This person started talking to me. I introduced myself and he (I'll use male pronouns for now but therein lies the point of this post) introduced himself to me with a name that sounded masculine. He was presenting as mostly male but I would say not passing particularly well right now, but I took the name and presentation as a queue that he identified male. I'm not actually going to say the name for privacy reasons. But suffice to say I was led to believe he identified male.
He asked me to follow him inside and bought me a drink. I wasn't really planning to drink anymore but I kind of let him talk me into it and decided I was having a good time and didn't want to leave for a while. There was another guy hanging with us and this person introduced to him with a different name, this time a woman's name.
All of this is complicated by the fact that the bar was noisy and he didn't talk very loudly. I was leaning in close to hear better but it was still difficult. What I was able to get though, is the masculine name (what he told me) was his last name and the feminine name (what he told the other guy) was his first name. I asked which he preferred to go by and he starting waffling. I heard something about binary this or that and it sounded like maybe he was trying to explain about the gender spectrum or something. Very hard to understand. I said something like how I would respect whatever he wanted me to call him. Then another guy who I'd been hanging out with a lot last night interrupted and kind of changed the subject. (Boy was he was a chatty Kathy!) At that point it kind of never got addressed. On a sidenote "Chatty Kathy" and I had been getting increasingly flirty with each other as the night went on. I was meeting a lot of friendly people last night.
I appreciated that this (possibly trans man) seemed interested and we exchanged numbers at his request. I'm a gay man. He probably figured that. After all, this was in a gay bar that was like 97% male.
It's a little awkward for me. He might be kind of flirting with me. He may just be being friendly and maybe I'm reading too much into it. He initiated everything--buying me a drink and swapping numbers. I don't know if he is currently pre T or early T or maybe non T, or maybe identifies andro. I'm still fairly clueless. I do know that he is not my type
right now but I definitely don't want to burn any bridges. It's possible I would start finding him very attractive if he transitions. I don't even know if he plans to. I wish I didn't care about that but I can't help it. I'm strongly gay on the Kinsey scale.
Any suggestions how to approach this? Maybe someone here has been on the other side of my dilemma and can help me be respectful and tactful about this.
