I just found this great thread via a search. Thanks for starting it,
@littleoc
Your original post asked for "your story". Mine is really convoluted and includes issues with both gender and sexuality. I was sexually abused by both male and female parents from age 3 or so on. My lovely system managed to sequester that information for many decades until it all came blasting out in a monumental sort of way. Ugh but that's a different story.
I was fully aware from as long as I remember that I identified as a boy even though I had a girl's body--mostly because my mother fought me on it constantly. She'd adopted a girl because she wanted a girl. Her bad luck. Back then, I was identified by others as a "tomboy." I insisted on being called a boy's name. I remember being utterly shocked when my best friend, his brother, and I had one of those little kid moments (around age 4) of showing each other our privates. They had proof they were boys and I was not. It was a horrifying revelation to me that I could not be a boy simply because I believed I was. The gender experience started before the sexual abuse. Until I was 12, I was forced to be my father's boy, and my mother's girl--and the abuse related to some of this.
Some earlier poster said they were sexual before they even knew what that was. I was too (very oversexual)--in part, I'm certain, because of the sexual abuse. As I got older, I still didn't "get" much about sex (I was pretty dissociated all along), but I liked boys. So my sexuality, on the surface at least, was hetero. But, if you layer the gender identification over that, it basically made me a gay boy, not a hetero girl.
It's even more convoluted than that. Because I was raped by my father, as his "boy," I ended up unconsciously developing this shame about feeling I was a man attracted to men. And because my mother abused me in different ways, I learned to fear and distrust women. Yet I was, biologically, a woman. YIKES. It all confuses even me. Even still all these decades later. And...guess what? I have been married to a man for 24 years and "he" is transgender (I didn't know that until about 10 years ago). But he is heterosexual technically because he likes women and he hasn't transitioned. And we have two nearly grownup kids who identify as gender fluid and bisexual...and did long before they knew anything at all about us, their parents. And neither of them has experienced any sort of sexual trauma.
I think trauma can deeply complicate both gender identification and sexual orientation/preferences, and that humans fall somewhere on a continuum of gender as well as a continuum of sexuality (which can shift and change over life), no matter what their physical body looks like or whether they've experienced trauma. It's all very confusing to sort out, and moreso for those of us who have been traumatized whether by sexual assault or by rigid cultural "norms" that view us as abnormal and can make us grow up to hate and abuse ourselves.
