The most intimate article I've ever written.

I was a little reluctant to release this, but I don't think it's too offensive and I'm hoping that people take it in the spirit that it's meant. I'm trying to be as honest as I can with everybody.

Before my transition, I was always attracted to women. That’s never been in question. But if I’m being brutally honest, my way of being attracted to women was slightly off compared to what most people might expect. I was not like other men. Yes, it was sexual in some sense, but much more than that it was admiring. When I saw a beautiful woman, my mind never leapt to imagining sex. Not once in my entire life.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve never had any interest in the male part of my anatomy. It didn’t upset me when I lived as a man, but it didn’t interest me either. I never played with it, never found it engaging. It was simply there, functional, useful for standing up at a urinal and that was about it. I suspect this was difficult for some of my female partners, that I often seemed disinterested in sex itself.

There was one exception that sticks with me. A French girlfriend, very sexual, who loved me to do all sorts of things to her. One day she said: “I think you were a woman in another life. You know exactly how to do these things—it’s like you’re living your sexual fantasy through me. But you don’t want anything done to you, do you?” She was 100% correct. I always imagined being her when I did this. That was the closest anyone ever came to working me out.

That was my backdrop as a man: I craved love, affection, connection, closeness but rarely the act itself. In fact, all of my male sexual encounters, where I managed to go all the way, always involved me flicking my mind over and imagining I was the woman, and that was when I could come. That's the only way, as a man, that I could do it. The second I pretended that I was the woman being penetrated, then I would do it. I never told any of my sexual partners this.

When I transitioned, I half-expected things might change. Many people report shifts in attraction. For me, not really. Not so far. I can look at a good-looking man and think, “He’s an interesting-looking character,” and admire him in that way. But I’ve never taken that to the stage of imagining something physical. Maybe that will change as I explore my own submissiveness and how I experience intimacy. I don’t know.

If anything, the way I’ve seen men behave since transition has probably put me off them even more. Most women I encounter, for all their complications, come across as kind, decent, and human. With men, though, it often feels like there’s a mask that slips eventually. Too many reveal themselves as what we can only call chasers men who fetishize trans women.

I suspect I occupy a very particular position in their fantasies. Some men seem to project onto me the idea that I transitioned because I wanted to indulge in the same private daydreams they have, imagining themselves as women, imagining themselves playing with their own bodies all day. They think I exist to fulfil that fantasy. And of course, they assume that must be how I came to transition too. But that isn’t me. Not at all. I actually believe this is how the autogynephilia label crops up amongst those sorts of men online. Basically, they're just projecting how they would fantasize being a woman.

I say it over and over: I transitioned for one simple reason, I love being a girl. It makes me happy. There’s nothing complicated, kinky, or pathological about it. I don’t spend hours wallowing in some sexualised sense of my femininity. And I certainly don't lie on my bed, feeling myself up all day. I just live my life, and it feels right at last.

When I look at women now, I’m still attracted but in a different way than before. It’s not that physical attraction has disappeared, but it’s layered with something more. I want connection, mental closeness, intimacy. When I imagine being with another woman, it feels like us together, as two women. That, more than anything, feels right to me, like the missing piece of what I was always reaching for as a man but never quite able to hold.

I have tested this in the real world. I’ve kissed girls in bars (too bloody many), discovered that if I just stand there, dance a little, before long someone comes up and it just happens. Only once did I take things further, and even then, I was reluctant to let her do much with me. Without the anatomy I want, I feel embarrassed. I don’t want to bring my male parts into play.

I shared these feelings recently in a transgender women’s WhatsApp group. The responses were fascinatingly varied. Some of the women said they were perfectly happy using their male anatomy during sex with women. For them, it wasn’t a problem,

it was natural, comfortable, even enjoyable. I respect that, but I find it impossible to relate. To me, it would feel disturbing, even degrading, to attempt “male sex” while looking like a woman. I’d feel like a parody of myself.

Maybe some people would say that makes me sexually repressed. I don’t think so. I think it simply reflects what I can and can’t reconcile with myself. I could, for years, accept a role as a man with male body parts, even if it didn’t fit. I can imagine myself, now, as a lesbian woman with approximated female body parts, and that feels possible. But I cannot accept the idea of presenting to the world as a woman and then attempting to have male sex. The dissonance is too much.

And so I sit in this middle ground. Still attracted to women, but differently now. Still working out what intimacy looks like for me. Still trying to understand how my body, my mind, and my sense of self all weave together into something coherent.

What I know is this: I didn’t transition for sex, and I didn’t transition for men. I transitioned because living as a woman makes me whole. Everything else, romance, attraction, intimacy is being written as I go.