It's hard to describe what it felt like as a very young but self-aware trans girl, particularly as that experience is filtered through the shame, confusion, fear, and anxiety that accreted around it.
I didn't even have a sense of myself as a gendered being at first. I was just this chubby-cheeked little blonde child. Several times my mother was told she had a very pretty, very sweet, very well-behaved daughter.
It felt nice.
She hated it and she "corrected" them, quite forcefully.
I didn't have a strong sense of self at all at first. Everybody described me as quiet, especially compared to my brother, but I was rarely even aware of myself.
So that sense of myself as a girl evolved between ages 4-7, a little later than cis children, and it introduced this note of worry and confusion into what was otherwise a fairly placid life.
Once I was aware of myself, it was self-evident I was a girl. I tried to play and be friends with other girls. I tried to be included.
But other people insisted on referring to me as a "boy" and by a boy's name, which I didn't understand. I felt like I had arrived from somewhere else and ended up in the wrong place.
My mom asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I just wanted to be a mom like her.
But I became aware these things were not allowed for some reason.
My parents figured out early on I was a girl or at least "different," extremely so from my brother.
You keep getting comments about your daughter and you start to notice, right? And I was always docile, soft-spoken. I followed my mom everywhere.
Early on, she let me play dress up with her clothes, wigs, and jewelry. In her loneliness, she seemed to enjoy having a female friend, even a little one.
That stopped abruptly at some point. Maybe my dad said something about it.
I was rather religious at the time even though I couldn't take the Christianity of my parents seriously, and I started doing the nightly prayers to wake up as a girl. Because CLEARLY a mistake had been made.
I used to go to bed crying every night. I'd wake up sometimes and check, just in case. And it fostered a sense of betrayal, you know? This all-loving god couldn't spare five minutes to solve little me's problem.
When you're a child, your world is built on the trust that your parents will love you no matter what. And I didn't have that. They turned increasingly venomous about my behavior.
And I gradually became aware that the whole world was hostile. The AIDS epidemic was in full swing by then and I was painfully aware of how gay people were treated.
I knew I wasn't gay. It couldn't be THAT easy! But if gays and lesbians were left to die in agony, what chance did I have?
My parents set my brother to watch me wherever I went outside the house and school, and if I "acted out," I got beaten.
My female friends at school basically deserted me. It wasn't cool hanging out with a "boy."
My male peers terrorized me almost as much as my brother.
I knew I had to hide. But I didn't want to. It felt wrong lying about it -- and moreover, I had the sense that if I did, I would start lying to myself, too, and then maybe I would cease to exist.
Puberty started late. Small mercies. When it kicked in, though, it destroyed any illusions I might have had that I could still be a "normal" girl and be accepted by other girls.
I couldn't even recognize myself in the mirror anymore.
And that made me constantly suicidal. For a while, I was cutting. I tried to make myself cut my genitals off a couple of times. My family turned a blind eye to my misery.
There's a few years I don't really remember and my memory is spotty after that all the way to college because I wasn't really -- there? -- most of the time.
I was living in a parallel reality in my head where I was just a normal girl and everything was okay. I stayed there as much as possible. If I had to deal with outside reality -- school, peers, stuff -- I broke down and couldn't function for days.
Like I said, my parents ignored me and told me to shut up and stop crying so much.
In high school, I ended up falling in with a few guy friends, one of whom used to be my tormentor in elementary school.
So that was interesting.
And it was strange because most of the time, I was interacting with people through this dissociative fantasy. And I guess people picked up on that?
Everybody in high school remembers me as a girl. And a couple of the guys ended up taking care of me, doting on me almost, to the point we were essentially dating.
It's really hard to be honest when you feel like your whole world is going to end if you do.
I never lied about my gender or who I was because that felt like the only real thing left about me and the rest would come unraveled if I let it go. So I lived with lies of omission.
And it worked? In a weird, mindfucky way. One of my friends serenaded me on guitar in his bedroom.
I lost all my friends when I went to college, though, and I was a mess. Social anxiety, panic attacks, suicidality, dissociation.
I could barely function, and it got to where I was going to kill myself if I didn't do something.
So I stopped hiding.
I figured if I was going to be miserable, I might as well miserable as me. And if I was going to die, I might as well make someone else do it. It was strangely liberating.
@gwynnion z I came of age in the early days before and during AIDS. It was called GRID when first named. Gay Related Immune Deficiency. Friends had already died from it.
@Kalshann I remember the dead. The people who supported me when my parent's didn't. My first sex partner died of AIDS. She wasn't even the first to die. I'm honestly surprised I didn't catch it.
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