This is just something that I need to write out and I'm thinking about giving it to my spouse (a little backstory – he claims he "gets it", that I'm not female, but then goes out of his way to gender everything I do in a female way, to refer to me as female even when we're alone, and basically just ignore whole conversations I've had where I painstakingly explain my "issues"). I'm posting this here only because I feel other people will be able to relate.
What My Life Has Been Like
I think for me it all started in the womb – a chemical imbalance that caused my brain and body to develop slightly differently from the typical female fetus. Many years after the fact I discovered through letters written to an aunt that tests had determined my mom was "probably" having a boy. She was quite sure of it, in fact. My first and middle names were going to be Michael Andrew. I also discovered that my mom had PCOS and at least double the normal female amount of the male hormone, testosterone, and it was only through surgery to her ovaries that I her pregnancy with me was even possible. Anyway, the big day came and, surprise, I did not have all the male equipment and thus a big fat "F" was marked on the certificate that would hunt me the rest of my life. I was of course given a more appropriate first and middle name, and so began my journey.
While that big even was now almost 41 years ago, I still struggle in my daily life with the fact that society labeled me something I am not, without even giving me a chance. Some of the earliest memories I can recall concern confusion with the adults around me, then, a little later, even some of the other children. Probably because of the epic fits I pitched, my mom would acquiesce and for years kept my hair short and allowed me to wear a lot of boys clothing (I was an only child by the way, so she actually did go out and buy boys clothing specifically for me) and passed me off as a "tomboy" to anyone who inquired or mistook me for a "real boy". When I was very young, I still wondered why people treated me differently. I wondered why people would tell me I "shouldn't sit like that" or "shouldn't do that" or "shouldn't 'act' like that". It was shortly after I started talking (age 2) that I expressed that there were some things missing from between my legs. I could only imagine how horrified my mom was when I said this (while I can remember my expressing it clearly, I can't remember her reaction). When I was a small child, I truly was being myself. I was expressing myself the only (and natural) way I knew. I would play with other boys. I would get dirty. I liked trucks and army men and action figures. I would pull on girls pigtails and generally think the whole lot (girls) were "icky". Even as a 5 year old I realized I did not understand girls or how they operated on a social level. Imagine my confusion when people would say I was one. It was kinda scary actually. I didn't really have a full grasp of what it all meant, I just knew I didn't like it. It was in this era that I started to rely heavily on my imagination and every night I would go to bed and dream about how life would be like had I just been born "right". This set me up for decades of the mindset that I was, born in the "wrong body".
The confusion only grew as the years went on. In about middle school was when the first wave of ridicule from other kids came, simply because I, "looked like a boy". I wonder where they learned that behavior from? I did have the ability to stop the taunting pretty fast though ... that happens when you're not afraid to get into a fight (and usually came out the victor). I remember a school counselor talking to me and telling me that fighting was not "ladylike behavior", to which I responded with something like, "Well, I'm not a lady", only to have it thrown back in my face that, "You are a girl that will grow into a lady". I was smart enough not to make a case out of it. I could see which way the winds were blowing and by age 11 it was reaching a crescendo. My dad stayed out of the fights between me and my mom about clothing and hair and makeup (and how I refused to conform to anything female). Gone were the days where my mom would buy me items from the boy's department, because according to her, it was my time to, "straighten up and fly right". Translation: start behaving like a female. She even drug me off to the doctor (the same one that delivered me into the world) and I was subjected to a battery of tests. I don't know what happened exactly during the time period other than I felt like my mind was cracking. I felt horrible and emotional. I begged my mom to not go back there. It finally stopped.
By that point, puberty was hitting me in the face. I developed what would become a permanent slump in my posture because I couldn't deal with what was going on with my chest. It felt like my body was rebelling against my brain. My brain was getting more and more freaked out feeling like something was very wrong. I became the recluse artist kid who didn't have very many friends and kept to myself. Anything beyond friendship with another person terrified me. Thankfully though, I still didn't look like a girl, but an awkward teenage boy with moobs, so I was spared any affectionate attention save for one confused lesbian in the 9th grade. Sadly I was still cursed with the sex drive a teenage boy, so needless to say this was a very frustrating time. I discovered I liked aspects of girls and boys in a sexual way, but the confusion and hatred of my body kept me from doing anything with anyone.
College was a blur. Mostly because I had already discovered alcohol as means to escape from a reality that shoved me in a box I didn't belong in. I was going to art school in Los Angeles so it was easy to present myself in various ways and get away with it. There was still a part of me that was faking it though. When I wasn't out of it on booze (or something else) or lost in my imagination, reality would come back and I would realize that I was still forced to live as a female in society. I felt like crap, all the time, yet put on this facade that everything was fine and that I was indeed a female. I honestly felt a little dead inside trying to play that game. After years of having been forced to be something I was not, I had developed some world class acting skills, but it was still not enough. Certain people could tell and often times when I was having to act in a group of women, I could tell they could sense it too. There was something "not quite right" about me. I made some other vain attempts, all of which just left me feeling more hollow inside. The hatred of my body hadn't exactly gone away either. It was still there. Always there. 24/7. I even broke down and tried therapy, only to be told by the therapist that if I wasn't willing to "transition" or take any kind of hormone treatment, then I should just face the fact that I'm a woman.
Somehow I lived through college and several more years of partying to come out the other side changed. Not in a gender way, but in a, "I guess I don't want to die, regardless if I have the wrong body" kind of way. For the next few years I suffered with extreme panic attacks and anxiety that basically made me non-functional, so I had to resort to going on unemployment and then disability for two years. I refused to take any meds for this as it was my opinion that meds and therapists were part of what drove me to be crazy in the first place. There was no "help" in that direction and regardless of what anyone else thinks of my opinion on that, I still have it. To help myself, I had to actually do it myself. I didn't even have a friend that I felt I could confide my deepest secret to. I felt that, like that therapist, everyone would just think I was crazy, "Oh the poor girl thinks she's male! How silly! How delusional!". I had some friends along the way that probably thought I was a dyke or something, but nobody would bring up the subject with me and I certainly wasn't talking. I made some half-hearted attempts to connect with people on a more physical level, all of which turned into disasters. I had resigned myself to being alone, forever stuck in a body I didn't know what to do with, hopelessly stuck as a "female" in society. It was a depressing time, while I watched everyone else from the outside in who seemed to have no confusion or issue with their body or being male or female in society.
I allowed my mind to go to all those dark corners and cling to that "wrong body" stuff. I absolutely refused to accept it, yet that's all there was if I was to live. So that's what I did. By about age 35 my mind was starting to change though. I was getting a little punchy from all the years of awkwardly trying to fit in society's "female" box. I was getting tired of people giving me every reason why I was a female, "You know, maybe you're just a masculine female" or whatever the pseudo-helpful comment was, but it was always female. Never male. No, because that was just not a possibility in other people's minds that maybe, just maybe, what was going on with me in the womb before I even came out into the world changed me into a male who's body didn't get the proper signal to go along for the ride. I was fed up. Instead of feeling hopeless about it, I started to change small things about myself to more match who I really was. By this point I'd managed to use my imagination as not just a coping mechanism where I did have the perfect body and life, but for a creative career. Things were going well in other aspects of my life. I had a spouse (thankfully, asexual, whom I am still with today), a house, a car, the career. I had just about everything, except for acceptance of my body.
I spent years gaining more confidence and letting go of the "act" I had been perpetrating for decades up until that point. I even "came out" to several people (one long time friend, and two new friends I had met over the internet). They did accept who I really was, which meant the world to me. They treated me as male and it was a huge confidence boost to be myself more in my everyday life than I had been since I was a small child (the last time I was truly just being myself).
I don't have the desire to transition now because I am learning to be myself regardless of what society thinks about it and regardless of that horrible "F" on the birth certificate that's followed me around my whole life. That is how I refuse to conform now. I can't say it's easy, but it's what I've chosen to do. What's been dragging me down lately though, is being referred to as female over and over again by the person I chose to share my life with. Even after lengthy explanations and discussions, it continues. I don't know if it's conscious or what, but it makes me feel like the progress I've made to be even "okay" with myself in the last 5 years is being challenged. I feel like I'm back in the therapist's office ... "Silly girl! You just think you're male, how cute.". At seemingly every opportunity to point out the supposed "differences" between males and females, it is pointed out to me. At any chance to refer to me with a female pronoun, it is done. I made it clear that I was fine with continuing part of the "charade" for society and the "public". I'm not going to have some big "coming out" party right now. My parents will never understand. They're old, so why bother? Let them live out their lives without the added drama of my maleness. I really don't want mere acquaintances to know my big secret. I've told my doctor, and while she's a realist, she gets it. But only a handful of friends know. But why does the in-my-face-female crap continue from my SO? I've never been female. I have some female parts in my body, but that doesn't make me female. This isn't something that is only valid if I'm talking about it. This is 24/7 in my life and it's been that way since the very day I was born. I don't know how else to phrase it or what other way to say, "Please stop referring to me as female ... as 'she' ... as 'girlie' ... as 'having a vagina' ... as 'not understanding because it's a male thing'. Continuing to do it after I've tried to explain it all hurts and feels disrespectful to me and who I am. The only thing that's changed about me is that I've stopped putting on the act. My personality is the same, my likes and dislikes are the same. I'm just done with being put in a box I never should have been put in to begin with.
