The Obligatory Childhood Post

Since you can't talk about shit like a gender transition without people wanting to know about your childhood, here's a little glimpse into mine...

The first memory I have of feeling female, or at least of feeling uncomfortable with my “maleness” was taking P.E. (physical education) in grade school. They typically had classes segregated by sex. I always felt like an outsider hanging around a bunch of boys for an hour. Dodge ball stands out. What a stupid sport anyway. All I learned was how to throw shit at people. It was ALWAYS girls verses boys. There were other occasional “battle of the sexes” activities. From the time we’re barely developed enough to piss on our own, we’re taught that boys and girls are somehow in opposition to each other. If you’re on the wrong team, you’re very aware of this.  Besides feeling like an outsider, I knew I related with the girls. I wanted them to win, even though I had to be on the losing team for that to happen. I kept this to myself as a matter of self preservation, which I’ve always had a knack for.  Most of my friends were girls. At almost 35, most of my friends are still girls. When I had typical childhood fantasies of being a rock star and that sort of thing, I was a girl. I hung out with my sister and her friends a lot, generally being the only boy.

I didn’t really have a complete concept of all this as a kid. I suspect most kids don’t, but I imagine the Internet helps these days. I just knew there was sort of a discrepancy between how I saw myself and how other people saw me. I remember starting to grow a little bit of body hair at about age 11. Then acne came along. A lot of it. It annoyed me to no end. I got bullied in the 6th grade quite a bit. I was too different from the other boys, and the train wreck that was my acne made it worse. Chased around the playground, spit on, etc. I guess it was fairly standard kid bullshit. That only made me feel that much more disconnected from them, since I apparently wasn’t enough of an asshole to be a pre-teenage boy. I wasn’t really one of the girls either, so I basically became a loner. Being left the fuck alone was as good as it got in the 6th grade.

What you learn to do is hide the things that make you a target just under the surface, which I successfully did all the way through school. When all the 1990s Grunge stuff came along, there was my perfect excuse for long hair & long pretty fingernails. I first grew my nails out at age 14 at the request of my first girlfriend. At least it turned out I have perfect nails. I was happy about that. 20 years later, I have yet to go back to having them short.

Even between high school and college, when my friend Shari and I spent a little bit of time sleeping on park benches near Cherry Street, I hated beard shadow. I might not have always cared about shower access, but I made sure to shave each day when whore bathing in the Java Dave’s restroom. She still has the 13 star flag we stole from some balcony because we needed a blanket. That was 15 or 16 years ago. Something like that. I had one of my better hair cuts around that time. My friend Marta was in beauty school. She gave me this angle cut where it was straightened, about to the bottom of my neck in the back, and as you went to the front, about chest-length. That was free. She was in school. Everyone loved it almost as much as I did. I basically presented myself as a feminine, young gay male. Once I went to college, I decided I’d grow the beard out and such, and attempt to be more masculine, but still identified as a gay male. It seemed like a good explanation for everything. I sort of switched back and forth between presenting myself as feminine and as masculine until well past 30 years of age, before I just couldn’t fake it anymore.

You can only hold a balloon underwater for so long. Eventually you’re going to get tired of it and slip. I got tired of it. It’s a lot easier to live my life when I’m not expending most of my energy trying to hold a big part of it underwater. Balloons are no fun under water anyway. Now that I’m above the surface, although there are still struggles, my life is a lot more fun and a lot more full.

My childhood sucked in the social sense (Family situation was fine. I grew up in a reasonably healthy and loving home). That may explain some of my misanthropic and anti-social tendencies. I’m slow to trust. I don’t leave home that much, as I’ve successfully organized almost my entire life within my home. Thankfully, I’m basically past it. It doesn’t torture my soul or anything like that. People seem to love me more than they ever did before. I have more friends than ever. People seem to take an interest in how I’m doing if I fall out of touch. I have my beautiful partner and our beautiful daughters. Life is so much better now that I just put it all on the table and decided to actually LIVE. Fuck those who didn’t like me when I was a child, and fuck those who don’t now. When you just be YOU and live your life, the people who do love you actually love YOU instead of some facade.