In 8th grade I had gotten a shoulder length haircut, and in 9th grade I was pretty androgynous — I was openly a trans boy at this point and asked my teachers to all call me a boy's name and male pronouns. I was made fun of, but never physically attacked, although my principal was terrified that I might be assaulted due to my insistence on using the boy's restroom – and even more terrified that if that came to pass, I would most certainly be blamed.
I remember one day sitting in his office with a boy my grandfather had called the school about, because I had complained about being made fun of each day.
"Why are you picking on her?" our principal asked.
"Because she's a tranny."
Regardless of my constant insistence that I was a boy, I still loved the "femboy aesthetic" I saw online and often tried on women's clothes at Goodwill, never buying them. I felt a strange arousal sometimes in women's clothing, which I thought of as autogynephilia rather than a slow acceptance of my own sexuality as a female.
I tried on makeup and a friend even bought me a long wig, since I had begun getting buzzcuts every month... I hated the "tomboy in a dress, everyone reacts with shock and awe" trope I always saw on television, so I tried to hide all of this from my family. I was being consistently called a male name and pronouns (at least to my face) by the age of 16, so I didn't want to risk "fucking all that up." I did once try to show my makeup and dresses to my mother's ex husband, who asked me why I wanted his sons confused by calling myself a boy without dressing like one. I was angry, but began working harder to hide my femininity.
My grandfather took a different approach than my mother. She had often hidden my "masculine" clothes, including women's button-downs and polos. I hid myself in a baggy jacket in response. My grandfather, however, let me wear whatever I wanted and even offered old football jerseys. He took me to get my first barber shop haircut, which I paid for with my winnings from an essay contest.
That essay contest was focused on To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I remember in one paragraph I had written something about modern day transphobia as it related to Scout's experiences being forced to wear a dress to school. My essay won for my school district and was submitted to the University of Alabama for the statewide judging around 2010-2011.
Still, my grandfather never gave into things like calling me a boy's name and male pronouns. He felt pushing too much would make me dig down deeper, though of course he never said as much to me. At most he tried to counsel me that I could not be a "gay man," because gay men are homosexuals – not interested in females. I stopped speaking to him when my mother revealed to me he "did not really accept this trans thing." He saw it as something I would grow out of, because the majority of children with gender dysphoria who aren't medicalized do grow out of it. Only in extremely severe cases does gender dysphoria extend into adulthood.
One of the mistakes I made was seeing "trans" as an identity to retreat into. In my opinion today, no one is "inherently trans." Some people have a mental illness known as gender dysphoria, and they may or may not attempt to change their sex in response, or at the very least begin to lie about their sex. Because changing one's sex is impossible, this does not completely alleviate gender dysphoria even in those individuals. But worse, if someone does not actually have gender dysphoria, then medicalization or attempting to live as the opposite sex can cause that to develop.
Today a lot of kids are essentially "roleplaying" mental illnesses such as this, and they don't understand they are playing with fire. Many of them have no dysphoria, and they still jump straight into transition. They feel lonely, they feel weird, they feel like they don't fit in, and so they find solace in an online community and identity that isn't really helpful. They don't understand it's just like a religion, a cult of identity.
I remember that at 14 my mother had asked my doctor for help, and he referred me to a private therapist to help me with a "damaged sexual identity." When I saw her, she told me that it "wasn't her job to change me," and she referred to me exclusively as male when talking with my granddad after sessions. He would calmly respond, talking about me as a girl, and the two would go back and forth like this while I stood there holding a teddy bear I always brought.
I only saw this therapist a few times before my mom said we couldn't afford it ($10 a session, out of town) and I was eventually switched to the county mental health clinic, where I bounced around from therapist to therapist. A few wanted to focus on my gender identity, which I resisted conversation about as I saw it as a solid fact that needed no discussion. I refused to consider if sexual abuse had made me feel bad about my body, or if I was simply a tomboy who wanted to stop being made to feel weird about my boyish interests. I refused to explain how "feeling like a boy" was different from "feeling like a girl" because I was unable to accept that those ideas are meaningless.
My friends at school referred to me as male and interacted with me more or less as a boy. This made actually living my life as a teenager difficult: I was interested in boys, but insisted on lying about my sex. No gay boys were interested in me, and if straight boys were, then I was offended at being correctly sexed by them. I was kind of interested in girls, but no girls were interested in me. My whole personality was no longer about my hobbies, dreams, and passions, but instead my ideology.
A lot of my life at that point was about the aesthetic of being "transmasculine" or being a "transboy" more than it was about actually trying to live my life pretending to be a man. Ultimately, this was always about running away from shame I had about my own body and sexuality. I felt like my body was gross. I worried that seeing women as attractive was wrong and objectifying, but I also struggled with wanting to be attractive and not wanting to be used, hurt, or reduced to my body. All of these, of course, are bad reasons to retreat into the fantasy of becoming male. They are all reasons to deal with internalized misogyny.
The biggest mistake I made was believing that gender is real and separate from sex, and that people can "feel like girls" or "feel like boys." Being a female who "feels like a man" doesn't mean anything. It doesn't make us men, it makes us human beings who just want the same respect we see men get. None of the girls pretending to be boys whom I knew as a teen ever really wanted to stop looking like young, pretty boys... and all of us started to see the same things when we medicalized our bodies: hairy stomachs, weight gain, and receding hairlines... things we never actually wanted.
By 16 I had found a gender therapist in Montgomery and emailed her. I explained that I was uncertain that anyone would let me medicalize my body because I was "a little nonbinary." She told me I would be surprised at how open-minded she was. I began saving up money to go and see her: every single penny was pinched with the goal of one day using it all to transition. I did not do anything fun with my friends or create savings goals for adulthood.
At 17, I finally had an appointment with her - she made sure to schedule it for a day there would be a group meeting, where I met another 17-year-old transboy (who was already on testosterone) and a transwoman (who did most of the talking while we both sat there shyly, silently).
Our appointment consisted of 20-30 minutes of my explaining my story (leaving out details that tumblr had suggested I omit, which were mostly related to my nebulous identity), highlighting that I had "lived as male" for a few years at that point. She asked why, then, had I come to see her, since I "sounded so sure" of myself. I told her I needed to see a therapist in order to be prescribed cross-sex hormones, and she turned around to enter my name into a pre-filled form for this purpose. She printed a copy and handed it to me, saying she would also submit my referral to an endocrinologist who worked in the same building.
I was FLOORED... it was really going to be this easy?!
