The Family That Found Me: Becoming an Arab Man at 30

Most people assume that found families and blood families are mutually exclusive—that choosing your family means you must be estranged from the one you were born into. But in my experience, both can coexist in different ways, shifting through time, and estrangement is rarely a permanent state.

As a former Arab lesbian, I spent years fearing that I would never escape the family lair without a traditional husband, even though my family was neither particularly religious nor strictly tied to traditional rites of passage. Approaching 30, I felt trapped. How could I carve out a life on my own terms without surrendering to the heteronormative happily ever after? Then, in the past six months, the universe answered that question for me—brutally and decisively. One moment, I was applying for a car loan while still living under my mother’s roof; the next, I was being rescued by the friends I now call family, after a silly fight at home spiraled beyond my or my birth mother’s control. Both my mother and I had been clinging onto each other for six years in a toxic, codependent dynamic against the backdrop of a tenuous existence in the Arab Gulf, where your existence is directly tied to your labor status. By that point, I had spent a year slowly and surely gaining my independence, a fact a narcissistic parent would never be able to stomach without a fight.

And so, I left. For better or worse, I am fully on my own now. And yet, I’ve never been more surrounded by love. If it weren’t for my found family, I would not be here to tell this story.

The events that led me to my found family were traumatic and formative, to say the least. In the midst of an emotionally turbulent romantic relationship, I found my family members, or rather, they found me. Wounds, when unwitnessed, can never heal. And in the midst of all the turbulence in my life at the time, the only thing that carried me through was the balm of being witnessed, acknowledged, and taken care of.

Before I delve further into my own story, I want to reflect on the phrase found family. This is a familiar concept to those of us who are queer, but what draws me to it most is the implication of a completed quest. Much like the hero’s quest, the story begins with exile, forcing the hero to venture beyond what’s familiar in search of belonging, and ends with the discovery of home. The point here is that a found family isn’t stumbled upon by chance, it’s found through effort, resilience, and often—though not always—in the wake of rejection by one’s biological family.

What separates “found family” from “friends”? It’s a question worth exploring. I don’t see these categories as hierarchical—there’s no relationship ladder where someone gets promoted from “friend” to “family.” Instead, I see them more as overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. I’ve known people who felt like siblings but weren’t exactly friends, and others who were great friends but never quite became family. I’ve had blood relatives—a cousin, in particular—who I’d also classify as found family, since we grew up primarily apart and made the conscious decision to stay in each other’s lives, even as our families remained distant. I’ve seen relationships shift from family to friend-level and back again. The difference, I think, lies in the intimacy forged through shared struggle, pain, and sometimes shame. Found family lives in the deeper layers—these are the people who’ve seen you at your worst and chosen to stay, people who have contributed to your upbringing, even beyond childhood. I often think of The Odyssey; Odysseus’s crew stays with him, despite his moral failures, all the way to the end, at their own risk and peril. Found family, in its own way, can feel like that. Mine is made up of people who chose to stay despite my failures, and perhaps, in some cases, even because of them.

I walked away from my childhood home with no real sense of self, but in the presence of people who love me because of who I am, not despite it, I have been forced to bloom into the person I was always meant to be. A stereotypical Arab man in every sense—one who relishes Turkish coffee, conspiracy theories, and Ramadan shows (despite being raised Greek Orthodox, I very much enjoy the cultural elements of Ramadan). But also an Arab boy, finally experiencing the childhood I was denied: playing video games with my brothers, getting $3 haircuts at the barbershop downstairs, staying out until 2 a.m. with no repercussions, and playing foosball at the local burger joint.

Becoming a man at 30 means experiencing boyhood and manhood in parallel to catch up on everything I missed while the world saw me as a woman. There’s no doubt that some of the lessons I learned as a woman come in handy. Unlike many Arab men, I can cook and take care of my own home, but I’ve also come to discover—through the exasperated help of a dear member of my found family—that I lack a “feminine” touch when it comes to decorating my own home, and that I require some handholding when it comes to the basic tenets of interior design and feng shui.

These words may make the average gender studies professor shudder in horror, but I don’t necessarily subscribe to the gender-critical ideologies I once encountered in liberal arts spaces anymore. I understand that some may see this as a step backward—it’s not exactly “progressive” to label certain experiences or objects as masculine or feminine. But for many trans men, coming into manhood means compressing both boyhood and adulthood into a short time frame, often lived in an accelerated parallel.

It’s the experience of wearing Spider-Man Crocs to the beach in the morning, then a suit to your friend’s fine dining birthday dinner at night. We don’t have the luxury of theorizing on masculinity when we’ve spent so much time being denied access to it, either by ourselves or others. Right now, I’m not interested in dissecting why something feels masculine or affirms my manhood—I’m just trying to live it. Maybe when the dust settles, I’ll find the space to reflect. For now, I’ve spent enough time intellectualizing gender. This is the time to embody it.

I grew up as an only child, and because of this my childhood was incredibly lonely. My parents were both sucked into the workaholic, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. life that defines most work environments in the Arab Gulf, and I was left home with a nanny who spent most of her time watching tennis (Rafael Nadal vs. Roger Federer—she always rooted for Nadal, and I inherited this soft spot for him through her). It was against this backdrop that a dark sense of queer solitude festered. I was incredibly lonely; I thought I would never fall in love or have more than one friend I could be my authentic self with. And there was this constant, nagging feeling that my body just was not right. I once stumbled upon an FTM transition video on YouTube at the age of 12, and it unsettled me in a way I couldn’t explain until years later, when I recognized that feeling for what it truly was: longing. I was suffocated by that feeling for the longest time; anytime I thought about that video, I felt a lump in my throat. I couldn’t be trans on top of liking women, the dysphoria just felt too visceral. Surgery was too much of a commitment and felt Sisyphean, especially at that age. Besides, what the hell would I say to my parents? So, I decided I would never be trans—but as someone dear to me often said, declaring “never” is the surest way to make something inevitable.

I spent all six of my college years in Beirut, holding myself back from fully joining the city’s queer scene by miring myself in one long-distance relationship after another. Then again, long-distance relationships are a rite of passage for us, especially queer women (which I mostly identified as at the time). It was during this time that I met Leo at the age of 20; I was young, recently single, and Leo fascinated me in a way that most people didn’t. He was my first trans male friend and we hit it off right away. He was four years older than me and took me under his wing. At the time, I was just starting to explore new pronouns; in the meantime, Leo was starting to wear binders and make more of an effort to “pass” (as male) in society. While there was a significant age gap, in many ways we were growing up alongside each other. Watching Leo wear his binder reignited that longing in me to physically transition in a way that would align with what I was truly feeling on the inside—but I swatted that feeling away, reminding myself that I could never commit myself to any permanent physical changes that would enable me to live as a man.

This didn’t stop me from experimenting. I found myself leaning more into my masculinity, with Leo’s influence. I was still very affected by the gender studies framework that I had been exposed to through the liberal arts, so I continued to ascribe to the ideology that products cannot be inherently gendered. I still believe this is true, but that doesn’t stop me from finding euphoria in using a men’s razor, or men’s cologne. I started introducing more masculine items to my wardrobe. Men’s jewelry, for example, became a staple in my wardrobe, but I would pair that with red lipstick to quell the panic looming beneath the surface. It was a time where I found solace in existing in-between: in-between genders, in-between cultures, and in-between geographies. I moved around a lot—I traveled to visit family in the West, to the Gulf, even to Australia to visit my partner at the time. And yet Beirut was home during these years; I did not want to be anywhere else, nor did I feel fully comfortable exploring this “in-between-ness” anywhere else.

As I edged closer to graduation, I tried to stay in Beirut permanently, but out of economic necessity I found myself forced to move back to the Gulf. I had a few hundred dollars to my name and no ability to sustain myself without family funds. I committed to a fully heterosexual existence, thinking I needed to do so to find a job. I had no friends in the country during this time; my social life was limited to my mother and my cat, and my return to the dark sense of queer solitude—after a relatively rich queer life in Beirut—only heightened my sense of isolation. I was still in touch with my mentor from Beirut and his wife, and I tried to speak to them often enough to stay tethered to some semblance of family, and even traveled to visit them at some point to get away from the monotony of my chosen geography. They were the closest thing I had to parental figures, and they often advised me to get away from this sad, inauthentic existence and invited me to stay with them while I figured out my next steps. However, my fear of the unknown—of living away from my biological family—persisted, and I would always shut the idea down without entertaining it.

It was also during this time that I was diagnosed with PCOS, which caused my testosterone levels to rise significantly. It became harder for me to exist “in-between”, because I was already more masculine, and the testosterone didn’t help. To my horror, I found myself, deep down, reveling in the excess my voice got deeper, I developed some facial hair that needed constant maintenance, even my scent changed. While these were signs of masculinization that I had always longed for, the timing could not have been worse. I was working in a very public-facing setting at the time, and I could not get away with my appearance, even in the most ludicrous feminine outfits (that I had my mother pick out for me). I felt disgusting and out of control, and the dysphoria would have killed me, had the pandemic not started and forced us all to stay home.

The pandemic coincided with meeting my partner at the time. It was my first relationship without geographical barriers. We were both isolated in different ways, largely due to family constraints. Like many queer people, I’d fallen into what’s often called “destination addiction”—the belief that happiness exists around the corner, somewhere else. “Not here,” I would constantly remind myself. With a Western passport in hand, I was fixated on escape. I wanted us to leave the region as soon as possible, convinced that life could only begin after we’d departed. My partner, a refugee, felt otherwise. She was grounded, realistic, and rightly pointed out that immigration wasn’t feasible during the pandemic, especially while we were unemployed.

Still, I felt restless. I poured myself into hobbies—piano, swimming, reading—and a demanding remote job. I forgot about my gender identity. My health slipped. I loved my partner and felt safe with her, but something essential was missing. For both of us. After three years, she proposed opening the relationship. Despite my resistance, I felt compelled to hear her out.

Years of arrested development had blurred my sense of self. I hadn’t let myself think about being trans in a long time, and I’d lost touch with what would nourish me versus what would undo me. But one thing she said stuck with me: we’d been together since we were young, both shaped by family restrictions—wouldn’t it be freeing to explore, for once? That argument landed. I said yes. And in doing so, I opened a door, not just to new relationships, but to the queer community around me, and eventually, back to myself.

I learned a lot about myself through non-monogamy. It wasn’t unfamiliar—like long-distance, it’s something of a rite of passage for many queers—but it was my first time practicing it in the same geography, and that proximity hit differently. It was a shock to my nervous system. I coped the best way I knew how: by turning inward. I threw myself into solo routines and small joys, discovering new hobbies that made me feel grounded again. Most days, I found myself in the kitchen. There was something stabilizing about hacking a new recipe, doing things with my hands, and watching a transformation unfold—ingredients becoming something whole, something nourishing. In those moments, I felt myself shifting too. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I began moving away from that long-held sense of “in-between” and toward a more rooted, embodied sense of manhood. After all the years of denial, I was beginning to embrace it—not in abstraction, but in practice, through movement, through care.

The irony of embracing my masculinity in the kitchen, a space so often coded as feminine, wasn’t lost on me. But somewhere between kneading dough and braiding garlic knots, I discovered a version of masculinity that didn’t rely on performed dominance. It was quiet, domestic, tactile. So much of my discomfort with non-monogamy had stemmed from unexamined ideas about masculinity and possession. But in the quiet rhythm of nourishing myself and others, I started to let go of that. I realized that my masculinity didn’t have to be defended or proven; it could be a masculinity that demanded presence, not performance. It could be nurturing, understanding, and still entirely mine.

This isn’t to say I didn’t suffer alone in the months that followed that first conversation with my partner. I had few friends, and most of them were heterosexual—well-meaning, but ultimately unequipped to hold the kind of pain I was dealing with. In a bid to be witnessed, I turned to self-destruction. The usual: excessive drinking, disordered eating, other modes of self-harm. And that’s when my found family began to quietly coalesce around me. I didn’t go looking for them, they found me, in different iterations of pain, and chose to stay.

By that point, my trust in myself had been deeply eroded. I had lost touch with what would nourish me versus what would undo me. In simpler terms: I didn’t know what I wanted. I didn’t even know who I was—I’m still figuring that out, even as I write this.

What I do know is that we often define ourselves in relation to others. With my partner, I took on the role of provider, protector—traditionally masculine positions—but along with that came the role of pleaser. I have a tendency to prioritize other people’s happiness, often at my own expense. It’s not the most admirable trait, and certainly not the most stereotypically “masculine,” but it’s part of me—and probably a part of being socialized as a girl in an emotionally fraught, broken home.

By then, I had slowly been letting go of the “in-between” phase in my gender identity. Part of letting go of this phase also meant letting go of the inner pleaser. I needed to embody a stronger sense of self; and that’s where my found family came into the picture. I had spent so much of my time defining myself as a provider/protector that I lost sight of the fact that I needed to provide for and protect myself first, and without my found family I would have never remembered that.

It started with a text from a stranger: hey, we met last night. you had a lot to drink—just wanted to check in. are you okay? The night before, I’d been self-destructively binge-drinking—a cry for help—and help arrived, quietly, in the form of a new friend. I didn’t open up to her right away, but within a year, she had nurtured me into someone who existed beyond the pain of my relationship. She took me in when I left my mother’s home, and within a month of cohabiting she became the older sister I never had.

We were both only children, and that shared experience made me feel understood in a way others couldn’t match. Her tough-love teasing—my taste in women, my late-20s crisis habits—came with care, not cruelty. She sometimes apologized for it, but I’d never felt more seen. In standing by me through my rupture with my biological mother, she reminded me that maybe I was always meant to have a sister.

I also made two other trans friends during this time—both younger than me, but with what felt like decades more life experience. One had just moved out of his family’s home a few months before I did. He patiently walked me through setting up bills, weighed in on furniture choices, and invited me to play Fortnite (which I only tried for the first time recently) whenever I was feeling low. He teases me relentlessly on a day-to-day basis, but in that moment of despair, he was calm, patient, and encouraging. It made me want to keep playing—not only for the game itself, but because of the comfort of the newly established ritual. It felt like he was trying to comfort me the way he comforted himself, and there was something incredibly affirmative in that. The other, who’d been on his own since he was 19, let me cry on his shoulder after my partner and I broke up and she moved out. We’d only known each other a few weeks at this point, but there was a quiet, brotherly ease between us that made it easy for him to comfort me the way he had once needed to be comforted. The next day, he treated me to a haircut, and we cooked iftar together for our friends.

I had spent six years trying to muster the courage to move out of my mother’s house. And yet when it finally happened, it was so abrupt that I barely had time to process it. One moment I was in my late-20s and still living with my mother; the next, I was crashing on someone else’s couch. I’d always been afraid of being alone—who isn’t?—and that was one of the primary reasons I had spent so long cloistered in the spare bedroom at my mother’s house. But during that month of apartment-hunting, I realized something I hadn’t before: I could be independent without being alone. I’d come back from viewing apartments and have family members to debrief with—people who had been through the experience of apartment-hunting and who would be honest with me when I was being unrealistic with my expectations, and kind when I needed reassurance. They were continuing with my upbringing, in a way, by teaching me about things that my biological parents hadn’t, or couldn’t. I was becoming independent in spite of my biological family, not because of them. Biological parents—especially in our region—often live in direct opposition to Khalil Gibran’s famous adage: “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.” I understand that protectiveness can make it difficult for parents to live by those words. But there’s a fine line between protectiveness and possessiveness, one that Arab parents too often cross. It’s an unfortunate reality that many of us have to contend with, and it becomes even more fraught when you’re visibly queer.

With my mother, it felt like her desire to exert ownership over me was less about safety and more about stamping out the parts of me that would deprive her from watching her only “daughter” walk down the aisle in a white dress and have biological grandkids. In reality, I would love to have children one day, with the right partner who would be a good mother to them. But I’m also painfully aware that these children would never be acknowledged as my children by my biological family, and that they would likely grow up with my chosen family as their real family—because my chosen family showed up where my biological family didn’t.

This isn’t to say that my biological family is out of the picture. After I moved out, I didn’t speak to my mother for a few days, but she kept reaching out, insisting that I return to her home so we could work through the rupture that forced me out. I relented, but only to retrieve my things. It broke my heart to break hers, but once I’d had a taste of independence, I couldn’t go back. And over time, she learned to accept that, or at least tolerate it. It was only a few months after I had set up my own home that I invited her over for lunch, and she begrudgingly accepted that this had been the right step for both of us. 

My father has always been a quiet presence on the periphery; as a child, he was primarily a source of financial support and was emotionally quite distant. In adulthood, he’s become a distinct emotional presence, calling often to check in on me. His support is silent, stoic, and much appreciated.

My parents don’t know I’m trans. And I feel I can’t tell them. I’ve seen the panic in their eyes any time I’ve transgressed too far into masculinity, mirroring the same panic I felt all those years ago when I found that YouTube video. Their panic holds me back, the same way it held me back all those years ago.

I wish I could reassure them that I’m the same person, even if my physical appearance may change. But that wouldn’t be true. My transition is reshaping me, not just on the outside, but in who I’m becoming. I want to embrace that change fully, even if they can’t; I haven’t decided yet what that means for my relationship with my biological parents. 

In the meantime, I’ll always have the family I’ve chosen—the ones who see me, and stand beside me where my biological family cannot. And that, for now, is more than enough.

Badr is a trans Arab man who lives in an undisclosed area of the Middle East. He spent much of his life trying to find his place and has resorted to carving one out for himself instead.