Coming Out of an Identity Crisis: How My First Queer Relationship Empowered Me to Challenge Our Gendered and Cis-Heteronormative Culture

By Hannah Conroy

From childhood to adulthood, I genuinely believed I was obligated to centre my identity around archetypal storylines for women. So, you can imagine the shits I flipped when I realised that I didn’t have to live according to the expectations severely inflicted by society.

All the Disney classics I binged only showed romantic dynamics between men and women. My first sex-ed class in fifth grade only explained reproductive roles according to the gender binary. Even high school Lit class explored the dichotomy of gender roles responsible for the conditioning we experience now – and nothing beyond those spheres. Even my favourite TV show, Sex and the City, blasphemed bisexuality as an inability to make decisions (I’m disappointed in you, Carrie).

All these outlets actively excluded the universe of self-discovery that lived outside the dichotomy between man and woman, straight and not straight. And with that, the love and respect we deserve to experience.

I flipped ahead in school textbooks and never found the word ‘queer’ or an explanation distinguishing gender identity and gender expression. I didn’t even know that existed. I just remember everybody in middle school used ‘gay’ as an insult. I also remember girls who kissed girls in college were characterised as ‘hot’, ‘dirty’ or ‘attention-seeking’. 

Being limited to these conditioned environments left little to no room for me to embrace who I really was. The vice grip cis heteronormativity held my beliefs in was so excruciatingly tight that I didn’t even realise that I was choking for years. 

Growing up with an indisputably minute ache that not everything I wanted in life was cis and straight felt borderline apocalyptic. Every couple of years, I mentally addressed the ever-present sensation that I didn’t know how to authentically express. Was I bisexual, lesbian, pansexual? I genuinely didn’t know, nor did I have any idea where to go to comfortably seek answers.

This identity crisis of mine made it difficult to decipher what it means to be truly happy and, more importantly, in love. Every relationship I had been in since I was fifteen was with a cis guy, and I questioned my sexuality in each one. It took years of self-reflection (and therapy) to pick up on the patterns of behaviour both my male partners and I fell into, which resulted from the gendered culture we grew up immersed in. 

I always took the blame for the boys who manipulated me and treated me like an object rather than their equal. I felt painstaking terror every time I debated telling a boyfriend how they hurt my feelings. I didn’t know what a boundary was nor how to set it effectively. I utilised sex as a bargaining chip because it made the gaslighting a little easier to ignore. Now, looking back, I recognise that the microaggressive misogyny I was victim to wasn’t entirely my partners’ fault; it’s what they’ve been indoctrinated with. (I’m not excusing their brutal bullshit. I just want to acknowledge that they’re also victims of these constructs. It’s just comically cruel that the punishment rules in their favour 99.99% of the time.)

College encouraged me to discuss queerness more than any other educational environment. If there was a time and place to question everything I knew, this was it. But I was scared and still painfully reliant on the validation cishet culture dangled in front of my face. So, like many other young adults, the invincibility complex I suffered from was misused to further repress my curiosity. 

So, when I began my first queer relationship fresh out of my academic career, it felt like I had busted open Pandora’s box. Only it wasn’t just creatures of evil and malice that flew out, but powerful beings full of hope, courage and riveting authenticity.

My current partner is trans-masculine nonbinary (they/them); we met when I was still exclusively dating cis guys (OOF). What began as a fun hook-up at my twenty-first birthday party steadily morphed into an unwavering bond. We even drove across the US and moved in together! Despite the dreadful anxiety that no one was ever going to look at me the same, I was more terrified by how insatiably strong (and good) this relationship felt. 

There was an undeniable shift in how I was treated, embraced and celebrated. For the first time in my life, I felt comfortable acknowledging that I was more than a woman: I was human. Being asked for my consent (and not performatively) was like speaking a whole new language. Being urged to voice my feelings and NOT have them used against me? That was whacky as f*ck, at first.

This relationship I’ve built with my partner not only emphasises the necessity to nurture our emotional intelligence but also promotes discourse about our self-expression outside of sexuality. 

You wouldn’t believe the number of times I’m mistaken as human Google by cishet people bewildered by my partner, our relationship and how we choose to live our life. Many cishets are conditioned to primarily resort to the sexual dynamic of queerness and not ascend past that. That’s probably why every time I heard of queer sex in health class, it was either described as ‘up the ass’ or a trapdoor into the void of STDs and STIs. Which is downright degrading, I might add.

I’ve been asked about my love life more in the past two years than my entire decade of dating. I wonder why that is! Is it possible this ignorance is rooted in my worst fear? That the queer narrative, MY narrative, is being overlooked as an integral plotline in humankind’s greater story? 

The recent US legislature pushing to censor discourse around LGBTQIA+ topics in education only confirms that our culture is inherently biased. Claiming ownership of my identity as a queer woman is my means to retell the story that we could all benefit from learning about. And, of course, use it as inspiration to rewrite a more empowering tale.