Day 2
"How did you grow up with your gender?"
I grew up not quite a cisgender female, but not quite a demigirl either. When I was younger I used to be quite into feminism and "girl power", et cetera. But I envied boys. And I recognised society's inherent gender prejudices quite early on.
Come to think of it, my gender preference fluctuated even at a really young age. When we played imaginary games at school- pretended to be fairies, and so on (admittedly, most of my friends were girls at that age), I'd sometimes choose to be a male character; sometimes choose to be female. It never seemed to matter to me. And I always rejected the whole 'pink for girls; blue for boys' thing. And when we played games with boys against girls, I tended to go between the sides without even noticing. It's funny when you look back on it. By the time I was about 10, my friends were equally male and female.
The first thing I heard of gender identity was when Conchita was on the Eurovision Song Contest, crazily enough. I couldn't figure out if they were male or female, and then I realised I didn't care. My parents closed the TV off when she won, in anger. I researched it later and found out what genderfluid meant. I didn't really think about it again.
I remember so many other things which led me to question society's two-gender thing. When one of my friends couldn't join the school netball team, because he was a boy. When there was a "gender-swap" day at school- it was gender equality day or something- and the boys dressed up in dresses, and the girls wore trousers to school, but I didn't change anything.
When I was about 11 I learnt what transgender meant, but only within the binary. I didn't really relate to it. I thought I was stuck as a girl forever. I still hated things like dresses, and make-up and boy bands (we were just entering One-Direction-era), and pink, and I loved typically masculine things like Maths, and Science. It was then that I went into single-sex classes at school, which completely suppressed my gender expression for years. I lost all of my male friends. I faked being a cisgender female, to fit in. And that's when puberty starting kicking in, and that's when I started self-harming.
That's how I grew up around gender.
