A Confession

As a young child, I was never interested in playing with Mommy’s or Big Sister’s make up. As a young child, I was more interested in playing with Daddy’s work tools. Being a typical Disney-like princess who sat there and looked pretty never interested me much. Instead, my imagination was filled with being a knightly prince who stabbed everyone with his almighty sword and had dramatic entrances on his noble horse. Back then, when my female friends and I would play make believe, playing the role of the mommy was a joke. Me? Be a mommy? As if. I wanted to be daddy, or even better yet, the obnoxious brother, because everyone knew that girls had cooties and that love was a yucky, cootie filled thing.

In addition to rejecting female roles in pretend play, I was quite the video game addict. I didn’t care for games geared towards young girls. My type of game was generally geared for teenage or adult males. You know, ones filled with guns, blood, and guts. Doom was a personal favorite of mine. Dressing up Barbie, however? While I admit, that did catch my attention for a slight amount of time, I always returned to my more masculine games which involved shooting aliens on Mars. Plus, who could resist being a kickass soldier taking on hordes of aliens on his own? Apparently, my girl friends found it appalling, horrifying even!

Soon after I was old enough to go to school, I was labeled as a tomboy. I hung out with the guys, and occasionally with the girls. Even though sports were not my thing, I enjoyed playing rough and getting dirty. Still, despite my reputation of being a little tomboy, I did on occasion engage in typical feminine behaviors. While I collected little toy cars, played with action figures, and played video games, dolls and stuffed animals became my guilty pleasure. To this day, I still collect dolls (albeit much more expensive and prettier ones) and have quite the collection of stuffed animals!

Then, around the age of six or seven, I had begun to reject the idea of being female. If everyone said I acted like a boy, then why couldn’t I look like one? Why couldn’t I dress like one? Why couldn’t I just be a boy? Through many nights of intense and wishful thinking, I had somehow managed to convince myself that, at some unspecified date in time, I’d turn into the boy. Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months. Then those months turned into a year. Second grade had arrived, and the tomboy in me was in full force. Playground games consisted of play fighting with the guys, pretending to be our favorite Pokémon characters, and sending each other to “jail” in games such as Cops and Robbers. Needless to say, I felt rather alienated from my female friends. Around this time they had begun to experiment with cheap make ups that could be bought at Claires. Me? I thought it was a dumb and pointless thing. I mean gee, how fun could rubbing a stick of unknown substance on your face possibly be fun? Yet, they seemed to love it. What weirdos!

Perhaps one of my most vivid memories of my second grade year was this: We were all sitting at lunch going about our usual business when the principal or some other person of high authority made an announcement stating that boys could not sit with girls and vice versa. To be honest, I don’t remember their reasoning behind the segregation at all. Whether or not it was some kind of punishment or some other reason I can’t say. Maybe they didn’t even give a reason. I can’t tell you because I honestly don’t remember. Anyway, I wasn’t too fazed by this. The next day, I sat with my guy friends like usual, and before I know it, I was being yelled at for sitting at the wrong table by the lunch lady. Again, what she said is nonexistent in my memories, but I do remember the tears which welled up in my eyes, how they slid down my cheeks like acid rain, corroding every bit of masculinity and exposing a sense of femininity which I had tried so hard to hide. I felt like a dog trapped in a cage with no escape because the key was thrown away. My body was my prison, a permanent cocoon. What was their reaction to my crying? I don’t remember what happened between there and then, but I do know this: Eventually, they reversed that rule as if it never existed.

Those were some of my first memories of experiencing gender dysphoria. Around that time, the label of “tomboy” was no longer good enough for me. No longer did I want to be known as “The girl who acted like a boy”. I just simply wanted to be “a boy”. Unfortunately for me, my body had other plans than what I had originally wished for.

Another year had passed, and I was now in third grade. Third grade a year of a lot of negative change for me. For starters, much to my horror and dismay, this was around the time my mom decided I needed to start wearing a bra. She told me that every girl needs to wear one at some point in their life, and that sometime in the future all of my female friends would be wearing one too. This hit me hard. I took is extremely bad. I cried. I cried so hard I wound up making myself sick to the point I would throw up. Needless to say, I was more than devastated. It actually wasn’t until several months later were I wore my first bra, and let me tell you, “I fucking hated it” doesn’t even cover my feelings towards that monstrosity.

As if that wasn’t enough damage to my self-esteem, several months later I received my first menstrual cycle. Again, my mom told me it is a normal thing for all girls to go through, and with time, my female friends would have their periods too. Unlike the whole bra experience, I didn’t cry, nor did I get upset. I just felt numb. I mean, how was I supposed to act? Getting my period felt like the final nail in the coffin towards my intense wishing of becoming a boy. Who was I kidding? It wasn’t happening. I was a girl against my will. In order to save my sanity, I began to push these wishes, desires, and fantasies way down inside of me to a place I didn’t know existed. Still, not even that was enough to salvage my self-esteem. The years following that, I began to wear baggy clothes to hide my breasts, which had grown significantly. At one point, I was so desperate to stop menstruating and lose my breasts that I began to stop eating. Fortunately, that didn’t last long enough to cause any permanent damage.

Nowadays, I can’t help but stop and wonder what would have happened if I didn’t keep my mouth shut about the intense hatred and discomfort towards being female. Would my life be any different? What would of, what could of happened if I did rewrite my role from female to male? I’m not going to dwell on that. I’m going to make that happen. While I can’t rewrite my past, I can write my future. Many years later, I am still waiting for my metamorphosis to occur, but this time, I will take it into my own hands. I’m ready to emerge from my cocoon, to organize a jailbreak from my prison. Now is my time to show the world who I really am.