Having a concept of gender identity at an early age

Childhood hints are the greatest, aren't they? In fact, in the letter I'm making coming out to my mother, I wrote this:

Just some childhood signs for me, I guess.

 

I can totally relate. I didn't have a real good understanding concept of gender/male and female sexes as a child. I never cared enough to ask about the parts and no one ever really told me. So I managed to get all the way up to 6th grade thinking everyone had the same parts. (It was really weird cause I got the talk at the end of 5th and I think my dad assumed I knew about girl's parts so he didn't explain it in the slightest so I was so confused but he took it for embarrassment and I don't often ask questions so I didn't then, I just kept trying to figure out how the males part went into the female part, which i perceived as a males part as well. Just kind of funny.) Anyways... So all of my Elementary I remember thinking that I'd reach a certain age and I would change and everyone would see me as a girl and I could wear dresses to formal occasions and all that. (Incredibly stupid for such an intelligent child) Then I found out about puberty in middle school and was crushed. I went home and cried that night after school. Then I went through my middle school years thinking I was crazy and wrong until I found the word transgender, and I was like, "Oh, yea. That's totally me." Anyways... Then, in kindergarten, we'd have a house setup and when we had indoor recess the girls would all go play house. I always played with them and dressed up in this dress that was there and these blue 1 inch heels and went about as the mom. I'm still thankful to my teacher for not stopping that, even though she probably could have at the time. There was another time in 2nd grade where we had these weeks where each student had to tell about themselves. One of my classmates said that she wanted to be a fashion designer when she grew up and brought in her sketch book that had a bunch of dresses in it. I remember feeling really jealous of her because she had one and I couldn't have one. Which is totally stupid, cause I could have had one had I asked for one, but I didn't cause at my school, that's just not what boys did. I have a few other instances too but they were just minor and I've made this long enough already lol. That's just a bunch of things that made me realize that I've known all along, even if I blocked them out for a short period of time.

 

When I was very young, between 4-7, I had these weird recurring dreams where I would be naked along with my girl-friends at a sleep over, and we would be comparing parts, and my parts "down there" were way bigger than theirs so they all start laughing at me. At this point I had never seen a boy naked. I started getting this deep feeling that I was somehow different from other girls, and that I had to hide it because if anyone found out they would laugh like in my dream. I started to freak out if my mom or grandmom walked in on me changing, or when my grandmom wanted to watch me play in the tub so I wouldn't slip and fall. My grandmom would say "What? It's not like you have anything different!" but I still felt like she was wrong.

That feeling became so real, even though I didn't understand why. I guess at a young age I knew, even if I didn't really find a word for it until just last year!

 

When I was little I tried to change my name on multiple occasions, although it never really worked... When I was three or four I got this toy cat, and I figured that since I didn't like having my name, and since two things/people obviously could never have the same name, I named it 'Catfish' since that was my nickname at the time. Every time people talked to me I'd go "THIS is Catfish!!!" while holding it up. My family just took it as an adorable little girl doing adorable little girl things. Then around seven or eight, which is when I started to have a concept of gender and that I was different somehow, I tried to have everyone call me Mickey, since I was given the middle name Michelle. Somehow I ended up getting convinced that my oldest sister was the only one who had the right to change her name since she was the oldest, and all us younger siblings just had to make do with our names whether we liked them or not. I also remember asking my mom for a short haircut, but she said I couldn't have one since I would look like a boy and followed with a story of when her stepmom cut her sister's hair and everyone mistook her for a boy even when she wore dresses and skirts and earrings. What I took from that story was that I had to get my ears pierced to get a short haircut lol.

 

When I was like 12, I remember the thought springing up in my head "I'm a gay guy in a girl's body." I was shocked by that, and instinctively forced myself not to think such "perverted thoughts." So if that wasn't a sign...

Also, it's funny this, but when I was super little (around 5) there was this video game I played all the time. It was called Dynasty Warriors 3, and one of the characters was a dude named Zhang He, and I always picked him to play as. This guy, though, was always shirtless and he wore butterfly wings into battle. So gay, I know. He would also talk about beauty and essentially being more fabulous than the other warriors, so haha! I was obsessed with that guy, at five years old. I guess it's ironic that I found out I'm a queer dude after all.

 

Hehe! Since I was in 6th grade I would joke around with my best friend that I'm a "gay guy trapped in a girl's body". I like to joke about things that I honestly feel to make them seem less real and more harmless. Funny how that works? :lol:

 

When I was a kid, I hated so many things that people considered feminine; dresses, skirts, dolls, long hair, my birth name. And at the time it was because people were saying they were for girls so I had to have them and I just didn't agree with their reasoning. But in my mind, I didn't hate them because they were for girls and I wasn't one, I hated them because they made me personally feel weird and uncomfortable. They just weren't what I wanted. So I didn't really put it all to gender until I was about twelve, maybe thirteen, and had long since received all the 'boy' things I longed for, and I had said something about myself in the third person. I used he as a pronoun. It was something that kept happening, I wasn't just wincing at she but inwardly saying he and I wasn't supposed to, and I always kind of pushed away until recently. Then I did it again and it was like holy shit Batman.

 

I feel like the only person that hasn't heard about the word transgender or has even seen a non-girly girl or a non-boyish boy until I was like almost 16. Is there anybody like me who didn't know they didn't have to dress like or be their assigned sex for a really long time? I feel like everybody's always saying they already felt like a guy trapped in a girl's body at a young age and although I felt like something was off I would NEVER have thought about something like that even for a second. I just didn't know/think that it was even possible. I mean, 16 is so old to just realize that not every girl has to dress feminine and not every boy has to dress masculine and that there were even people that were AFAB/AMAB and had a gender different from their sex... I feel kind of dumb for not knowing especially the dressing-thing for almost 16 years... Other kids are tomboys when they are 5 or even know they're transgender and I just wonder how they know so early what transgender is? I didn't ever see one on TV or something. I wonder how much longer I would have dressed as a girl and believed that I had no other choice although it was just so obvious and simple? I could have just bought boys' clothes. Nobody ever told me I couldn't. But I never thought about it as an option. I feel like I was a stupid kid

 

Don't worry! I actually didn't think "I'm a boy trapped in a girl's body" or anything like that when I was little. I had weird dreams, and I felt like something was odd and that I was different from other girls, and I felt like it was something to hide and be ashamed of, but it wasn't clear that I was a boy. I was a tomboy, but that's just because my parents let me do what I naturally wanted to do, and I naturally was just more into boy stuff than girl stuff, but even I thought that I was just a weird girl at the time.

I started joking about "being a gay guy in a girl's body" in middle school, and it was something that felt right to say regardless of it being a joke, but I never let myself take it seriously, so it wasn't something I was internalizing. I never felt, at that time, like I was hiding my gender. I just felt an intense sense of not fitting in with other girls.

Nobody told me there was another option either, and when I found out 1 year ago that I didn't have to be a girl if I didn't feel like one, it was like getting hit by a ton of bricks. I wish someone told me sooner! Lol.

 

Actually, a few months before I discovered I was agender, I would often joke about how I was "internally a gay man". Not transguy but it's still funny.

 

I only started thinking about it (the dressing thing more so than discovering that transgender was a thing) a couple years ago when I was working at a summer camp and everyone was talking about the clothes that wore out in the real world, and I was thinking how it'd be so nice to dress how the guys dressed, and then I realized that there was really no reason for me not to.