Back when I was transitioning people would ask me how I knew I was trans. That’s the kind of question that all trans people get asked. For me it was difficult to answer, and it still is something that I think about from time to time. Lately I’ve been thinking about it a lot because I had something happen that gave me a real sense of gender euphoria for the first time in decades. I won’t go into that now, but I would like to talk about my early memories and how I eventually came to realize that I was trans.

The first thing to note is that I did not realize I was trans until I was 20 and at college. It’s not that I didn’t know I wanted to be a girl, it’s just that I never really knew anything about trans people and I had no language to describe what I was feeling. When my egg cracked in the spring of 1989 I desperately needed to learn more, so I went to the library on campus. I knew the word “transsexual” from advertisements of daytime talk shows, like Phil Donohue and Jerry Springer, shows that I had always avoided watching because the thought of watching transsexuals disturbed me for some reason I did not understand. When I got to the library I went to the card catalog (there were no computers yet) and looked up “transsexual”. There was one entry that I found that caught my eye, a book called “The Transsexual Phenomenon” by Dr. Harry Benjamin. Reading that book finally gave me a name for myself, and that is when I knew I was trans.

But what about before that? What about in childhood? In my childhood years I didn’t think there was anything different about me. People said I was a boy, so I thought I was. But there were definite signs, anyway. I remember a time when I was about 5 years old. I got a pair of my mother’s boots one night when she was at work (she was a singer) and I went in the bathroom to play. I pretended I was a super spy or something trying to stop an evil villain. But the villain could magically change my sex and every time I got close to him he would do so to delay me. I would put on the boots and say out loud “oh no I’m turning into a girl!” Then I would go after the villain again and he’d turn me back and I’d take the boots off. It was just innocent play, right?

In the next couple of years I remember another pair of incidents where I wanted to do things that weren’t considered gender appropriate. One time when I was visiting my grandparents I went out to play with the other kids in their neighborhood. A bunch of us decided to play family, and the oldest of us, a girl named Toni, was going to be the mommy. I confidently announced that I would be the daughter. Toni told me no! She said I had to be the daddy! I argued with her but she was insistent, so I let it go and played the daddy. I figured I could just be the daughter next time, or something.

There was another girl in that group who lived across the street from my grandparents and she had an enormous hand made doll house in the living room that her father had built for her. Whenever I saw it I so much wanted to play with it. Finally one day I asked her if we could do so, but sadly she said she had decided she was too old for that (she was 7 or 8 at most) and so I never did get to play dolls with her.

Another early memory is something my grandmother said to me. When I was a child I had really thick and long eyelashes. One day she commented on that and said that my eyes were too pretty for a boy and that I should have been a girl. That made me feel really happy!

I don’t realy have any other gender related memories from the first decade of my life, but there is one very crucial memory from when I was 10 years old. At the time I lived next to a family with two boys. One, call him K, was a year older than me, and his brother, B, was a year younger than me. We hung out and played together a lot. One day we went into the store room off the car port of the house and started digging through the boxes in there just to see what we could find. I found a box with a small plastic footbal, a sweater with a school letter on it, some pom-poms, and a cheerleader uniform. I think they belonged to my older sister in junior high. Seeing those gave me an idea. Let’s play dress up!

So I gave the football and sweater to K and told him to put on the sweater and be the football player who just scored a touchdown. Meanwhile I put on the cheerleader outfit and I was going to be his girlfriend. I even remember stuffing the top of the outfit to give myself the appearance of having breasts. K went along with it and was laughing and seemed to be having fun, while B got this weird look on his face that I didn’t quite understand, though it was clear he thought this was not a fun game. So there I am dancing and cheering and I’m all psyched up to give the football player a kiss to celebrate winning the big game, when suddenly, a different older sister walked into the room.

I looked at her and she had a shocked look on her face. You could have heard a pin drop in the silence that followed. She looked at me and said in a very demeaning tone of voice “I won’t tell anyone about this. Your mother is looking for you” and then she left. I felt devastated. I didn’t know why, but I clearly got the message that dressing up as a cheerleader was apparently wrong. And not just wrong, but Very Seriously Wrong. So wrong and so terrible that even talking about it was a bad idea. It was in that moment that learned a new emotion: shame.

I was ashamed. I didn’t know why I should be ashamed of wanting to be a cheerleader, but it was clear that I should be ashamed and that I should never tell anyone about it, ever. I had learned that I had to hide my true feelings from other people or I would get in very bad trouble for it.

K and B and I silently put everything away and they went home. As for what happened the rest of the day I don’t have any memory. I just crashed into a deep fear and a bad feeling and I went numb. This was probably my first experience with depression, too, which would later become a defining feature of my life.

When I was a child I did not know I was trans. I knew I liked playing with girls and doing girl things, but I didn’t ever really get a chance to do so because for some reason no one ever wanted to do that with me. And then came that fateful day when someone finally let me know that she did not approve of me wanting to play as a girl and that I would get in severe trouble if I did.

I didn’t yet know I was trans, and I didn’t even consciously know I wanted to be a girl. All I knew was that being girly was dangerous, and I should be ashamed of it. That was the most important lesson I ever learned in my early childhood and it left me scarred for life.

Next, I’ll write about my pre-teen years.