb shelter. As missiles flew over my head and explosions shook the earth below my feet, I found myself running between bomb shelters. Meanwhile, my leftist American friends posted updates on social media from the safety of their comfortable couches, justifying that Israelis deserved to live under constant rocket attacks. In my naive attempt to refute their arguments with verifiable evidence, the powerful internet algorithms transported me into the depths of the gender-critical world.

From that moment, my world began to shatter. I realized that the goal upon which I had based my entire future, was based on nothing but a set of false premises and outright lies. In an attempt to achieve the impossible goal of becoming a man, I had deceived everyone around me in ways that would be impossible for me to disentangle from without fracturing my most important social relationships. The psychological aftermath of building my entire sense of self upon the false premise that my female body existing in its natural, healthy state is a sign of pathology that needed to be corrected with dangerous hormones and surgical interventions, has been truly harrowing.

Throughout my life, any discomfort I had around my breasts was easily placated by the notion that someday I would have them removed. Whenever I saw my male friends winning the affections of the women I longed to impress, I blamed my female body as the culprit of my loneliness. I must now cope with the reality of being a masculine woman and a lesbian, which is statistically speaking, a lonely experience. Lesbians used to have communities in which to heal from this type of baggage and find love. Considering that these communities have largely disappeared, today’s young lesbians find solace in the fantasy of transition.

It is incredibly destabilizing to divest oneself from an identity based on half a lifetime of lies and false promises. The years of obsessive breast binding needed to maintain the illusion have taken their toll on my skin, my back and my ability to breathe normally. At the age of 24, I must now figure out how to interact with men as a masculine lesbian, when just a few months before, I used to be “one of the guys.” Even more difficult is the prospect of interacting with women, now that I am no longer pretending to be a man. Between living through three Middle Eastern wars and surviving multiple terrorist attacks, in addition to surviving a 12-year-long stint of trans identification, I honestly could not say which of these experiences has psychologically damaged me the most.

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Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position.

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