when i was a kid i had no concept of "gender" or "sexuality"! i only labelled myself as a girl because i was told i was a girl. i liked "boy" things, and no one told me to be more girly. but when i was forced to be a girl at age ten, i hated it! i didn't want to be a girl, or a woman, or a lady or a chick or anything! i would play pretend with my friends and my characters would be boys, my self-inserts would be boys, i dressed as neutral as possible... i hated my voice. i hated my chest. i hated my figure, my squishy face, my soft hair (i kept it short, never past my shoulders), i hated bleeding from my internal organs every month... i didn't know the word for this until i was fifteen.
correction: i knew the word, but didn't know it applied to me. i knew what gender dysphoria was; according to the internet, it was a serious mental condition that made you want to die when you looked in the mirror! i never wanted that, so i wasn't dysphoric, i was just a normal teenage girl who wanted to feel special. yes, in my teenage years i was a "cis" transmedicalist... it's kind of embarrassing to look back on now! thankfully, most of that time i spent on a now-banned and deleted subreddit has been scrubbed from the internet. i don't like to think of it outside of talking about how far i've come in my life.
in middle school i was questioning my gender identity, and landing on all sorts of different words; genderqueer, genderfluid, demigirl, nonbinary, agender, gender nonconforming... i tried to force labels where they didn't fit. i wasn't attracted to any of my male friends, so i was a lesbian, right? (well, it turns out my male friends were just insufferable.) i loved everyone the same amount, so maybe i was pansexual? or bisexual? or maybe i was just straight and thinking too much!
i've been the entire LGBTQA at some point, whether it fit or not. in 2019 though, i had some kind of realization! i got into friend groups and made friends with people online who were nonbinary or transgender, and i realized everyone was trans differently! so i started letting myself be more neutral; i never really liked to use my "real" name online anyway, so i let people name me whatever they wanted. usually they just picked a part of my discord username and it stuck! things really, really picked up when i stopped giving out my pronouns, or listing more than just she/her. people started to use they/them for me, or even he/him, and i realized that that was me!
and so i came out as a demiboy. i still had some connection to femininity, i was still not entirely a boy! partially because i had been lost in the "all men are scum" sauce for a while; my best friend/partner/codependent/favorite person/abuser/whatever at the time was a man-hater (aside from a few fictional skinny white twinks.) i wanted to make myself appealing to the "softboy crybaby sensitive" transmasculine crowd, so i made myself soft! i was a demiboy, i liked pastel space, i was a "twink" (spoiler: i am not a twink), and of course people walked on me. it was a dark time for me, not just because of the gender crisis, but because i didn't know how to be a person! (also, someone basically implied i had "rapid onset gender dysphoria" because of my friends at the time! funny, 'cuz i've had noticeable dysphoria for years and had it before then too...)
i got better though! i slowly started to feel out of place with the "softboy" stereotype. it made me uncomfortable. it made me feel dirty in a way i couldn't describe. looking back on it, i hate how i acted, and then how i acted after that phase to "compensate" for it. my parents didn't question my decision, aside from my father taking me aside and telling me he used to crossdress, thinking his mom would like a daughter better than a son. he wanted to make sure i wasn't doing the same thing, and i wasn't.
my high school years were ROUGH. i was out and proud at school; luckily, i went to an art school and live in one of the most queer friendly places in florida, so i never felt unsafe. you can probably imagine how i feel now, though. i was a member of the GSA, i attended the yearly pride festival with my peers, and i wore flags to school. and for the first time in years, i felt... happy with myself. i still hated parts of myself, but i felt just a little better in my own skin.
i'm out of high school now. i got onto testosterone in february of 2022, a few months before i graduated that year. my deadname was read at graduation and is printed on my diploma; a legal name change costs too much down here. and sadly, my father, the man who pulled me aside to make sure i wasn't just crossdressing for validation, never got to see my true self. he died the month before i started testosterone, before i graduated, before i got my first job, before i started college. it's okay though! i don't need consoling or grief from strangers, because i'm happy now without him. i hope he's rotting!
it's 2023 now! it's been a rough year, thanks to the lovely florida governer. but as always, it's okay. so long as i survive, i'll be proud. you can't make an identity into a crime! i mean, i guess you could if you really wanted to, but being trans will outlive hatred.