My Younger Years

From my youngest memories, there was always this noise present. I never was able to fit into the box people wanted me to fit into.

In Kindergarten, I got in trouble for always messing around in the girl’s costume chest. It had so many pretty clothes and I couldn’t help myself. Guilty as charged.

I was always and awkwardly friends with the girls because I always considered myself one of them, I had clothes that were boys clothes but I couldn’t help but always feel my clothes should match my friends’ even when I was told that wasn’t possible. My thoughts would always turn to what is this boy/girl baloney about anyways?

I was a cute kid, I guess.

At the time I didn’t know it, but my little brain was just wired different than other anatomical boys’ brains, and it didn’t match what my outward anatomy said I was. I didn’t understand this and also didn’t understand why I was being told to go over and play in the boys costume chest.

How boring and limiting anyways.

Another tradition I had as a small kid was my Grandma painting my nails. It annoyed my Dad and Grandpa, but it was something that would allow me to feel like one of the girls when my sister got hers painted with me. We’d talk about all the things a four and five year old talks about with your grandma regardless of gender and by God I had a butterfinger candy bar coming at the end of it all so life was good.

But to be quite honest, somewhere in there, I don’t remember why or when, I was told that getting my nails painted was a girls thing and I was a boy. I’m sure I protested, but it didn’t matter. That was the girls thing, and I wasn’t a girl.

Sigh.

I don’t remember much in totality about my childhood. To be honest, trying to remember important things is nearly impossible. The things I do remember are all linked by one thing along a solid string: I was trying to be a girl or wishing I was a girl in just about all of them.

Eventually in each memory, someone comes along to tell me that’s not how it was. I was a boy and the girls were girls and that was that.

I mean, technically I still get that stuff today from certain corners of society, so not much has changed in some respects over the 31 years of my life.

Transgender people don’t make this stuff up. In fact, there are now promising ways to perform brain scans that can tell with a pretty high degree of accuracy if a person is transgender or not. This is our reality, being told by those with no experience walking in our shoes that we are something we deeply feel we are not even though evidence is showing our feelings are not only genuine, but a product of natural biology.

Many trans people eventually figure out how to deal with the ramifications of this prolonged discomfort with ourselves. And honestly, discovering myself sooner certainly would’ve saved me a hell of a lot of time as a child because what came next was pure, unadulterated hell.