How many ways can one be a woman? I was told there were three. There were the athletic women — the women that forego wearing makeup and play sports and who don't exactly know how to put an outfit together. This woman is also called “the tomboy.” There were the “girly girls,” who wear pink and get their nails done and always smell like vanilla or flowers. And then there were “emo lesbians,” who supposedly were the girls and women with thick black eyeliner and skater shoes and a love for all things anime. Most of my friends were “emo lesbians.” And then there was me, a person who didn't fit into any of these boxes, boxes that folks of all genders feel limited by at least once in their lives. Regardless, I was labeled the “tomboy.”

In my adulthood, I eventually figured out why every brand of femininity didn’t quite fit me — including tomboy. I figured out why I didn’t feel I could relate to girls and the feminine rituals my mom introduced to me as “fun” and “normal” growing up. The answer, of course, had a lot to do with the fact that I was a trans boy.

I'm now at a good place in my life where I’ve fully realized my gender identity and I have access to the hormone therapy I need to masculinize myself to suit my comfort level. But as I take steps towards becoming the Sebastian I want to be and see in the world, I've become painstakingly aware of the negative messages I've received about femininity over the years, including the boxes that were drawn around me. I now realize how the misogyny I've internalized from my upbringing is playing a part in how I feel about my transness.

Since the process of transitioning takes time, I find myself getting extremely impatient and having feelings of loathing toward my femininity — “the femininity with an expiration date” as I tend to see it. Lately, it feels like my transition is a race to erase anything femme about me, even the lipstick and booty shorts I treasure. I've noticed myself trying to water down my identity to one binary, masculine gender. It's proven to be a fruitless endeavor.

Along with feelings of loathing toward my own femininity, I sometimes catch myself feeling deep resent towards girls and women in my life, something I've felt since I was a little kid. While I refused to wear dresses, refused to be small, refused to forgo belching in favor of being “ladylike,” little girls like my sister and best friend represented the template to which I was compared, in hope that I would try to imitate it. I loved my sister, but I hated how much her love of pink and all things feminine were celebrated fiercely. I was forever the tomboy, a phase I was expected to grow out of as stereotypical femininity was conflated with maturity. My sister quickly became a symbol of my otherness within my own family and she suffered for it — I was often unkind and even cruel to her in retaliation for an identity and aesthetic she enjoyed and was strongly encouraged to further embrace by our parents and society.

Over the years, I had fewer and fewer friends who were girls. Being cruel to feminine folks in my youth felt like rebellion against my parents, venting the rage I had for the girls who were “doing gender right,” making me look bad. But my childish condemnation of femininity slowly faded, morphing into purely concentrated feelings of insufficiency. Next to a woman or feminine person, I often feel that I just don't add up. This feeling, “trans identity” I would later come to call it, upset me so much that I saw the fabulous femmes in my life as reminders of what I'm not and what I should try to be no matter how uncomfortable it felt. Before I came to terms with my firm desire to transition, I admired the care my femme friends put into their appearance and would painstakingly take notes on what parts of their look I would want to adopt.