realization

At four years old, I walked up to my mother and asked hopefully: “Mama, everyone has some boy and some girl in them right?” I don’t remember if or how she replied, but I do remember my follow-up statement: “but I’m mostly boy.”

Realizing that I am a transgender human has definitely been a big step forward for me, but at the same time, it has also been a journey into the past. When I was a young la(d/ss) I knew that I wanted to be a boy, even though I wasn’t entirely clear on what the differences between boys and girls were. I knew that I wanted to wear “boy” clothes, play “boy” games, and I definitely knew that I abhorred the feminine assumptions that others placed upon me.

Middle school was a different story altogether. AS IF middle school wasn’t BAD ENOUGH already, #theworst, it was around this time that I started trying to suppress my gender non-conformity. Society made it QUITE CLEAR that these sorts of thoughts were frowned upon, and so I tried really hard to be happy/ok/not-completely-disappointed-in-every-single-way with being a girl:

I bargained with myself,

      it's not SO bad now, is it?

I reasoned with myself,

      come on now, just relax, this is crazy talk...impossible dreams.

I ignored myself,

      what? problem? there's no problem here...

to no avail.

Puberty was a nightmare, quite literally. I had nightmares about what was happening to my body: you mean I’m going to bleed? For a week at a time? And not die? WHAT IS THIS MADNESS?? I was a ten-year-old insomniac, not entirely sure what I was so durn ANXIOUS about all the time, but extremely anxious none the less.

I tried several times to deliberately follow the gendered guidelines that society had set forth for me: I bought girl clothes and read seventeen magazine #friendsdontletfriendsread17 and talked about cute boys with my girlfriends, but it was no use. After a while I assumed that I had simply been given a raw deal, and that I had to just get over it. I truly thought for a long while that being female just sucked for everyone, and that it was an accepted fact of life, and that all the women of the world just found a way to deal with it.

It wasn’t even until college that I learned that being transgendered, was a thing. In the back of my mind I knew that people got sex changes, and I had wondered a few times what that might be like, but I never thought that my impossible dream could ever come even close to being fulfilled. After watching several (many) documentaries about transgender individuals, I began to wonder about myself. I thought gee, if someone had explained all this to me when I was a kid, I probably would have taken those puberty blockers and started on some cross-gender hormones… I finally stopped suppressing all my feelings about gender and allowed myself to once again want what I had always wanted: to be a boy! It was so simple, and after the initial shock, “WTF is going on?? What is WRONG with me??” it made perfect sense…

…Ok, it sounds really simple when I put it like that. In reality I wrestled with the though for quite a while before I was comfortable admitting even to myself that I wanted to be male. I flipped out. JUST as I was settling in to being really comfortable with being gay, I realized that my biological gender did not match my mind. It took many nights of tears and talks with my therapist to accept the reality of my situation, but now things are far more clear than they have been in a very long time. And so now I am setting off on a cognitive-societal-personal adventure to do EXACTLY what I knew I wanted to do at four years old, and if I could high-five my four-year-old self right now I would. 

This is for you, little M!