Obsessing over gender/sexuality, alongside my traditional upbringing, made me homophobic. I want to change.

Hi everyone, I (22 F) want to start off by saying that me being homophobic/biphobic/sexist is something that I WANT to change really badly. It has been caused by my traditional upbringings and further enchanced by me being transgender and straight.

Having grown up in a more traditional place, I only ever learned of transgender people around the time I was 18 (which is also the time I started hormones! As soon as I learned I can take hormones, I immediately realized it was right for me).

Before I was 18, I spent every single day trying to be as feminne as I possibly could. The WORST thing would be when someone saw me, percieved me as a man, and made assumptions about me being a man. It bothered me like a LOT. It bothered me so much that I started to gender everything about myself, literally anything I could get I started to gender.

I started to wear mostly pink, not even becaue I like pink that much, but because I wanted people to see me and think "oh he's wearing pink from head to toe, he must not be a ""real"" man".

I started to walk extremely flamboyantly, talk super feminine, I got realllyyy into makeup (even tho I don't even like makeup that much lol), I'd wear colorful eyeshadows, always wear feminine jewelery.

It went so far that I even gendered things that made NO SENSE. Like, I started saying my favorite flavor is anything fruity (because fruity flavors are "girly" lol), whenever I play video games I would only allow myself to play girl characters, even if there was a man character I'd like the playstyle of, because if I play a man character that makes me less girly -.-

I became OBSESSED with gender. Every little thing had to have gender associated it. Eating too little was feminine, being shy was feminine, wanting chicken over steak was feminine, liking pink over green is feminine. Everything here consumed my mind, I could not longer just be myself, I had to make the world know I was as feminine as possible. And all of these came from very bigoted and frankly sexist ideas.

Eating less is "feminine"? what?? It sounds like what an incel would think is feminine. But I am only now really realizing this.

The #1 biggest thing that I based my femininity around was the fact that I liked men, but manly STRAIGHT men!! I only liked really masculine men that loved p**sy and sports, and if they didn't like sports that meant they were less masculine. If they had ANY inkling of liking something that I viewed as "feminine", then that makes them less of a man. Because in my mind, if I liked something that was "feminine", it made me more of a woman. And I used the fact that I like masculine men as a way to be like "look!! I'm not really a guy, because I like men! And only girls like that, right? So therefore I'm not a man, I'm like pretty much a woman, right??"

This way of thinking became so ingrained in me that I started to have very homophobic views. I saw every single gay man as intrinsically more feminine JUST because they liked men. My line of thinking was: "the most feminine straight man out there is still more masculine than the most masculine gay man out there just because the straight man likes women, and liking women is the most masculine thing a guy can do"

And saying that is extremely extremely bigoted, and I know that :( I want to change so bad.

Someone close to me came out as bi, and that made me view them differently, I viewed them with a different lense, and I HATE THAT!! I know I can change, but where do I start? Are there any book recommendations? I am planning on bringing this up to my therapist as soon as I can. I understand that me thinking this way is wrong, I really do, I just want some help now.

Edit: thank you for the responses :)) I’m already doing better. The advice that really stuck with me is that I “needed” that mindset back then since my outside didn’t match my inside, but now that my outside matches my inside (thanks to hormones and styling), I do not need to gender everything like I used to. It will take a while to adjust, but I now realize how to get over it ❤️