I identify as a poly straight cis white guy in my mid 30s fortunate enough to live in a coastal liberal bastion. I'm invoked in kinky and sex positive communities. I do my best to be an ally to the people who do not have the same privilege I have because they are queer, trans, otherwise not male, POC, etc. However, as far as attraction/arousal goes, I'm really something like a Kinsey 0.75.

Earlier this year, I began a relationship with a transwoman. I've known her for some time and I've never seen her as anything but a woman, hell I didn't even know her trans status for the first few years I knew her. I've always found her terribly attractive and she's just an all around cool person. In the past, I've had fleeting attraction for a few transwomen and I once made out with a transwoman but it's never been a specific turn on or fetish of mine. Porn featuring people with breasts and penises has never been something I've watched, been aroused by or jerked off to. My girlfriend hasn't had bottom surgery, and it was a transition for me to get used to sex when PIV is off the table but I'm quite happy.

When I first started dating her a queer and trans friend of mine said, "I want to warn you, someday someone is going to call you a faggot. Just be ready for it." Well, I went to school somewhere in the middle of America so it's certainly not the first time that will have happened. However the idea that I'm struggling with now is this: Am I Queer? I'm not asking in that I feel burdened with the label and it is attacking my sense of identity, but more in the sense of, "If I say I'm queer am I 'invading' the space of other people?" It's not really something I'd use often, if for no other reason that to respect my girlfriend's wish to not be outed. However I am in a lot of "safe space" type situations and I do have some right to my own story. I'm worried that if I did identify as queer in one of these spaces with people who know me to be hetero (or who make the pretty accurate assumption that I'm hetero) am I taking a label that doesn't rightfully belong to me?

Am I allowed to say I'm queer?

Genuinely Understanding Yourself

This question is tricky, GUY, because it sounds like the "Am I Still Straight If I Date A Trans Person" question. You're a man, she's a woman, you identify primarily as heterosexual and she's straight. Even with PIV off the menu—and something else on it—this relationship wouldn't make you gay or bi.

On the other hand... trans people, even straight trans people, are members of the LGBT community, and queer is the umbrella term often used in place of the awkward LGBTQIATSLFQ, etc. You're currently partnered with someone who's queer, GUY, even if she doesn't identify as queer (so as not to out herself as trans), so in a sense you've married into the queer community. Perhaps that makes you a queer-in-law.

But your question is even more complicated than that, GUY, because the land of Queer Theory has many definitions, surprises, cul-de-sacs, containment ponds, chutes and ladders. Jose Muñoz, smart academic guy who wrote Cruising Utopia in 2009, has some things to say about being queer:

Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain.

Got that?

Muñoz says queerness is a type of utopian vision we are constantly striving for and reinventing. I think. Practically speaking, this all sounds exhausting—queerness is something we work towards all our lives without ever achieving—but it may be a helpful approach to your problem, GUY, since Muñoz separates queerness from sexuality. Instead, queerness is an alternative approach to experiencing life and imagining your future, an alternative approach that LGBT people are overwhelmingly drawn to, but an approach to/idea of queerness that has room inside it for the odd Kinsey 0.75 dude like yourself.

While we're talking about the future, GUY, it may be helpful for you to spend some time thinking about your own. In the future, if you aren't dating this particular girlfriend anymore, would you still consider yourself queer or want to identify as such? If this experience feels like it's awakened/shifted/(insert verb) your understanding of yourself and who you are, then maybe you're queer. But if this queerness feels situational and only tied to your current relationship—if you're really just a queer-in-law—then you may want to stick with straight/Kinsey 0.75.

If you find all of this confusing—and it is confusing (I've been queer for decades and I can barely follow it)—here are some helpful words from Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of Failure:

Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well; for queers failing can be a style, to cite Quentin Crisp, or a way of life, to cite Foucault, and it can stand in contrast to the grim scenarios of success that depend upon 'trying and trying again.'

If you're not sure what to do and you feel like you're failing, do the queer thing and embrace failure. We grow into ourselves in increments, so it's okay if things aren't always clear and or feel clear for a time; our identities, as you've recently come to realize, aren't carved in marble.

P.S. You can identify as queer in "safe space" situation/emergency without necessarily outing your girlfriend. You can say you're queer without having to say exactly what kind of queer you are. People are likelier to assume you're a bi guy with a girlfriend than they are to assume you're a straight guy with a trans girlfriend.