Childhood, A Time Before Being Transgender
My hands dig deep in the blue-and-black striped cotton basket with the smiling snail on it. The boy next to me just fished out a cowboy head, and the girl from next door is trying on the wings of a fairy costume. I’m looking for something very specific. I know it’s in there, but my tiny arms are too short to reach the bottom. I start emptying the basket, littering the living room with the costumes. From behind the Pterosaur outfit I wore last Halloween, I spot a golden sparkle. With a big sigh, I grab it with the tips of my fingers, and a golden sequin top flies out of the basket.
The others are already in costume, dressed according to their gender. The boys are pirates, cowboys, firemen. There’s even an Elvis walking around somewhere. Almost all the girls are princesses. No surprise there.
And then there’s me.
I’m wearing the sequin top that reflects the afternoon sun that radiates into a million specks of light through the street filled with children. My belly button is visible. A whole part of my back too. On my head, I’m wearing a white kitchen cloth which I tuck behind my ears to hide the buzz cut underneath. To finish it off, I’m wearing my mother’s oversized heels.
Running from my driveway, I proudly join the others. I scream and I laugh and we play silly games, chasing each other from one side of the street to the other. They don’t pay any attention to the costume I chose to wear. They don’t even ask me what I’m dressed as.
What was I dressed as? I guess… as a girl.
Some of the mothers are standing on the sidewalks, chatting amongst each other, occasionally screaming at one of their kids. When I walk past one of them, I feel her eyes on me. It’s the scary-looking mother that lives in the house at the end of the street. Her children are two of my favorite playmates. She says something to the mother next to her and they both look in my direction. I hear her say something like, “Look at him. Can’t he wear normal clothes for a change?”
I still have so many questions about how I got to be the woman I am today. So many questions about the workings of my brain when I was a child. Biologically, I was clearly a boy; I wore the pants my mother set out for me to wear every morning, there was an M on my passport, I wore the name of a boy, and my bodily structure was, and still is, built out of X and Y chromosomes.
Still, everything I did, the way I acted, talked, and thought, was utterly female.
I was seven when I was invited to the birthday party I mentioned above. How is it that a seven-year-old boy chooses to wear sequin tops, wants to play with Barbies, only prefers the company of the much quieter girls, and plays games as female characters?
What goes on in the brain of a biological boy acting like a girl? Was I born with it? Was I exposed to some strange behavior before I even had clear consciousness? Did I get a stroke in my mother’s belly, resulting in the suppression of male behavior?
It’s as much a guess to you, as it is to me. All I knew was that I was a girl.
Except for an occasional snarly comment from one of the mothers, my girly demeanor didn’t bother me, nor others, much. I became more aware of it while I was growing up, but I thought that my boyish appearance and girly behavior were something that made me unique. Until I was fourteen, I wasn’t aware there was such a term as transgender. I wasn’t aware that there were others like me out there. That it’s something that has existed over the ages.
I thought it was something that made me me. For better or for worse.
When I entered puberty, things got confusing. I wanted to stop the changes that were about to happen to my body, judging by the looks of my male peers. Some of their voices had dropped a few octaves. One even had some hairs on his upper lip already. It freaked me out. I didn’t want my body to evolve in such a direction. It didn’t feel right.
My female mind and male body were in a clinch.
So when my mom and I park the car in front of the grocery shop one day, I take a moment to tell her something before we get out. “Mom, I want to become a girl”. She looks me in the eyes. Do I spot fear in them? She doesn’t look surprised. How could she? I’ve been walking in the house with her shoes and clothes on for years now.
“How do you mean, you want to be a girl?”, she asks.
I can’t find the right words to tell her how I feel. “I don’t know. I just want to grow up as a woman and not like this”, I say while pointing to my boyish appearance.
She nods and stares at the window for a few seconds. “Okay, maybe we can talk about it with a doctor”.
I smile. I feel a sudden rush of excitement in my body.
She ended up making me an appointment with the psychiatrist my dad is seeing. The appointment is in two months. Before that time, I reach season ten of my favorite show at the time: Degrassi. A new kid, named Adam, joins the cast, and he carries a secret with him. As the show continues, we find out that Adam was born as Gracie. He’s transgender.
That was the first time I heard the term transgender. I pull myself off the couch with my elbows and start googling everything there is to know about being transgender.
It’s hard to explain how it felt, but I lit up from the inside out. Suddenly, my girlie dreams didn’t feel so impossible anymore. Suddenly, I didn’t feel so weird anymore. Now, I had a name for what to call “whatever is wrong with me”. Now, I could become a woman.
That was over a decade ago. I’ve come a long way since then. Transgender is now a term that rolls with difficulty over my tongue because I’m just a woman. I’m just the way I felt when I was a child dressing up as a girl.
Ariane is an aspiring writer and storyteller. She enjoys writing stories and poetry with themes of nature, womanhood, and culture. Currently, she’s working on her first book and is enjoying the challenging process. Ariane lives in Belgium where she just finished a degree in Journalism.
