In the end, I don’t think anyone can say it comes as a surprise. In retrospect, a lot of things make sense, a lot of jarred images fall into place and make me go “a-ha! well, duh!”.
As a kid, there were definitely instances when I said I wanted to be a boy. But the memories are too blurry to tell if I craved that on its own, or as a way to resist all the chains I felt being progressively looped around me on account of being a girl. Girls don’t run around. Girls don’t make a mess. Girls don’t stomp when they walk. Girls are neat and nice and wanna play mamma and baby.
(I said at a very early age, when adults were trying to have the idiotic conversations they usually try to have with little girls, that no, I do not want to marry, not even a prince, and I certainly do not want children. It was laughed off and brushed aside as talk from a kid too little to know how the world works. I am nearing the end of my thirties now and I have not changed my stance on that. Joke’s on you, condescending ex-adults.)
Girls do not spend time alone with boys. Girls cannot be outside once it gets dark. Girls need to always be on their guard to stay safe. Girls need to start wearing bras when their breasts grow (those will get their own chapter – because mamma mia!). Girls get goddamn periods. Girls get cramps and mood swings and pains that make them wanna curl up and die and have to deal with the whole mess and find it normal and okay because it’s a trade-off for being able to have the babies that I so hate.
So in my mind it was pretty clear that I’d be much better off as a boy and I have repeatedly expressed my regrets at the unfortunate circumstance of not being one. In seventh grade biology, we learned a bit about genetics. I came to know then about XY and XX chromosomes and that the egg always carries and X and its pair is determined by what the sperm that fertilizes it carries. I got home upset and accused my dad. I said that now I know it is all his fault, that he gave me the god damned second X chromosome that sealed my fate.
My poor parents were poorly equipped to deal with that. They tried to take it in good humor and weather a mood that would pass. I was bottling up frustration of not being taken seriously and was unable (and unaware that I am unable) to adequatly convey the seriousness of the issue for me. Now when I look up resources, I marvel at the fact that people are aware of transgender topics, that children get taken to therapists when in distress, that there are treatments available to make life easier for them if it’s gender dysphoria they experience. In the time and place I grew up, knowledge of transgender topics did not exist – for children and grown-ups alike.
Sometimes I wondered aloud if I could somehow go to a doctor and have some sort of surgery and magically wake up changed. The answer was there is no such thing. As if I was supposed to accept that and move on. The answer from my grandma’s mouth when I expressed such odd stuff was “quit talking such nonsense” – whenever I challenged something that I was supposed to accept as given (which in hindsight were often things that stemmed from a mix of internalized mysoginy, an aversion towards anything remotely sexual or scandalous that might attract attention of other people). It didn’t stop me wondering, but I never imagined that something that seemed so ingrained in the programming of my body could be made to bend to fit the image in my head. I wished for it in the quiet yearning sort of way that I wished for replicators or teleportation from the Star Trek series, in a “wouldn’t that be neat?!” sort of way.
Another moment that stands out with clarity happened in highschool, in the tenth or eleventh grade.
In junior high, I still mostly hung out with the boys. I joined their soccer team and made a good goalie and I joined their woodworking during crafts rather than sewing and knitting. Just another thing that made me an oddball. By high school, the relationships between boys and girls shifted in subtle, but irrevocable ways. It was not cool for guys to hang out with girls. Especially not with undesirable ones. The jokes grew cruder, the exclusion from groups harsher and the curiosity and the hormones were running rampart – a wave I was not riding (again, another chapter). Crafts lessons stopped, I moved to play volleyball with the girls and my new desk mate Anna became my best friend.
She was a girly girl, pretty, with long hair, who took to wearing make up and who wanted to be liked by boys – though equally restrained from going out by conservative parents. We spent a lot of time together inside and outside school and I felt I could tell her anything. I never did much, because I was never one for sharing (much to the chargrin, frustration and self reproach of my mother, who felt something was amiss but never knew what), but it felt good to know that technically, I could. That was tested one day, when an odd conversation happened.
I do not even remember exactly how it started. It was something about me failing to notice that she got a haircut. It’s true, I rarely do. If someone I talked to walks out of the room, I would have trouble saying what the person wore. She was upset at me. Either she made the remark that that’s a guy thing or I was trying to justify not noticing by saying that my mind works more like a guy’s when it comes to these things. She stopped and thought about it and said “does that mean you like girls?”. I laughed because no, I do not and I find boys cute. In an attempt to explain it I said something along the lines of “Well… I guess you could say that inside me lives a gay guy then”. It is the closest I had ever come to explaining how I felt and the look on her face was one of betrayal. She was mad at me, because I had somehow failed her trust – she had confided things in me as her girl friend and I was changing the rules of the game. She was sour for a couple of hours, though eventually it was like it never happened. That reaction stuck with me, though.
Mind you, at that time I was still completely oblivious about gender identities. I had no notion that there might be a name for the thing I was feeling. Everyone else around me seemed to be doing fine and being ok with who they were and what they were turning into. I came to the only logical conclusion – something was wrong with me. Some switch somewhere was broken. Maybe the same one that made me find babies repulsive, or not taking any more interest in boys other than finding them cute, or making me never wear dresses and not seeming to like a lot of the “girly” stuff.
It is only in retrospect that I realise how much that conclusion that I was somehow kaputt hurt. It hurt then, when I was busy evolving into a mature human being and it hurt me in the long run. It hurt and it made me feel incredibly lonely and out of place for years – in spite of having loving parents and good friends around me. Something vague was always amiss. I developed coping mechanisms. In time, I started wearing my little oddness like an armor and wearing it defiantly – the excelling at school, the open disdain for whatever my peers pursued, the quips at the grown-ups who kept trying to tell me how the world works. I resigned a long time ago to the fact that I would turn into a crazy old dog lady and eventually die as lonely as I had grown up, with a sort of invisible wall between me and the world at large, in including my friends. A wall for which I had not laid the foundation, but which I have dilligently built up all my life and for which I had never found a name other than oddity.
