Someone asked me a question the other day: “When did you realize you were trans/a boy in a girl’s body?”

 

I’ve been pondering that.  Please follow along here as I explain…

 

The mind is an amazing tool. It can hold two opposing beliefs simultaneously. Not comfortably. Not usually forever. Because after a while, something called cognitive dissonance sets in and if you have a sound mind, you realize you can’t carry something that whackadoodle around inside your brain anymore.

 

As young children, our brains are sponges:

 

… they soak in everything as they try to make sense of the world they’ve been thrust into. Even before we enter kindergarten, we’re taught the words fingers and toes, noses, knees and tummies, cats and dogs, trees and leaves and cows and horses and elephants.  We hear “I love you” and figure out what love means by how our parents, siblings, and pets reveal it to us.  We adopt these words as gospel because we don’t yet have other frames of reference.

 

As very young children, we learn girl and boy, woman and man. Not as sexes, but as archetypes.  Back in my childhood years, in U.S. and European cultures, archetypal females were always shown  wearing skirts or dresses, while males were shown wearing suits and ties, military attire, or cowboy hats and boots.

 

So, anatomy/gender/sexuality isn’t “a thing” to young children unless something is going on in their homes or elsewhere that isn’t on the up and up.  What we can see is all we can get at that age.

 

As a young child, I was my neighborhood’s tomboy

 

I ran around mostly with male kids — shirtless on hot days — wore pedal pushers and Roy Rogers outfits, rode horses, played with erector sets, model trains, plastic horses and tools. When I played cowboys and Indians, I was always Roy Rogers, never Dale Evans.  And thankfully my parents didn’t consider me weird for behaving in these ways. They let me be who I was.

 

It was as I approached puberty at the ripe old age of eight and a half and started to bud sizeable breasts that I started to wonder, “Hey, what’s going on here?”

 

And when I got my first period shortly before nine, I was scared spitless. I thought I was dying, bleeding profusely from an orifice and hurting inside. That was waaaayyy too young for my Mom to tell me about menstrual cycles! My older sister hadn’t even started ovulating yet!

 

I didn’t tell anyone, because I was sure I was dying. I buried my underpants for three months, always became terrified when the thing would happen again, and then utterly relieved when it stopped.

 

But finally after three long months, I confessed to my younger six year old sister that I was dying, and she of course told Mom, who calmly explained that it was all perfectly normal.

 

Like hell it was!  Not to me!

 

When I came down the steps to the ground floor after this horrifying revelation, my Dad commented, “So … my little girl has become a young lady.”

 

I was mortified!  This was NOT who I believed I was going to turn out to be!  I had not a single “girl”/”woman”/”motherhood” thought in my head.

 

So, I guess that was my AHA moment. That’s when I figured out something was very, very strange and different about me. That’s when cognitive dissonance first raised its ugly head.

 

When I watched romantic movies, I was always inside the male’s brain and body, not the female’s. From a relatively young age, I always felt instinctively that there was something “missing” below my belt that “should” be there. I even fashioned fake phalluses to try to create something that would “complete” me. (Maybe imagine a tragic situation where a soldier loses an appendage and has phantom sensations where it used to be. That’s as close as I can come to describing it. It can be maddening!)

 

As a hormonal teenager, I fell in love with girls, and the male heroes that I loved were men that I wanted to grow up to be like.

 

The revelation of my transgender status was rather like a child figuring out that what had been taught to me as a cat turned out to be a dog, or as what had been taught to me as an elephant turned out to be a giraffe.  I had to decide whether what I’d been told about myself by being forced to wear dresses to school was all a big mistake or a lie.

 

What I knew for sure is that I was most definitely not a girl! And I’ve always loathed being treated like one. (By this, I mean being hit on by random, randy men, discounted by men, passed over for promotions, paid less, etc.)

 

Amazingly, after I learned the terms intersex and transgender not more than 20 years ago, everything fell into place.

 

There were others like me! I wasn’t an outlier!

 

I no longer felt ashamed or terribly alien. And when I finally wrote my coming out story WOMB MAN: HOW I SURVIVED GROWING UP IN A BOOBY-TRAPPED WORLD, one of my longest time best friends — Judi Cooper, whom I’ve known since I was six years old and she was three — read it and said to me, “I always knew there was something different about you, but I could never put my finger on it. And that’s it: you’re a guy!”

 

So, some people have always known. They just didn’t know they knew until I finally named it and claimed it.

 

That’s when I stopped trying to “pass” in any way as the female I had been taught I was well before kindergarten.

 

One question remains: Was I born intersex and surgically altered to the default sex that most intersex infants were in the 1950s?  I don’t know. If not, I am quite simply transgender.

 

If you want to know more about how being transgender has shaped my experiences, my book is available at Amazon.

 

Questions?

 

Hannah Kate’s rendition of me as a boy!

LOVE IT!

One of the images from my book WOMB MAN

Composite image by Lisa Twining