Last time I wrote about how I came to finally understand that I wanted to be a girl, and I’ve previously written about how I learned not to tell people about my attraction to girl things. Now we come to a really pivotal moment when I was finally exposed.

One evening late in my 8th grade year, my mother came to me with an angry look on her face. She told me to follow her, and I knew I was in trouble. She led me to the bathroom and then pulled up the carpet in the bottom of the closet, under which I had laid flat my hidden stash of women’s clothes. Normally there was so much junk covering the carpet that the bulge wasn’t visible, but somehow she had found it. I was in shock. I had been fearing this moment for 3 years and it had finally come.

She asked me why I had all this and I just stammered and started to cry. She asked me if I liked wearing women’s clothing and I nodded my head yes. She asked bluntly if I wanted to be a girl, and I whispered “sometimes”. I didn’t want to say it out loud, but being asked directly I just couldn’t deny it, especially not after my clothing stash had been found. She sent me to my room and I went to bed early feeling absolutely terrified by what was to come.

The next day my parents called around and found a child psychologist to send me to. They wanted me “cured”. I ended up going there once a week for a few weeks talking to a therapist telling him little bits and pieces of my story, but mostly trying to avoid doing so. After a few sessions of this he asked me if I still wanted to be a girl. This was my chance. I could have told him, and maybe it would have gone well. I didn’t know it at the time but he was actually not transphobic, though he did adhere to the orthodoxy of the time which would have precluded all gender affirming care for children.

But all I saw was an opportunity to appease my parents, get out of therapy, and go back into hiding, so I told him that I didn’t want to be a girl any more. That satisfied him and my parents and they stopped sending me to him.

I became deeply repressed at that point and genuinely tried to be a boy for at least a few months after that, but of course, it could not last.

That summer I turned 13 and in the fall I started high school. I was now in classes with completely different people, except for band. Most of the band kids got into the high school band, too. Band, it turned out, made my gender envy come back. There were two bands, an upper and lower band, but both bands combined together to form the marching band during the fall football season. As we practiced I started noticing the flute players. They were all girls, and for some reason they had a particular gait to the way they marched that made them sway their hips forward and backward a lot more than the other kids. I was fascinated by it and I found myself trying to walk like that when I was alone, because the fear of my parents was wearing off again and I was starting to envy girls once more.

There were also flag twirlers who practiced with the band, and the flag twirlers were all girls. At the first football game I finally got to see their uniforms, and lo and behold they wore long skirts. I was so jealous! They got to wear those amazing skirts while I had to wear a stupid looking pseudo military uniform. Our drum major also wore a skirt, and I envied her too!

And then there was the drill team! They were a dance team, and again all girls – there was no dance instruction for boys at that school. The drill team actually wore miniskirts and cute little vests and hats, and they all had their make-up done up in the same exagerated fashion (to make it visible from a distance I think). And sometimes the band at the games would call out “Hey drill team, how do you feel?” and the drill team would all do a little clapping dance and respond “we feel good! Aww we feel so good! Wooo!” I so much wanted to do that with them!

Why were there so many beautiful things around me that I was excluded from just beause people wanted me to be a boy? I hated it.

After football season ended it was time for concert season. We did two concerts a year, one in December and the other in May. Again, we were issued uniforms and I got a stupid fake tuxedo looking thing, while the girls all had floor length black dresses. Once again I was filled with envy.

One time, though I actually found myself alone in the uniform storage room after school and I realized I had an opportunity. I made sure no one else was around, and then … I put on a flag twirlers skirt. It made me feel ecstatic! I did a spin and made the skirt flare outward and it was amazing! But then I got scared that someone would come in and see me, so I hung the skirt back up again quickly. But there was one more thing to do before I left. I found a concert dress in my size and I stuffed it into my French horn case (I had switched instruments). I took that dress home – stole it, really – and started a new stash of clothing in a different location. I was back in business!

Throughout high school I kept on building up my stash of clothes until I got caught again, though that time I had two stashes and only one was found. This actually happened a third time during my high school years, but the second and third time I did not get sent to a shrink again, thankfully.

One time, when I was 16 or 17 and after I had gotten a drivers license, I got dressed up as best I could, which wasn’t very, and snuck out of the house at 4 am. I drove around for a while just enjoying being out of the house as a girl finally. At one point I came across an all night grocery store, so I screwed up my courage and went inside to look for make-up to buy. I picked out some blusher, and I think lipstick. The young man at the checkout counter saw through me of course, and sneered at me, but otherwise didn’t say anything. So with my cheeks red from embarassment, I paid for my things and left the store. I had successfully gone shopping dressed as a girl for the first time ever! I was so proud of myself!

Also about that time my friends gave me my first exposure to anime and got me watching Robotech, the Americanized version of Super Dimension Fortress Macross, and a couple of other anime TV shows from Japan. I fell in love with the character of Lisa Hayes. And then I realized that some of the clothes I had access to looked a bit like her uniform in the show, so I made my own version of a Lisa Hayes outfit. My first, and really only, cosplay. I loved that outfit. I so much wanted to be Lisa and I was rooting for her in the Lisa, Rick, Minmei love triangle of the show.

During my late high school years, me and some other students got together and formed a school sponsored Dungeons & Dragons club. It was mostly boys, but there were a couple of girls in it too. And then there was K. K was a boy, but acted very feminine and always played female characters in games. K really got into those roles too, flirting with other players and playing up the character’s sex appeal. I was really fascinated by this but also disturbed because I was astounded that someone would be so open about playing with gender roles like that.

One night I drove K home after a club meeting. We chatted a bit on the way and I wanted to ask K if “he” wanted to be a girl like I did. I almost came out, but I chickened out. This was a sadly missed opportunity, because years later after I had started my own transition we met again through a mutual friend and it turned out that yes, K was trans and had already transitioned before me and changed her name. I missed my only opportunity to get to know another trans girl in high school.

During my sophomore year I also started occasionally doing something risky. Since being in the marching band meant I did not have to take PE classes, there was no time of the school day when I ever had to change clothes in front of anyone. So I started wearing women’s underwear to school, and knee high stockings under my socks. No one ever saw anything, and it made me feel more comfortable.

But during high school I also found myself avoiding doing something that everyone else was doing: dating. There were two girls I was actually attracted to in high school, but in both cases I was too afraid to say or do anything. I especially felt like I would be lying to them in a way if I went on a date with either of them, because they would be expecting to date a boy, and I knew inside that I wasn’t a boy. I didn’t yet really have any concept of being a lesbian, so I just ended up avoiding dating completely during high school. In fact, I didn’t end up going on my first date until I was 29 after I had gender reassignment surgery.

And during my high school years my grades went steadily down each year because of my growing depression caused by gender dysphoria, a term that I don’t think had even been invented at that point. I was in the honors classes, and as a freshman I got mostly A’s. As a sophomore I got mostly B’s. My junior year was mostly C’s, and by my senior year I was getting D’s. I was becoming more and more withdrawn and isolated, wiith fewer friends as time went by, and I spent more time at home crying alone in my bedroom as the years passed.

All of this was finally going to come to head in my second year at college, but I will save that for the next post in this series.