Gender and My Sexual Orientation

I have never identified myself as a girl or a boy. Growing up I felt like my body and the people around me did that for me. They told me I was a girl. I’ve always known I wasn’t, but I didn’t feel like a boy either. I just felt like me. For lack of a proper definition, I would probably have identified as genderqueer or gender fluid but not only within the traditional binary. Today, and would prefer to identify myself without a gender.

As a child I wasn’t sure if I was asexual or if something was wrong with me. My father had a conversation with my sisters and me about how being sexually attracted to others was only natural. He told us not to worry about who we were attracted to because he would only really be worried if we weren’t attracted to anyone. I wasn’t sexually attracted to anyone at the time but my own fear and confusion stopped me from bringing this fact to light.

I was raped when I was 15. I was also severely sick during this time. I had a gallbladder that was three times too big and growing through my liver. I was in pain every time my body tried to digest food. Eventually, I gave up on eating. I was small for my age, weighting at most 85 pounds.

I didn’t know the guy that raped me. He had pulled me aside when I stepped outside for a bit to get away from the noise of the small-scale hardcore puke show. I was weak, I remember only being able to scream and eventually just try to hide the fact that the zipper on my shorts was broken as I walked home. Until this point in time, I have never told anyone else this. Honestly, I probably would have kept it that way if I hadn’t been confronted with this prompt for class. I can find no better words to help explain the change in my sexual orientation and would feel a coward to lace this rather personal essay with anything but what I perceive to be truth.

After that event, I realized that I was sexually attracted to men. It was felt weird at first. I had to adjust to having another drive influencing my thought process and eventually my life. What was even more confusing was that I wasn’t sure how to label my sexual orientation without having a label for my gender first. I knew I wasn’t exactly a gay male stuck in a female’s body, but I also knew that I wasn’t a straight female.

Right around the same time that I was trying to figure this all out my sickness got worse. This was mainly due to the fact that no one believed that anything was physically wrong with me. Therefore, no physical actions were being taken to fix the problem. My parents and all the doctors that I had gone to