I feel like I'm being held back from both sides
I know there are a lot of posts like this, but I just had to get this off my chest.
I was born and raised in a somewhat conservative rural area in Asia. I faced a lot of sexism, and by the time I was in elementary school, I already hated being a woman. If I’d been born just a few years later, I might have been completely immersed in the internet and identified as a trans man.
From a young age, no one understood my feelings for women. I didn’t come out openly until I started college, and I was always lonely. I didn’t have a single friend who was part of the LGBTQ+ community.
When I started college, I joined a very liberal group of friends. I still don’t have any close lesbian friends, but I do have friends who identify as bisexual or pansexual. However, even within this group, I began to feel alienated.
I started to feel like we didn’t see eye to eye on topics like gender theory, the idea that “sexuality is fluid,” and other issues I couldn’t safely discuss on Reddit. For example, I don’t like it when people say things like, “OP is a person who expresses her gender as a woman,” just because I prefer long hair and feminine clothing. The fact that I am a woman has absolutely nothing to do with my clothes or hairstyle!
In this way, I’ve ended up feeling disappointed in the very liberal group of friends I used to admire so much back home.
Of course, there’s no one in the world who shares my exact views. But I feel like I’m stuck in the middle, with no place to belong. To borrow the words of someone here, I’m too liberal for conservatives and too conservative for liberals. This is the only place that reminds me that people like me actually exist in this world. Thank you all for being here.