Consider the following three statements:

I wish I was a boy. I should have been born a boy. I am a boy.

Do these all mean the same, or something slightly different? That’s where I’m stuck at, in my gender-questioning process. I can say with absolute confidence that I believe I’d have been happier if I’d been raised as a boy instead of as a girl. I’ve been saying it for years, and while there’s no way to go back in time and perform the experiment I do strongly believe I’d have been a much happier, better adjusted child, adolescent, and young adult if I’d been born and raised a little boy and seen as male consistently.

Mind you, I never thought this at the time, at least as far as I remember. When I was a kid I thought of myself as a kid, not as a boy kid or a girl kid. I had a range of interests that didn’t particularly conform to any gender, and had no interest whatever in clothing- I dressed in whatever my mom picked out for me, which were generally pants and shirts, probably in neutral-to-girly colors. My genitals never distressed me (they still don’t- a fact I clung to stubbornly in my denial that what I was feeling couldn’t possibly be the same thing that trans people were talking about).

But after my personality began to take shape, and after my adolescence went spectacularly badly, I began to speculate about the ways in which I might have done better if I’d been raised a boy. An example: I learned relatively late to regulate my own emotions with stereotypically-male self talk. So, it followed that if I’d been hearing “toughen up” or “shake it off” from childhood, I could have avoided a lot of hardship that was only alleviated after I learned that this approach to emotion (more associated with boys than girls, at least in my experience) makes me feel strong and safe, while being gently encouraged to “talk about my feelings” makes me panicked and anxious.

For that, and for many other reasons, I now think that I’d have been happier being raised as a boy. But, does it follow that I want to become one now? As a masculine woman, how would this differ from the way people already see me and relate to me? Is being treated as an unofficial “honorary guy” by most people good enough, or is there some reason to seek official man status? I just don’t know. Sometimes I think “I want to be a guy” and it sounds right to me. Sometimes it sounds vaguely ridiculous.

And then there’s that last statement: “I AM a boy” which still seems as though it would sound pretty nonsensical if I were to say it. But, is that really what I mean when I say things like “my personality would have been better suited to being raised a boy”? Is there some essential maleness or femaleness inside of me that can be discerned if I put in enough concerted mental effort? I wonder, and I doubt, and then again I wonder. I continue not to fully understand what its supposed to feel like to be male, or to be female, and I feel frustrated by my lack of a clear signal in one direction or the other.