Why couldn’t I just say who I was without the caveat? Why did there have to be that tension? I needed to put other people down in order to bring myself up. To make myself real, I had to invalidate other people; to make myself right, I had to say other people were wrong. This was my internalized self-hatred on display. At a basic level, I thought that being attracted to men was wrong because it was “feminine,” so I had to prove that I was somehow right. Conforming to the gender binary was about wanting to hold on to power.
