Writing From the In-Between

How being bigender, AFAB, and living with gender dysmorphia shapes my voice as a homoerotic author telling stories of men who love men.

Some days, being bigender feels like standing in a doorway that never quite closes. It lets me peek inside somewhere I sometimes long to be.

I was assigned female at birth. The world decided what that meant for me long before I had language for how I felt inside.

For years, I tried to live comfortably in that box because it was easier than explaining why I didn’t fully belong there. Easier than explaining why some days I felt like a woman moving through the world, and other days I felt unmistakably, undeniably male in ways that had nothing to do with how I looked and everything to do with how I existed.

Being bigender is not a neat 50/50 split. It’s a constant shifting of internal gravity. Some mornings, I wake up, and my reflection feels like a stranger. Other days, I feel almost aligned, almost at peace.

And threaded through all of it is gender dysmorphia—the quiet, persistent discomfort of living in a body that doesn’t always match the shape of my mind.

That dysmorphia is not loud or theatrical. It’s subtle. It’s the way clothes sit wrong. The way my voice sounds unfamiliar. The way I sometimes feel like I’m performing a role that was handed to me rather than one I chose.

It’s the way I carry myself differently depending on which part of me feels closest to the surface that day.

And then there’s the writing.

For years, I wrote MM+ Romance. Stories about men loving men. Stories about male desire, male vulnerability, male intimacy.

And somewhere along the way, I realized that I wasn’t just writing about men as an observer. I was writing from a place that felt deeply personal. Deeply internal. As if part of me was finally allowed to speak without being filtered through the expectations placed on my body.

Writing homoerotic fiction intensified that realization.

Because homoerotic fiction doesn’t allow for distance. It demands closeness. Physicality. Sensation. It asks you to inhabit male bodies, male desire, male touch, male longing in an intimate, unapologetic way.

And when I write those scenes, when I write that desire, it doesn’t feel like something outside of me. It doesn’t feel like performance.

It feels like recognition.

This is one of the quiet, complicated truths of being a bigender AFAB author writing about men: sometimes my writing feels more aligned with who I am than my reflection does.

There’s a strange kind of relief in being able to explore masculinity, male sensuality, and male vulnerability on the page in ways I cannot always express outwardly in my own life. My characters get to move through the world in bodies that match the way I sometimes feel inside. They get to desire and be desired without the constant hum of dysmorphia in the background.

But it also comes with difficulty.

Because I am aware that to many readers, I am seen as a woman writing about men. And that perception can feel like a quiet erasure of the part of me that is not a woman at all. The part of me that feels seen, even healed, in the act of writing male/male passion and love.

There is a vulnerability in knowing that the space where I feel most authentic is also the space where I am most likely to be misunderstood.

And yet, I keep writing.

I write because queer male stories matter. I write because desire between men deserves to be shown as joyful, tender, messy, hungry, and deeply human. I write because somewhere out there are readers who see themselves in these stories in ways they may not yet be able to articulate.

And I write because, in a way, these stories are where I get to exist most fully as myself.

Being bigender and AFAB means living with a constant negotiation between how I am seen and how I feel. Writing homoerotic fiction is one of the few places where that negotiation falls away. Where I don’t have to explain. Where I don’t have to justify.

Where I can simply create from the truest parts of me.

And maybe that’s why I’m still here, still writing about men loving men, still exploring lust and love and intimacy sixteen years later.

Because in telling their stories, I get to quietly tell mine too.