Dear Diary,

I recently went on a great date with a sexy and sophisticated pansexual cis guy. It was the first date I’d been on in a long time. Charming and tall and adorable and smart with a sleeve of tattoos and cute glasses to boot, he made me hot and bothered in equal measure. You could say he was the total package. One might even call him dreamy. It was a match made in heaven.

Or it could’ve been, until he ghosted me.

It’s not like my standards are that high to begin with. As someone who has spent the greater part of a decade being sexually neglected because I don’t perform gender properly, my standards are comically low. You don’t have to be talented to get in my pants. You don’t have to be charming or funny or witty or able to make great conversation to make me fall for you. You don’t have to have a well-furnished apartment or a beautiful house in order to take me home. Just tell me that you don’t believe in the gender binary, let me know that you want to put it in, and I am pretty much yours.

You could say that I am desperate — because I am. In a world that both desexualizes and hypersexualizes transfeminine people and treats us like street garbage, I am desperate to find companionship and touch. I haven’t had good, consistent sex at any point in my life. I haven’t had a reliable cuddlebuddy for a very, very long time. My “dry spells” are calculated not in days or weeks or months but in years. How many years has it been since I’ve last had penetrative sex? How many years has it been since I’ve last given or received a blowjob? I have to stop and really think about it to calculate it — it’s been that long.

I’ve spent years pretending that I have a dating life; hiding my absence of romantic prospects under a thin veil of coyness or, more often, deflecting the question. I’ll be at queer brunch, everyone will be discussing their sexploits and, after a conspicuous silence, someone will invariably turn to me and ask, “Jacob, what about you? Are you seeing anyone?”

Socially masterful, I bat off the question playfully with a “girl, don’t even get me started!” As if to suggest that my dating life is too messy and fabulous to get into over brunch. As if to suggest that my dating life exists in the first place.

This type of dodging is socially convenient, sure, but it hasn’t helped. Being silent about the fact that I never get fucked isn’t helping anyone, least of all me. So I guess this is me opening up about it.

I want to start telling people that I don’t have a sex life. I want to start telling people that, at the age of 26, I still haven’t been in a relationship ever, that no one approaches me or asks to kiss me or makes eyes at me across the room. This is just the reality of my life. This is the reality of my gender. This is the reality of being gender-nonconforming and transfeminine and predominantly attracted to dudes and masculine-of-center folks. And if I don’t overshare about it on the internet, how will it ever change?

Of course, no person is obligated to be sexually attracted to me. But it's important that people consider their attractions and "preferences" and question why they are generally so averse to dating gender-nonconforming femmes.