First, thanks for starting this thread and thanks to everyone who has shared their story. If it wasn't important and necessary, no one would ask and no one would tell and no one would read this and find some hope from the stories of strangers on the internet.
tl;dr: am a cis lesbian, raised by Jehovah's Witnesses so that fucked all my shit right up and continues to fuck it up to this day...but I'm happier now than I was so it's ok.
When I look back on it, I am ambivalently boggled that it took me as until 23 to figure out that I am a lesbian...and that it only took me until 23. I'm fairly certain that my bio mother (who was very physically and emotionally abusive in general) figured it out pretty early on because she was extremely harsh about forcing me into conventional hetero gender stuff. I was tomboyish, so she forced me to wear dresses. I wanted to play with Hot Wheels and Legos, she took away every toy but the Barbies she forced me to have. She absolutely would not allow me to have any female friends, constantly making up excuses why I couldn't play with them. But she enthusiastically encouraged every last one of my male friendships. I liked to play with a pair of twin brothers who lived a couple houses down (because they had tons of awesome Hot Wheels and GI Joes and Transformers), so bio mom took all three of us on what she insisted on calling my first date when I was about 8 years old. That's right folks, my official first date was a three-way with twins that my mother set up.
I was raised a Jehovah's Witness so the whole time I was growing up I heard over and over again that it was impossible to be born gay. Either you fell into immorality because of bad associations, or you secretly wished to be the opposite gender. I specifically remember hearing multiple times during different sermons that lesbians only wanted sex with women because they wanted to be men and wished they had penises. I remember feeling really uneasy and sick to my stomach when they preached about homosexuality and gender roles.
That fucked me up for a really long time. That religion is pretty cultish, so as a child and into my early/mid teens, everyone who had a strong influence on me was a JayDub. And JayDubs don't just drink the Kool-Aid, they fill up the Jacuzzi and talk about how wonderful the cyanide feels bubbling up against their assholes.I know now that I'm definitely a cis lesbian, just not particularly feminine. But there was a 10 year period from about 12ish to about 22ish where I frequently had nightmares where I would be talking to or hanging out with a female friend and look down to find I had a penis.I'd wake up in drenched in a cold sweat, hyperventilating panic attack. The panic was over the idea of having a penis, because I was not male, had no desire or inclination to be male, but had been so heavily indoctrinated in the idea that lesbian = penis envy that feeling attraction to females pretty much broke my brain.
As a teenager I had gotten away from my bio mother so I was finally able to have female friends and well...you know how most lesbians fall for a straight bestie at some point....happened to me 3 different times before I could admit I was gay. When I hit middle school my both my classmates in school and my co-religionist friends started teasing me, and occasionally outright bullying me about being a queer, a dyke, a carpet-muncher, whatever. I tried to distance myself from anything gay as much as possible. I lived in South Dakota, in the 90s, and my father is a Bob Villa worshiping carpenter who has been giving me his old shirts since I was tall enough that they didn't drag on the ground and yet I still stopped wearing flannel because flannel = dyke. I pretended to have crushes on guys who I knew had absolutely no interest in me so I could say 'I'm not gay, I'm totally in love with Charlie. See all this poetry I write about Charlie. Charlie is ever so dreamy." But in reality Charlie barely knew if I was in the room, which was fine with me because I was having sleepovers with his cousin Claire and trying to find out what the appropriate amount of spooning was for 'really good friends.' But mentally, I didn't know I was pretending. I convinced myself that I was really in love with Charlie, but all the while I was just having a relaxing soak in the Kool-Aid. I locked the gay away in my mind. My response to even the tiniest amount of female attraction was to clench my eyes shut and think "La la la, you're not gay, Don't think about it. La la la, it's natural to be curious about other girls, that doesn't make you gay. Just don't think about it" I used that as my mantra like the Bene Gesserit recite the litany against fear. Boobies were my Gom Jabbar.
In my late teens I moved to Florida, rebelled, and went through a scene kid/hipster phase. Looking back I see it was another way of trying to be something opposite of what I am. I tried to date and convinced myself that I was in love with a few different guys, There were a lot of awkward handies exchanged, and a few truly horrible blowies. Anytime I fooled around with a guy, I invariably thought "masturbating is more fun than this." I did also make friends with and hang out with a lot of open-mined and/or LGBTQ people, and that lead me to begin questioning the whole JayDub belief system. But to get myself to the the point of actually admitting that I was even slightly, smally, in the tiniest way possible attracted to women, first I had to stop attending JW meetings and distance myself from that religion for a couple of years. I broke off a number of friendships because I was scared that I only thought I was a lesbian because I had several lesbian friends. Then I made new friends who had never been JayDubs and were awesome and supportive but also non-threatening, and I started slowly accepting that I might not be 100% straight. Then started telling people that I that I might be bi. Then I made out with a girl and realized for the first time in my life that kissing could be a fun and pleasurable activity, not a disgustingly awkward unnecessary fluid exchange. Then I decided to test things empirically and had my only penis in vag sex with a rando, and quite thoroughly proved to myself that I was not now nor ever would be either hetero or bisexual. Then I freaked out all over again and went through another totally antisocial phase.
I'm 33 now. I'm still struggling. I managed to get away from the religion slowly enough so that I was not disfellowshipped or disassociated, so my family still talks to me and loves me. My two favorite people on the planet are my grandmother and my aunt, both JWs. My bio mom was very physically and emotionally abusive and my aunt and grandma saved me from her. They're both pretty fucking badass awesome aside from the whole batshit JayDub thing. I'm about 67% sure that my aunt would accept me being a lesbian. My grandmother...not only would she never speak to me again, but she is 83, not in the best of health and is not very good about trying to hide the fact that I am her favorite grandkid, The consensus among family and friends who know her and know I'm gay is that coming out to her might literally kill her. As in like, because of her religion, she would feel the need to completely cut me out of her life, but doing so would make her so depressed as to start the downward spiral. So it's hard for me to put myself out there for dating, because I know it's unfair to ask anyone to be in the closet with me, especially with how important my family is to me. Sometimes I wish that I had just run off to New York or California when I was 15 and didn't love them as much as I do, so I could be who I am without hurting them. But I couldn't be who I am without them. So IDK. Maybe one day I'll meet a girl who doesn't mind pretending. Maybe I'll just wank a lot and die alone. At least I know who I am now, so that's something. It'a a lot, actually. It's not everything, but it's important.