Hey everyone!
A few short facts to begin with: I'm Handkerchief, 15 years old, biologically female, from Germany and I suspect I may be FtM transgender.
The whole thing started in my childhood. I refused to play with dolls and didn't like pink. I, however, didn't play with traditional male toys too (military stuff, for example, or toy cars)! Instead, I took a rather gender-neutral approach and liked role playing, dinosaurs (oh my, dinosaurs! My first great love. I had dozens of dinosaur figures, knew the time period, size, preferred food choices and Latin name of a great many species... Once, when I was six, I corrected a museum staff member who told our tour-group the wrong size for an adult Allosaurus. But to be fair, I think he just confused something and in theory knew the correct numbers.) and books. I knew how to read at 4, and soon left behind books that one might consider appropriate for my age. Dinosaurs and books, that was my childhood.
In kindergarten and primary school, I neither had lots of contact with the girls or the boys. I didn't fit in with either because I, as bad and overly self-confident it sounds, was smarter than the rest. They didn't like me because of my good grades and my love for books and knowledge, as well as my overall slight weirdness aka the so-called "Handkerchief Catastrophe Gene", short HCG, that make me incredibly socially awkward sometimes.
At the end of primary school (three crosses on that, really, kindergarten and primary school were the worst part of my life) a teacher suggested that I should go a school for high-gifted kids. I did, and that was one of the best decisions of my life. Really, I love that school. There are so many weird people around that all love Star Trek a little more than it would be considered healthly, and everyone has his or her own variant of the Handerchief Catastrophe Gene. We are all socially akward, but we can be akward together!
As I started going to this school, I noticed stuff. Previously, I simply had no friends whatsoever, and suddenly, I found myself in a rather big social circle and had a lot of friends-that somehow nearly all were male. It was kind of strange, but somehow, I had like seven, eight male friends and exactly one female one. I still did not display traditionally female behaviour, but at the same time, no traditionally male one (football? cars? Please, no.).
And well, today, I'm in Year 11, still love my school, still have many male friends, still don't fit into a female role, and I have no idea what gender I am, because of a simple haircut. A couple of weeks ago, I cut my hair short, and I mean pixie-short. Not because of anything related to gender, simply because I wanted to experiment. A week or so after the cut, I just happene to grab one of those collared shirt-blouse-things made of a little heavier fabric out of my closet, got dressed, looked in the mirror, realized I looked like a dude, shrugged my shoulders and went to school.
The lack of "oh my god I need to get dressed differently I can't run around looking like a boy"-freakout kind of freaked me out.
This day was weird. I moved, talked, acted differently. I'm stick-thin without a butt or boobs, and my pants were kind of wide, so most strangers must have assumed I was male. And somehow, I liked that.
I can't stop thinking about the whole gender-issue now. I started imagining myself as a guy, and I think I like that. At the same time, there are moments in which I feel female and I never think I fit the stereotype of the muscled, football-watching, beer-drinking dude. I also don't fit the female stereotype of housewife and link dresses, however. And so many men don't fit stereotype A and are men regardlessly of that, just as so many women don't fit stereotype B and are women regardlessly of that.
I don't know who I am anymore. Even my sexuality kind of shifted: I always assumed I was some sort of a straight-ish asexual with a little thing for females going on. Now, I can't bring myself to finding guys attractive at all anymore and sort of developed a little crush on a female celebrity. It is strange.
I am utterly confused. I don't feel female, that is pretty much sure. But maybe it's just a phase? Can phases occur in gender? I don't know what would be if I really was transgender. I mean, hormone therapy and stuff, of course I know about that, but how in the world am I supposed to tell my parents "Hey, mom, dad, you know, you have two sons?". Friends wouldn't be a problem, I'm surrounded by very liberal people, but my family is rather conservative. How do I even know for sure that I'm trans? Gods, it's all very confusing.
Well, writing it all down definitely helped. Perhaps you could tell me your thoughts about my story and questions and try to help me answer them? Thanks you all!
