I have no memory of when I eschewed dresses or other clothes deemed "girls", but have been told it happened around the time I began walking. I do recall when I was three, my older brother and I were staying with our aunt and uncle while our parents went deer hunting, that my aunt paid me $5 dollars to wear a matching dress with my cousin Sherry and have our picture taken. My uncle still has the picture on his wall, that was the last time I wore a dress. The following year, my dad bought me my first
mini-bike, I already had my own
fishing pole and
BB gun, also bought for me by my dad. I dont recall my ma ever putting up a fight with my dad to conform my brother or I to the gender straight jacket. In fact the day I was born, 9 months pregnant, when my ma, dad and brother went fishing that morning, my ma still helped my dad carry the boat.
Neither of my parents ever tried to discourage me from having only boy friends, they never pushed me to have girl friendships, which I had no interest in having as a child/teen. Girls I saw never rode wheelies, jumped ramps on their bikes, caught toads and field mice, threw rocks, played football or "smear the queer", but boys did and so did I. I never tried to fit in with boys, I just did. We liked similar things, laughed at similar jokes, had similar abilities. From age four on, growing up, the neighbor guy across the street in fact called me "little boy". But for all the free access I had to my strange
boyhood, strange because I experienced it as a girl, it didnt change the horrors that were in store for me, nor my horror in experiencing them.
The horrors, being puberty...
We constantly read in trans comments, how ungendered their childhoods were, what "sensitive" men and what "strong" women they grew up with. How given these "sensitive" men and "strong" women unstereotyped their upbringings,
proving that their uncomfortableness and sometimes down right hatred of their female bodies and female bodily functions are clearly because they were "
born in the wrong" bodies. While not having "girl" shoved down your throat at home certainly makes life easier, it doesnt change the incessant "boy"/"girl" messages that enter our eyes and ears as soon as we leave the safety of our mother's womb. Nor can being treated in a way we feel comfortable as a girl change the dysphoria puberty creates in many of us. This isnt a signal that there is something wrong with us, nor is it a signal that we are anything but what we are: female.
It is however a signal that years of sexist messages about females, years of ignoring the female that we are and years of our bodies changing before our eyes in ways we learn to despise can make us wish we were either male or dead. And until we can admit just how Butch Shame/Female Shame develops and how detrimentally it affects some of us, this homophobic nonsense of being "born in the wrong body" will persist.
dirt
