Originally a comment by Artymorty on When in doubt, do the dangerous thing.
The thing about having incipient homosexual feelings while being in Brighton is that in Brighton, the sexes and the sexual orientations are treated like tribes rather than material categories. Our brains are wired to see tribes as “us” and “them” — trustworthy or untrustworthy; safe or unsafe; family or outsiders; good-feeling and bad-feeling.
In Brighton, a girl does not look at her body and see that she is female; she does not look at other people and see that the bodies of one sex activate hormonal responses far more than bodies of the other sex. In Brighton, male and female are not material things — though they are still innate. But they’re innate in a way that’s connected to our natural dispositions — less like, say, blood types, and more like, say, the the Hogwarts Houses of Harry Potter: to be a man or a woman is to be a Gryffindor or a Hufflepuff; to be a “cishet” is to be a horrible Slytherin.
A Brightonite arrives at one’s “gender identity” and his sexuality by sussing out vibes. When you think about boys and girls — yourself as a boy or girl, as well as yourself among other boys and girls — anything that triggers a bad feeling is a sign that you’re not among your tribe; anything that makes you feel good is a sign you’ve found your people.
(This is, of course, what they call “gender dysphoria” and “gender euphoria”. And these terms originated, of course, as a folk-tale way for autogynephilic men to interpet their sexual arousal at their own bodies when they thought of themselves “as female”, and their sexual aversion toward their own bodies when they thought of themselves “as male”. But then that folk-tale way of envisioning our “sexed souls” caught on with the masses thanks to the Internet, and it hit the lesbians and gays and autistics particularly hard.)
Problem is, incipient homosexual feelings are often accompanied by innate “gender-nonconforming” tendencies, and both of those things will always trigger feelings of discomfort, because they put you in the position of being an outlier. Gays will always be massively outnumbered by straights — as much as 50 to one, if the sexological stats are accurate — and the super-tomboys and super-femmes will always be outnumbered by the more typical behavoural profiles of the sexes. Autistics are also atypical in a lot of ways, and they, too, develop confusion and distress about it.
Even in the rah-rah rainbow-festooned streets of Brighton, however much “gay pride” is publicly celebrated, actually being gay still comes with private emotional baggage, and the whole point of the trans movement is that a scalpel and a syringe is the only way to free yourself of such internal discomfort.
Gays and autistics will always go through at least a phase of feeling like they don’t fit in, no matter how many months we dedicate to Pride or how many Awareness Weeks and Days of Remembrance are proclaimed by City Hall. The gender movement will always tell people that feeling ill-at-ease is an urgent medical gender emergency.
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