Total name change for this as I'm pretty nervous about posting it. Back during the first lockdown, being home and so often alone brought about a lot of introspection. I'm a divorced single parent and haven't had any romantic or sexual relationship/contact of any kind since my marriage ended close to a decade ago. I'm far from asexual but whenever any sort of opportunity or suggestion for dating/hooking up with a man has come up, I have backed right off it. When the pandemic started one of the things that hit me was that in a lot of ways the choice/opportunity to meet a guy was lost to me for the foreseeable. Which was a mix of tough, because at times I do feel frustrated by the complete lack of a sex life but also absolutely fine because I so feel such a very strong aversion to being in another relationship with a man.
I've always identified as 100% straight. When people trot out the 'everyone is a bit bisexual' trope I've always felt it's belittling to all straight and gay people, but especially women, as it's so often just aimed at straight women. However, throughout lockdown for a genuine string of reasons, I started to feel more and more attraction to women. It started as a massive shock, one that I rationalised as a reaction to long-term celibacy, something my brain dreamed up to distract me from the pandemic, a desire to feel more special, a reaction to a terrible marriage etc. But over time, I think I actually probably am attracted to women too and can identify various times in my teens and twenties where that attraction surfaced and I rejected it.
I've taken a lot of time thinking through this, I've read a lot about it, articles and fiction. I've watched a lot of lesbian/bisexual media, including some youtube channels. I learned that it's actually reasonably common for women my age to develop same sex attraction later in life. Sometimes those women identify as completely lesbian, sometimes bisexual. My biggest fear as I've developed these feelings is experimenting with a lesbian woman and hurting her if it turned out this is just some sort of mid-life crisis. So I'm thinking that it's good that the pandemic has given me time to think through everything as much as I can alone.
And while going over everything, I found there are quite a few online chat groups for women who are developing these feelings when older, often after marrying a man, to discuss this with each other. I joined some of these groups last year and initially they were great. It's been really interesting to see the similarities and differences in our experiences. It's interesting to read about those who are further into their journey are getting on with dating other women. Or telling other people in their lives.
But I've come up against an issue that's increasingly a problem for me. After the first few weeks/months in a group, you start to get used to the most regular users. And as I worked out who they were, I also realised that as many as 1/4 or more of the regulars were transwomen. I kind of instinctually wasn't happy about that but I really couldn't work out why I felt that way. But as time went on, it became really obvious to me that our experiences weren't the same. The transwomen on these groups all identify as late in life lesbians because it's later in life that they have started identifying as women. their attractions haven't changed. Whereas the women in the groups are processing either a complete change in who they are attracted to or an expansion of it.
A discussion about our past relationships with men and whether or not there was real attraction, real enjoyment of the sex, how we felt then, how we feel in retrospect, etc, has nothing in common with someone who was a straight man and now identifies as a gay woman. Leaving aside any suggestion of AGP, and assuming that a male bodied person, identifying as a woman and maintaining an attraction to women, is a genuine gender orientation. Surely if you joined a group of previously straight identifying women, talking through their emerging attraction to women, you'd quickly recognise that your experiences had nothing in common, say best wishes guys, and go set up your own group to discuss your own specific, very, very different experiences. There are plenty of broader LGBTQ+ groups to connect with the whole broader community and discuss the experiences you may have in common. You wouldn't just stay and keep inserting your own irrelevant experiences into a unique and unrelated discussion group. Instead these posters join right in and are often the among the most prolific posters, just constantly inserting their own experience into the discussion.
So it makes me really feel like ultimately this isn't coming from a place of a genuine need to process their feelings and connect with those in similar situations. It actually does make me feel fetishised. Like these are men just really enjoying getting to join in and steer these discussions women are trying to have about our sexuality. Often the whole discussion turns to kink/BDSM, which makes me feel extremely uncomfortable because this tends to be one of the topics that becomes most dominated by the transwomen posters. I've never been able to participate in those discussions because I just feel really, really weirded out by them. Even though I think they touch on some interesting points that I'd actually like to discuss.
In the end I left most of the groups because something that was helping me make sense of my feelings became something that I was increasingly very uncomfortable in. I know, realistically that it's the internet, any poster can be claiming to be a woman in my age group and could be a 90 year old man or 13 year old boy or anyone else. But this isn't even pretending. It straight up feels like a space for women to discuss very private and confusing parts of themselves, has been made into something the opposite of safe. I miss having the groups. I really wanted to have the space to work through everything. I wasn't in a hurry to take how I'm feeling further just yet but I think I want to eventually and I wanted to be able to do it with a support network. Yet I feel instead like overall, it just turned out to be a bit of a creepy experience.