Well, it’s not too difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when I decided that I didn’t belong in a female body. I always felt uncomfortable doing any kind of girly things, and getting dressed up for fancy events, having to wear dresses, heels and makeup. It’s just never been my thing, I look back at pictures of me from even kindergarten and I would have my hair cut short and be dressed in little green overalls, no dresses, nothing overly girly, and I was covered in dirt. I’ve always been slightly different from the other girls around me, and it never really bothered me when I was super young.

  Elementary school changed that, every year there seemed to be something new with groups of mean girls that made me feel like I would never add up. I never thought that I wanted to be like them, but it was more like ’I’ll never be girl enough’ which for some reason was a thought that really bothered me. Not in the sense that it was making me sad, but in the sense that it was just a wrong thing to be thinking.

That doesn’t seem to make sense, but I think it will soon. I realized as I transitioned from elementary to middle school that the reason that I thought this thought process was wrong, was because I never really identified with ’being a girl’. I know that there are a lot of people that don’t fit the mold of girly girl, but I really just didn’t identify with any part of being a girl. 

 I had quite a few female friends who fit their mold inside the spectrum of being a girl, but I couldn’t identify even as a tomboy. One thing that I liked in middle school were the band concerts because we had to dress up, but the uniforms weren’t dresses for girls and suits for guys like it is in high school. We had to get fitted for men’s dress shirts at the school, and wear nice black pants and a cumberbund and bowtie. It felt right to dress that way, it made me happy, but I never told anyone because I thought that would make me weird. 

Around the time of middle school bullying picked up, not in the sense of verbal attacks and such, but in the sense that guys thought it was funny to ask you out every day even though you keep saying no. So, on top of not identifying with the female gender in any way, I was forced into the box of being female by people who didn’t know how to keep boundaries. I had a few older kids that would slap my butt as I walked past them and I had one guy that would hang on me every single day and ask me if I wanted to go out with him, while his friends were down the hall laughing at me. It was ridiculous, but at the same time, other than standing up for myself and telling him no and physically removing his hand each time, I felt like I couldn’t do anything about it because at that point I would have been "too young" to understand what I was feeling. 

As I moved out of middle school and onto high school I noticed that my mind started to shift to even viewing things as if I were a guy. I started to see myself as a guy when I looked in the mirror even though I obviously had a chest and long hair. I started looking at potential relationships from the point of view of ’i hope that any of my crushes are gay because they won’t like finding out otherwise, that I identify as male’. I’ve told every guy that I’ve ever been in a relationship with that I identify as male and for the most part they’ve been okay with it. 

The pressure to be more like a girl and behave like a girl started to come from inside the home. It started when I wanted to wear baggy clothes because I didn’t want people to see my female body. My mom would make me change when I wanted to wear long sleeves out of the house to go to school. It made me hate myself in a way that I didn’t like, I started to see a lot of things wrong with my body other than the things that pertained to my gender. 

I started to fall into depressions because of it and when I was at school I would scratch my wrists with pencils, something that would be gone by the time I got home to face my mom again. When we were out in public, and I would slouch in a way that I had adapted from watching other guys do it, my mom would say, "sit up, you’ve got rolls..." Yeah, I had gained weight, my chest and two folds of stomach that I got to continuously feel self conscious about as I tried to navigate being in high school and trying to find my place. 

The thing I enjoyed about high school was being in marching band because the uniforms make you look flat. It was great because no one could tell (until you let your hair down from the hat) whether you’re male or female. I marched for all four years because I liked getting to dress in the uniform, even if it was only on Fridays and Saturdays in the fall. For concert band we had to wear dresses which I picked at the whole time because even though they were long, my legs felt naked and it was wrong. 

As I transitioned from high school into college I went through a bad break up with a guy who knew that I identified as male, and he even called me by my preferred name. That hurt more than anyone around me could have possibly understood, because it was like he was the only one who really knew me for who I was. I tried my best, but I ended up falling in with a pretty bad crowd and went out partying and surprisingly I only blacked out drunk one time. I joined the marching band, but it wasn’t the same, not because that was how I met my high school boyfriend, but because they didn’t take it seriously, so it seemed like I had nothing to participate in, but I met another nice guy near the end of that semester of marching band. 

 I wasn’t looking for anyone new but we connected instantly, the only problem was that his views were VERY different from mine. I did tell him almost right away that I identify as male, and he said that his family didn’t agree with homosexual relationships, but that if we didn’t bring up that one small, yet very important detail, we could keep dating. Because I really liked him, I agreed to that even though it really hurt me that he felt like we couldn’t even be a little bit open. 

We were together for three years with me letting him run the relationship that way. It was long distance the whole time since he didn’t take college seriously and had to move back home. I visited him sometimes, and each time I knew it was wrong because I felt like I was living a lie. 

 At this same time my mom was worried that I didn’t get enough social interaction and so she suggested possibly the girliest thing I could do. "Oh, why don’t you join the Christian sorority, I’m sure that will be good for you and your faith. And you’ll make some friends." Haha, yeah, okay... I joined per her request and the dream didn’t even last past retreat. There was infighting, girls talking behind each other’s backs, it was ridiculous, and exactly one of the reasons that I hated being put into that box, because I’m a very laid back person, and drama makes me angry most of the time. I made some friends, but they left due to rumors that were spread among the sisters. 

 I made the decision, summer of 2017 to move back home and finish college. It gave me a fresh start to get away from the negativity and it gave me some time to get used to being around my family and starting school again. I started making music also and I started drifting further away from my boyfriend who still lived 2 hours away. I started feeling more and more like I needed to tell my parents and finally be completely open with them, and I told my boyfriend this. He said he couldn’t support a social transition, like calling me by my pronouns and my preferred name in public, and so I made the decision to come out to my family so that I could have some sort of support system, and I ended it with my boyfriend even though it was really painful and sad.  

It’s now the beginning of 2018 and I’ve caused yet another rift in my family by coming out as transgender. My siblings accept me, but will my parents ever be able to see that this is what will make me truly happy?