u/Your-osdd-friends

Hi everyone, feels good to be posting on here after being a lurker for so long :)

So, I (20M) need some advice on what gender I should select on dating apps. My body looks like a typical perisex trans man's body, however I don't identify as a trans man at all.

I wasn't raised with a consistent gender; not legally, medically, or socially. I was born with ambiguous genitalia and I was AMAB the longest, however I was mistransitioned to female for around three years and underwent SRS/IGM(?) surgery, hence my now more "female" body. Despite my forced medical mistransition, my social transition never followed. I've always been a boy to friends and most family, and I still identify 100% as a man today. This is why I don't call myself a trans man, how can I say I'm transgender when I never really changed my gender at all? I also feel like I don't fit in due to having internal testes instead of ovaries, and XY chromosomes instead of XX.

This raises an issue when it comes to dating apps. To put it plainly, I'm not looking for long term commitments. Most of the relationships I'm looking for are very sexual and casual in nature. As such, I've taken to using the trans man label for my body because it's quick and convenient, but this leads people into believing I have experience living as a girl/woman, and people have asked me to be part of T4T relationships. I feel like I'm invading trans spaces, but I also feel like I can't switch my gender from trans man to cis man without people thinking I have a penis. The first line in my bio mentions that I'm intersex, but people tend to read over it I guess. Unfortunately, the app I use has "intersex" as a separate gender option, so I can't be both intersex and a man...

So, my options seem to be:

Continue to use the trans man label, keep turning down those looking for T4T connections, and possibly risk my safety if someone freaks out over me being biologically male
Put my gender as a cis man, only for people looking for those with penises to get upset at me
Put my gender as intersex and never be recognized as a man

I'm not sure of what poison to pick here. It's 2026, I really wish that apps would let us pick multiple genders 🥲

Spaghetti without meatballs

(TW: rape, attempted shooting)

Where do I even begin?

In middle school, I had a girlfriend. We're both autistic, but she was diagnosed first. I wouldn't be diagnosed until high school.

To put things simply, I'm a small, physically disabled man. It doesn't take much to overpower me. And that's exactly what my ex did at her birthday party after her family left us alone for around 30 minutes. She overpowered me, strangled me, and then raped me. I broke up with her and ran home afterwards but the damage was done.

The next Monday after the party, she attempted to shoot up our school. She had a "hit list". I was the top target. Thankfully, she was unsuccessful, being caught by one of my friends before she could do anything. She was sent to a psych ward, but after she was out, no further action was taken. She was never punished. I tried to go to the police with my assault story, but because I'm a boy and she was an autistic girl, I was laughed out of the station. I tried to tell my family next, but they said because she's autistic, she's not family, and she's female, what happened to me doesn't matter.

I've developed PTSD from my assault. I have bad flashbacks where any contact from a woman, especially a woman who's larger than me, will send me into a defensive rage where I try and fight to give myself distance between me and her. I've been working on reducing that trauma response heavily throughout the years. I can hug and have contact with women just fine most days now. In fact, I even got engaged to a woman I've dated for over 4 years now.

Flash forward to today. I slapped my fiancee on the butt while talking to my parents. She likes when I do this, and my parents normally just roll their eyes at me, but today was different. My mom said, "y'know, I used to do that to him all the time, until one day when he just blew up out of nowhere."

I froze. She was referring to a time where I was insanely triggered because she kept grabbing me without my consent. I didn't even have a bad trauma response, I just yelled "Enough!" at her. I just asked her to stop.

My fiancee apparently thought this was hilarious and took this as an opportunity to mess with me. She poked and prodded me, pushed me, grabbed me in a lot of sexual ways, then grabbed me by the wrists. Being treated this way by a woman who's almost a foot taller than me...

Something inside me just snapped. I kicked her as hard as I could, freeing my hands, which I then used to punch her in the torso a few times. I didn't do a lot of damage, I actually don't even think I bruised her, but I wanted to hurt her. I wanted to throw her down the stairs. I wanted to push her onto the floor and choke her out before she could keep doing things to me. I recognized how violent I was getting, and managed to step away and go into my bedroom, all the while my parents were laughing at me.

I've been in my room for a few hours now. I already have plans to move across the country next month, otherwise I'd just move out tonight. I hate my family. I hate how they treat me like this. I hate that my fiancee is just joining them in torturing me. She's out on a walk right now, and when she gets back, I'm calling off the engagement.

I think I'm done dating women after this. All of them have been so incredibly cruel to me. My fiancee is a trans woman. She used to be so kind and sweet as a man, and now that she's a woman, she just uses that as an excuse to abuse me.

I'm giving up on being bisexual, I'll just be gay for the rest of my life. Happy pride month, I guess.

How should I label myself on dating apps?

My family keeps making fun of my assault, and I'm leaving my fiancee