When did you know?

I know a lot of you probably knew straight away, but many like myself have not. I mean to say when did you know you were in the wrong body? I knew when I tried on my moms lingerie and her shoes and never felt more beautiful, started painting my nails and toes, shaving when I got a little older. Started buying thongs when I had my own money, then toys because the hair brush wasn’t doing it right. Just curious on your stories, I’m also a no op woman

 

That totally makes sense, like I did repress for a lot of years and went back and forth with it until I said fuck it, walked into a Victoria’s Secret and bought a whole bunch of thongs. I decided right there and then, I was going to be who I am. Then decided to get a pedicure for the first time and loved being who I am ever since

 

Being a kid in the seventies I didn't. I just thought it was something that I did. I had liberated a skirt from a rag bag and hid it in the barn. I would go out in the trees and wear it and hang out there and up through the pasture. Made sure to never get caught. Mom did catch me wearing my sister's jeans to school one time though. I always wanted to have long hair but my folks weren't having that. There were other things too. Once I got internet then I started to learn more.

 

I knew in some form since I was five. The issue was that I didn't have the language to articulate my feelings to anyone--not even myself. I knew I wanted to be a girl, but I didn't know what that could possibly mean. I knew I got along better with other girls and was much more interested in playing with them than with boys. I knew I was jealous of grown women and their bodies, and felt a profound sadness when I realized I would grow into a man. But it was the mid-80s and terms like "gender identity" or "transgender" or "gender dysphoria" weren't in my vocabulary. It wasn't something you'd see on TV or hear discussed in school or, God forbid, by your parents. While trans people have existed throughout human history, the concept of being transgender wasn't common enough to be understood my most people--certainly not by school-aged children stuffing their teddy bears down their pants in order to create the illusion of hips, and then crying at the realization that real hips would never happen.

I even cursed God for putting me in the wrong body.

As a child, I knew I wanted to be a girl, but it took into adulthood to understood that I actually was and needed to correct my body to reflect that. That stuff wasn't understood. It was a different time. Truthfully, I wish I was born about 25 years later. I still mourn the girlhood I never had and don't have the luxury of gazing adoringly back at the past the way most people do.

 

I knew since the age of five that I was extremely bummed that I'd been born with male anatomy and was living as a cis-male. It first surfaced as jealousy of my sister's femininity. Once that feeling kicked in, it was accompanied by a nagging intergender curiosity about certain aspects of having female anatomy. Even without the capacity to understand what I was feeling, I was keenly aware that the mention or thought of certain things regarding female anatomy set off fireworks in my brain that far surpassed typical excitement a boy feels learning about the anatomical differences between boys and girls. Soon into college I noticed how much euphoria, comfort and relief I felt anytime I engaged in archetypal feminine things (e.g. peeing sitting down, tucking my penis between my legs, painting my nails, wearing bracelets and women's tshirts and jeans, and the most intoxicating of all was when female friends treated me like "just one of the girls.") Meanwhile, I'd begun to recognized the equal yet opposite depths of distress I felt whenever I truly sat with the fact that the coin hadn't flipped in my favor and all I could do about it was think, "Oh well. Ya get what ya get. C'est la vie." As I neared 30 and gender-queer identities entered the national conversation and friends started coming out as trans or N/B, I still believed that as long as I was able to -- however uncomfortably -- resign myself to the fact that I'm male, that it would be presumptuous and audacious to award myself "membership in the club." In fact, I convinced myself of that not because I couldn't accept my internal struggle but due to what I thought was respect for people who couldn't simply shake it off and tell themselves "C'est la vie." The final straw came last month when I bought some pairs of women's underwear to touch and look at while I masturbated. Although that was my only intention, as soon as I got them home, I immediately wanted to put them on. The nano-second those cotton briefs slid into place, I was like, "Ohhh... Okayyyyy..." I immediately looked up a few definitions of gender queer and other liminal gender identities, and read the entries for gender dysphoria and transvestic disorder in my DSM-V. It took about one-Mississippi for me to finally realize -- in the following order: 1) Cis-male had never been an accurate descriptor for my gender. 2) There are reasons we've expanded our language to include descriptors for liminal and nuanced genders. 3) I'm one of those reasons. 4) If I'm not the arbiter of my own gender then who fuck is??? 5) Upon confidently describing myself as gender-queer, I felt immediately better and no one else's identity was undermined because of it. 6) There was a whoooole lotta stuff I'd been doing for a looong time under the misapprehension I was motivated by my sexual attraction to women. And the so-called "fireworks in my brain" I'd been feeling since I was 5 years old was actually a response to immersing my mind in my best-worst superficial approximated daydream of feeling what it was like to be female. I started telling friends within 20 minutes.

 

Shout out to the lovely staff at the Victoria's Secret location near me!!! They are so great at making me feel welcome. I wonder if interacting with gender queer customers is part of their front of house training because they knew exactly how to balance being helpful but not so helpful it was just another version of treating me differently. Even the other clientele are great. My first time there, I was trying to separate a handful of underwear on an unused store fixture in order to count whether I had enough pieces to get the sale price. Another shopper saw me and figured I was setting them down because I'd been carrying all these items loose in my hands and they were kinda falling on the floor as I tried to put them down. She clearly picked up on the fact I was new to this. So, from a distance that offered absolutely no discretion, she asked whether I needed one of the reusable mesh shopping bags the store leaves out for customers. I thought it was the sweetest thing that she knew it was so much more supportive to just be like, "Hey! Ya need a bag?" compared to coming over and quietly whispering it to me.

 

It's so helpful to hear everyone's experiences. It's becoming so clear that my big hurdle of thinking I "didn't meet the criteria" because I was able to just be like, "Oh, darn. Guess I'm this thing whether I like it or not," is something so many of us did for so long. It wasn't a hurdle. It was a fucking billboard.