So all this business about how the different aspects of my sexuality inform each other, and they all inform my gender, which reflects back on my sexuality, and how aspects of all of these play into my interests and fixations and feelings about myself and others, real and abstract—it’s a lot, right? It’s all connected in these ways that I’m struggling to entirely navigate. It’s easy to just say, forget it; I am who I am, and I don’t need to define everything. And: sure. But, the better I understand, the better of a grip I have on myself on my own terms. And I have to understand what my terms are, to be able to be true to them with full confidence and be in full possession of myself as a person.

Likewise, I’ve got all this toxic code planted in my routines by outside agents, that one needs a fine comb to strip out and patch. Part of that external stuff comes from possibly a better-meaning place, and it’s all this concern I have built up about the problematic implications of this or that conclusion or association I’ve made on my own terms, as if they serve to comment on anything or anybody else. Part of it’s just pure disease.

So I guess part of this whole project here lately, in regard to my sexuality, is de-heebing my jeebs by really taking a look at the why behind the connections I’m making; how they hold the meaning that they do to me, where that comes from, and what its real implications are.

One of the big things I’ve been chewing over is, so what does my interest in dudes have to do with my femininity? It’s a question that feels obvious in some ways, but in turn anything obvious about it feels highly questionable once one steps back to think for more than a moment. What does it mean when I say I felt I was “allowed” to be attracted to guys once I came to understand and accept myself as a girl? What can we unpack from this on a granular level, apart from and in contrast with any kind of presumptions one might carry into the discussion?

Well, broadly, one’s understanding of one’s identity colors the nature of one’s relationships to others. I relate to so many things differently through a correct understanding of my gender than I did with that misaligned filter. My own words sound so different to me. This plays out on so many simple, visible levels. I’ve found a need to exercise a kind of caution in some situations, some kinds of conversation, that wasn’t even on the radar before. I’ve noticed that people are just nicer to me in some situations than they ever were before.

Our dynamics from person to person aren’t neutral. There’s a lot that plays into the psychology and the associated emotions based on our understanding of who we are and how we expect to be perceived. And those are weird and complicated, based on all these micro-power spikes. Even my close friends, even people I’ve known for years, I don’t talk to them exactly the way I used to—or I should say, the way that my predecessor did. And that’s not entirely a function of my changing emotional or chemical landscape, though those certainly are universes.

So just in the most unspecific possible terms, when I take a step back and look at myself as a rebuilt person, the way I feel about this person is going to be different. When I judge how this person will relate to others, I have different expectations than I did for the old me.

More to the point, there are a couple of obvious components. A lot of it is just self-possession, right? It’s just that recognition of who and what I really am, regardless of what that may be, gives me a solid foundation to start to build connections to other people and concepts. Being able to nail down, okay, Azure—non-binary girl; aroace; pan-whatever; neurodivergent along these dimensions; this is all inarguable and fundamental and has always been, will always be essentially true, some wiggles and nuance aside—it takes a load off. Sets natural guides.

Another thing I really don’t want to downplay is my changing body. Like, my chemistry is totally different now. I’ve had my intervention, things are quickly repairing themselves. I have access to all these emotions I didn’t have before. All my tastes and preferences are changing. There is an inarguable link between the feminization of my body and this abrupt shift toward intense new ways of thinking. I feel like a teenage girl in so many ways here. I never really had a dramatic natal puberty, so this is a first for me and it’s kind of overwhelming. Again without wanting to get too crass about it, there is a measurable association between the amount of estrogen in my system and the degree to which my fixation with cock has reached absurd levels, as well as just… the feelings I get from certain kinds of healthy masculinity.

So those two factors are kind of accessible and clear and simple for me. I don’t feel the need to labor them too much. What I want to unpack is more to do with the puzzle dynamics of gender specifically as it pertains to sexuality and vice-versa, and how they pertain to my wiring.

As a social construct, gender is this made-up dumb thing but it’s also got these real internal components that really go beyond assumed models or whatever. Like, sometimes your body is just gonna respond a certain way, you’re gonna have a certain emotional response, and so on. Certain things are going to feel inherently right, and make you feel good about yourself and like a functional human being even as you would never dream of asserting them on another person, and some of those are going to I guess inevitably align with this prescriptive garbage.

With me, I’ve got all these… gender feelings, that are complicated and that I am tempted to wind up with guilt over things that have nothing to do with me, no matter how I come at them. I’m an enby through-and-through, right. But I’m also obviously a girl. Which is fine, right. But one is tempted to read in this innate conflict, especially as the more comfortable I get with myself, the more I dig around, the more frickin’ femme I turn out to be, to a degree I’d not have anticipated. But this is what makes me feel like a real person. It’s clearly right.

I like makeup. I’m no good at it yet, but this really plays to my sense of self to a degree that surprises me. I have never felt more comfortable in my body than in delicate, lacy feminine-coded dress. I feel more human with smooth, shaved legs—even as I think hairy girls rock. I’m an individual, and as an individual I just… seem to be put together in such a way that all of this makes me feel well and right in myself in a way I didn’t know was possible. I didn’t know I could own myself, like myself, in this way—to not find myself revolting. Turns out, I’m great!

None of that is in any way prescriptive or indicative of broader thoughts or expectations toward femininity or what it means to be a girl or non-binary or trans or to hold any kind of attraction or lack of attraction to others. It’s just the status quo of Azure. Nothing more. It’s about putting the pieces together to make a whole person, whom I like and respect and want to be—exactly because of the innate, verifiable, undeniable truth of every atom of what makes her who she is. It’s about asserting the reality that I’m finding, that was denied me.

So it’s into all of that that we play this concept of, now that I understand myself as a girl—but more specifically as this girl named Azure—I have this availability and this certainty and this confidence to access these feelings, at the same time as my body is going nuts with its hormones and sensations.

Okay then, we’ve got this basic stage for why it would make practical sense for this to be a juncture where, if these feelings were gonna get un-repressed and we’d work to accept and own them on our own terms, this would be a reasonable time for that to happen. It makes sense. But, why “allowed”? Why do I feel permitted to house these feelings as a girl, when they were all out-of-bounds before I understood myself?

I think there are two aspects to that. One is just, I’ve put this work into disassembling and stripping all that external garbage. These feelings were always here; I know they were. That’s not the issue. To a large extent what kept them in check was the internalized homophobia [sic], combined with my basic disgust for myself as a person, to the degree that I was led to understand my identity. I’ve put a lot of work into dealing with this junk that was put onto me, that had nothing to do with who or what I am, and just scraping off a critical mass of that was enough to send this impulse bursting through the crust to assert itself.

Another part is, uh, a portal to another land of weirdness, and it scrapes right up on this area that I really don’t want to get into right now, but I guess I’ve talked about it a little bit already—so here we go. It’s to do with sexual roles, right. This topic has all of these complicated dynamics of its own, to some of which we can apply all the above discussion about Azure just being Azure. But the more that I unpick this topic the more it helps me to understand my feelings toward myself as a girl, and vice-versa.

The better I understand the dynamics of my pretty darned innate, hard-coded sexual role as it applies to my gender, the better I understand a lot of practical elements of the trauma that I’ve experienced in my sexual relationships, from the perceptions and expectations set on me. Obviously to be a girl doesn’t mean to be passive, it doesn’t mean to be a bottom, any more than to wear skirts and pantyhose. Azure is just Azure. But to understand the components of me as they add up to a whole person and color and are colored by my own personal femininity…

So here’s a thing. I of course have a penis, as girls will do sometimes. I have absolutely zero dysphoria in regard to my penis as a part of my body. It’s marvelous. It’s almost a shame I’ll never have opportunity to share it. It’s so pretty, seriously. I love it. What I very much do have however is role dysphoria. And this has taken a very long time to unpick, despite indicators going back literal decades. It’s still strange for me to talk about, as is anything to do with sex. And I’m getting really close to some danger zones for trauma. In brief, though, the act of using my genitals for a sex act does not make me feel good, along several axes at once. I just… am going to stop with that, because I can feel the panic rising. But of course there are certain coded expectations that one will carry around based upon anatomy—and I think it’s really taken me a long, long time to fully work around to detaching from those associations and expectations.

One of the things that has helped a whole bunch is the physiological changes brought about by HRT. Stuff works differently now, right. The anatomy works differently. Emotions are different. Physical sensations are different. Arousal is just this completely different narrative now, one that is… better. That actually kind of, makes me feel affection toward myself and the world rather than just shame and horror. My feminized body does not respond the way that my predecessor’s did, all of which supports my feelings toward myself as a girl and comes as an enormous existential relief. It’s just another development like my tits, right, which emphasizes the reality of what I know to be true. And you know, anyone can be anything. There are plenty of girls of any genital situation who are all about being the assertive or penetrative party or whatever. And that’s rad. But, my body cooperating with my mind and my emotions, putting me all on the same page for once? Phew.

So as a girl, this is one component of my understanding of myself; of how my gender functions in relation to me as a person; of how all these elements of me feed into and communicate and support each other in a healthy way that allows me to feel well and respect and love myself.

I break out all of this to say, that—the relationship of my sexual role to my gender—is the other part of what I think I mean when I talk about being “allowed” to feel this attraction as a girl. Or that’s a non-trivial ingredient of a larger picture. That’s the internal part, not to do with other people’s baggage. What I think is accessible to me now, it also has a logistical, even uh geometric, component that I was not fully able to process before, that has to do with my understanding of my sexual role, wound up as it is in my understanding of my gender.

In terms of my own personal dynamics with masculinity, I have zero interest with the role others have projected onto me. But now that I have largely broken away from my body even being able to respond like that—I, uh, have come to better appreciate alternative modes of engagement. Which isn’t just to make attraction all about what parts go where, right. That’s just one component, even to the subject of sexual role as pertains to gender. What it is, is indicative of a critical shift in perspective toward my personal and emotional role in respect to dudes. To understand myself as a girl, and for my body to work as it now does, is for a certain amount of logic to go click. Suddenly—oh! I get it now. If I’m over here and they’re over there, it looks like this now. I get how this works. It makes sense from this angle. Okay, vroom vroom.

Again much of this presupposes cisness on the point of the masculine party, because this all exists in the aroace magic hypothetical zone. And I already have long wrapped my head around how I feel about those of us in the weird zone, right. That’s relatively easy to understand.

So basically, a big part of it is just a matter of unlocking this modality of feeling in relation to my body and my role, that didn’t even exist until I was in a place to embrace my girlhood. It was not “allowed” in that I could not reconcile it with my prior understanding of me. That attraction was always there, but even absent of other people’s garbage, until I understood who and what I was, I had no idea what to do with it. Even if (misplaced) homophobia weren’t a thing, 20 years ago the thoughts and feelings would have felt divorced from reality.

But seeing as a girl, I get it. I have the perspective that I could not have had, in terms of the dynamics of how I fit together as a human being. Now it has become, for lack of a better term, logical. Which basically triggers a green light. Thus do my dreams become a dick parade.

I mean.

Again, I’m sure things will calm down eventually. Even with my hormones being as they are. But well. This is where we are at the moment.

So. Fine, okay. This is part of what it means for me to be human. This is part of who Azure is. So might as well bask in it, I guess.