Content warning: there is discussion of a suicide attempt at the end of this article.

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Before moving on to my pre-teen years, there are a couple of more things I should mention from my early childhood.

I lived with my mother and my older sister, D. Whenever we would all go out shopping, I would frequently hear my mother telling D “hold your humpy shoulders up” to remind my sister to have good posture. I always got the impression it was something that was very important for girls, because my mother never told me that, but I always reacted to it as well. The phrase runs through my mind even today from time to time as a reminder to be ladylike. I was disappointed as a child that my mother never told me the same thing.

I was also jealous that my sister got to have nice dresses and other clothes, even ones that were expensive enough that they needed to be bought on a layaway plan. All I ever got were jeans and plain shirts. It felt like I was just an afterthought when it came to clothing.

When I was very young, maybe 5, I was given a Raggedy Andy doll, a classic kids toy. But I wanted Raggedy Ann, too, and never got one, much to my disappointment. (I recently ordered the 100th anniversary edition of Raggedy Ann and it should reach my house soon. Better late than never!)

My pre-teen years

For the first ten years of my life I was pretty oblivious to gender. I was different from boys, but I didn’t realize it and just thought I was like everyone else, but entering the pre-teen years was when I began to finally understand that I really was different from other people, and I began to be more consciously aware of my affinity for girls.

For example, 5th grade was the first time I had a physical education class in school instead of a general recess on the playground. It was still really just play time at that point, but it was organized by the gym teachers. We would split the class into two sides and play dodgeball in a gymnasium, for example. It was in this class that they first started separating the girls and the boys. At the beginning of the class the boys would be sent to one changing room and the girls to another for us all to change into gym shorts and shirts. This confused me at first because I instinctively wanted to go with the girls, but the coaches told me I had to go with the boys instead, and since I “knew” I was a boy (because that’s what everyone told me) I just went along with it as disappointing as it was. This was the first time I consciously remember thinking that I belonged with girls instead of boys.

6th grade, though, was when I finally started to clearly be envious of girls and want to be like them. To begin with, in 6th grade we had a real P.E. class finally, with separate locker rooms and gyms for boys and girls. We could no longer even play together and I was stuck with boys exclusively. The first day of that class I found out that not only was I going to be stuck with only boys, not only were we expected to change clothes for the class, but we were also expected to shower at the end of class. In a communal shower. With each other. Naked.

This made me incredibly frightened. I did NOT want to see naked boys and I very much did not want them to see me naked. I knew they would laugh at me and beat me up. (I was routinely beaten by boys in elementary school and all throughout junior high school, but that’s another story.) What’s more, I instinctively felt that there was just something wrong with letting boys see me naked. I couldn’t handle this. So I refused to shower. I refused even to simply walk by the opening of the shower area so that I would not even see in there by accident.

Eventually the coaches noticed this and told me that it was a school rule that I had to take a shower. I still refused. They punished me. I still refused. I was paddled. (Corporal punishment was routinely used in this school.) I still refused. Eventually, the school contacted my parents and I tearfully told them that I really didn’t want to be seen naked, and they agreed to write a note to my teachers to get me opted out of showering. The school finally relented, but the coaches sneered at me and mocked me for it, and I still got punished by them anyway. They would find other excuses to paddle me.

I think this was also when gender dysphoria started setting in, because it’s the first time I remember being ashamed of my body.

At home I started doing other things. We had just moved across the country to a new state and there were a lot of things still unpacked. One of the back rooms of the new house, right next to my bedroom, had lots of boxes in it still, and I went in there one day just to poke around and see what was there. One of the boxes was a tall hanging clothes box that had a bunch of my mothers dresses and other clothes in it. I was curious what was in it, so I started looking through it and found a silver jump suit of hers. It fascinated me. It was very much disco era clothing and was flashy and feminine. And I put it on. And I loved it! I felt like a disco queen in it! I danced around and pretended like I was in the movie Saturday Night Fever, or maybe dancing to Abba. From then on, I thought of it as “My Jumpsuit”. I would go in that room and put it on every few days.

Then I started being curious about the other clothes, too. There were dresses and slacks and blouses and all sorts of cool things, and I would try those on as well and I was having a blast. I knew from my experience being caught playing cheerleader that I had to keep this secret from my family, but this quickly became an important part of my life.

My older sister D, lived with us, too, and I started sneaking into her closet when she wasn’t home to try on her clothes. And I started poking around in the laundry room, and in my mother’s closet when I was the only one home. Eventually I decided that I needed my own clothes, but not being able to go out and buy them, I started snatching things from the store room, and small items from the laundry sometimes, and hiding them in my room so that I gradually began to build up a tiny wardrobe of female clothing for myself. This was a terrible thing to do, of course, stealing clothes from my mother and sister, but I felt like it was the only way I’d be able to get women’s clothing of my own and I desperately wanted some, so I just took things in order to satisfy my needs.

I did get one piece of girlish clothing for real, though. A belt that I thought looked very feminine because it was thin and I’d never had a thin belt before, though I’d seen them on girls plenty of times. My mother thought it looked good and bought it for me. I was there at the time and I asked her not to buy it, because inside I thought kids would think I was gay if I wore it and any thought of being in any way exposed to others – “outed” as I later came to know – terrified me. The lesson of the cheerleader incident had really taken strong hold over me.

In fact, the belt made no difference. A lot of the other kids thought I was gay anyhow. On the school bus I rode, someone even gave me a nickname: Tinkerbell. I don’t know what inspired it, but everyone on the bus started calling me Tinkerbell. It hurt a lot. It hurt because, deep down inside I liked it, but it was being used in a way that hurt instead of making me feel good. I was desperate to hide my true feelings and here were these kids exposing the bare me, probably without even realizing they were doing anything other than “normal” childhood cruelty.

This mockery and the fear of exposure led me into a kind of denial and attempts to appear more masculine to others. An overcompensation of trying to fit in. I started to mock anyone else who I felt was an easier target. There was one boy, call him A, in my grade who everyone thought was gay, and to be fair he was very flamboyant, and I swear I saw him wearing a little makeup every now and then. Everyone called him a fa***t and I joined in with them to try and fit in. But A didn’t let it faze him and he would play it up when people tried to mock him, doing things like asking if his make-up looked good, or saying that he loved boys. Maybe he really was gay. I never found out, because I was terrified by him, actually. The truth is, I envied him in the way he openly defied gender sterotypes and refused to let others get him down. I really desperately wanted to be brave and open like he was, but my intense fear held me back. I’m sorry, A, for all the cruel things I said to you. You were secretly my hero.

There was another kid, S, who got called gay, too, but he didn’t play along with it. He just ignored it. Eventually I became his friend. One day, I was over at his house and we were trying to think of something to do. I was digging through a pile of toys and junk in his closet when I came across something I did not expect: a tube of lipstick. Suddenly I had thoughts that he might be like me, someone who likes to dress up as a girl when no one else was around. So screwing up my courage, I asked him why he had lipstick in his closet. I was so hoping that he would come out to me and that we could then practice make-up together! But alas, he just non-chalantly said that he didn’t know how it got in there and I let it drop. I always wondered what things would have been like if I had come out to him.

Throughout junior high, I kept up my secret clothing stash, and added make-up to it as well. Meanwhile, at school, the boys in particular developed a routine habit of abusing me. It felt like they started a fight with me at least once a week. Usually it would happen after school, since sometimes I walked home instead of taking the bus. I only lived about 3 miles away and could walk down a path beside a flood drainage channel (we called it the “bayou”) that ran behind my house. The attacks always confused me in that I never understood why the boys wanted to beat me up. But this had actually been going on since 2nd grade and I had become accustomed to it. It was just a normal part of life as far as I could tell. I actually became somewhat of a good fighter, though I wasn’t as strong as most of the boys.

One time, in PE class, one of the older bullies started coming after me and I knew I was in for a beating as he was bigger and stronger than me. I cried out “why are you doing this? Why do you always attack me?” He actually stopped a moment and thought about it. He got a very serious look on his face and told me that he didn’t really know, he just knew that I was different in some way he couldn’t explain and that meant he had to beat me up. He then proceeded to beat me up.

Another time, in 8th grade, some 7th grader got to me after school wanting to fight me. There was even a crowd of kids waiting to watch the fight. But although he was strong, he was also shorter and lighter than me, so I was able to use my size as an advantage and pinned him to the ground. I made him surrender, and he agreed. I let him up and immediately he came after me again. So I pinned him to the ground a second time until he agreed to give up. I let him up, and he came after me once again. At that point I was just confused. He couldn’t win. He knew he couldn’t win. And yet he kept coming after me again and again. So I just quit. I walked over to where I had put my book bag down, picked it up, and just left. The boys in junior high hated me, they didn’t know why they hated me, and they wouldn’t stop attacking even when they couldn’t win. It was baffling to me, and still is really.

8th grade, when I was 12, proved to be a pivotal year for me. That year I got into the top band of the school (I played trumpet) and was really looking forward to it. But the first week it gave me a nasty bit of gender envy. The band had an official secretary whose job was basically to keep a diary of what we did. This was before computers were really widespread, so the notes were all hand written. The band director said that meant only girls could be the secretary because girls have prettier handwriting than boys. Now I never really had flowery handwriting, but I knew I did well enough, and being told that I couldn’t be secretary simply because I wasn’t a girl made me feel angry and embarassed. It made me desperately want to be secretary after I heard the limitation even though it otherwise didn’t appeal to me. I didn’t really know why, but I was soon to know.

There was also a girl, M, in band and some of my other classes too. She, like many girls at the time, liked to wear her socks rolled down to her ankles. In fact, they would often wear knee high stockings like that, too. And it drove me crazy with envy! I so much wanted to wear rolled down knee high stockings like the other girls in my class. (Yes, I was starting to think of them as the “other” girls without realizing it.) I would dress up like that at home at night and try to make myself look like M. Which was ironic, because in another class, I was still doing the whole trying to fit in with the boys schtick. Puberty was hitting everyone and some of the boys in that class took to patting M’s buttocks if she got called up to the black board. They would slap her butt cheeks as she walked up the aisle towards the front of the room. One day I did that too, beause I wanted to make people think I was just like the boys, and I instantly regretted it. Oh, it got laughs from the boys, but I knew inside that I’d done something wrong, something that I would not have wanted to be done to me. Something sexist and abusive. I am so sorry M. I’ve been the victim of harassment now, too, and I get it.

Another girl, whose name I don’t remember, was in a third class of ours. One day she was giving a presentation to the class and I was in the front row right next to the podium. She had a habit, as she spoke, of making a little “tch” sound as she inhaled at the end of a phrase. I thought it was the most feminine vocal affectation I’d ever heard! And as she spoke I started silently make the same kind of noise inside my mouth whenever she did. I wanted to sound like her!

During 8th grade was when I really started to want to be in the girls gym class, too. I would sometimes see or hear about them doing really fun things, like archery, or learning how to dance, while the boys class was all about football, or baseball, or calisthenics, or even just running loops around the practice fields for the whole session. We were just being physically worn down, in my opinion, while the girls were actually learning and doing things.

And then there was one time when we had a joint gym class for some reason. The boys all walked over to the girls gym and the boys sat against one wall of the gym while the girls sat against another wall. And while we were sitting there I noticed the different way the boys and girls were sitting. In particular the way that the boys would spread their legs out, while the girls generally did not. So I consciously sat in a way that emulated what I saw the girls doing; I sat with my knees bent, and my legs together and propped up. Sitting like that made me aware of the bulge in my crotch because it was getting squeezed between my legs. I hated the feeling, so I started imagining what it would feel like if I had a vagina instead. A flat crotch, uninterrupted by any dangling bits. It was one of the most pleasant thoughts I’d ever had to that point in my life. I acheived a kind of euphoric state where I felt like my body really was like that. The end of class was a let down after that.

So, at this point my affinity with girls and girl things was getting really strong and persistent. I had a stash of hidden clothes and make-up. I was extremely envious of girls fashion in school. I detested everything about the boys. I was picked on and bullied because the boys could somehow sense there was something off about me, and now I was experiencing body dysmorphia. Gender dysphoria had finally set in for real. And as the year progressed something occurred to me. The thought that my whole life until then had been building up to. I wanted to be a girl. I’d always been different, but at that point I knew in exactly what way I was different, and I knew what I wanted to be. I wanted to be female.

And it seemed like it was impossible. There were no public role models for me. There was no discussion of it in sex-ed classes. My parents were certainly clueless and never talked about anything remotely like this being possible. I felt like there was nothing I could do and a feeling of despair tore into me like a flaming sword through wet tissue paper. I decided there was only one thing that I could do in response to this: kill myself.

One night, at the age of 13, I waited late into the night for my family to all be asleep. Then I got dressed up in a nightgown and dressing robe, gathered up a rope I had prepared, and snuck out of the house. I also had a suicide note pinned to my clothing. In tears, I stood beneath a tree in the front yard, ready to throw the rope around a limb and hang myself. I simply felt like I could not live anymore unless I could be female. I stood there staring at the tree and crying and sobbing for a few minutes. I was terrified. I didn’t want to die, but I just could not see any way forward.

Fear of death made me back down. Tears streaming down my face, I snuck back into the house and my bedroom as quietly as a could and I cried myself to sleep.

In the next post in this series, the glass shatters as I am finally discovered.