For those harsh moments of lucidity that break through the armor and pierce your heart.
For me, the cute moments of playful experimentation couldn’t quite penetrate my denial, but they did weaken it enough for the strong hits to make it through. I would quickly try to block and repair as best I could, but the structure was compromised and couldn’t hold like before. All these hits came from myself; from actually considering that I could be trans
ah, I remember wanting to be a girl growing up - but I thought I just tragically wasn’t a girl. Unlike “real” trans people, I didn’t insist that I was a girl. When I was like 5 or 6 my family told me this story that a psychic consulted before my birth predicted I would be a girl, and I remember thinking the psychic was right in some deep sense, that I was supposed to be a girl, that the universe meant for me to be a girl and that there was just a mistake. I didn’t know what to do with this information, I didn’t think it mattered that I wanted these things - I thought they could be entirely normal and reasonable. I have no idea if I shared it with anyone, but I know my family would have not taken seriously such desires, especially from a young child. My favorite Disney movie at this time was The Little Mermaid, which I never thought was significant but now I wonder if little boys enjoyed the princess movies as much as I did growing up.
My attempt to wear heels when I was four was met with literal violence from my father, so I knew it was very bad to do. I also didn’t know about “trans” as a concept growing up, the closest I had was Silence of the Lambs and Ace Ventura as examples, and in both cases it felt like those people were “trans” because they were evil. I didn’t ever think that idea was connected to the feelings I had, wishing to be a girl wasn’t related to “trans”.
I grew up with sisters and I didn’t like the way gender separated us - I wanted to be included, and for the longest time I assumed this is why I wanted to be a girl or felt I should have been - because the cosmos demanded it (as the psychic knew), or because I wanted to be close to my sisters.
It was actually really hard for me to ever overcome this rationalization, that there are brothers who don’t want to be a girl and accepted as a girl so they can be closer with their sisters. This idea feels foreign or made up to me, like of course all boys would want this. My model of boyhood and masculinity is based on my own experiences, which has been difficult to undo.