I'm going to have to chime in here with a little mythbusting and an alternate tale from the dark ages. I've come to realize my childhood experiences were pretty unique or otherwise, I wouldn't be taking the time to share them here.
I missed being born in 1954 by two days. I was raised in Ohio and Arizona, neither of which was a bastion of liberalism or progressiveness. I was forced to conform as in doing what I was told, not talking back and having to eat yucky vegetables and foods I hated but what was not policed was my personality, manner, behavior or interests which were 100% atypical for boys of the day.
Certainly I was encouraged toward masculinity and given every opportunity to express myself in that fashion but it just wasn't in my nature which was recognized early on and nothing was ever forced on me at least after my parents separated when I was five and a half. Prior to that, my dad was a Marine that fought in the Korean war that just couldn't handle having a sissyboy son that only wanted to play with dolls and have tea parties and failing to make me into the little man he wanted, he took off instead.
As an only child that spent much of my early childhood on a farm, I was well aware of the physical differences between males and females but I didn't really understand my place in all of this until I started kindergarten where being male or female translated into being either a boy or a girl. Finding out I wasn't the girl I'd always thought I was did not make me very happy to say the least. Right out of the gate, I was teased and bullied and didn't really understand why or what for nor did I know what to do about it. I just was who I was. Who else could I have been? I didn't know why I had to dress in boy's clothes or why I couldn't have long hair and pigtails too. I was a very serious and sullen child.
At home with my mother and grandparents, things were as they should have been. I was not teased for my femininity but it was frequently pointed out that some of the things I did or the way I was would be by others but I simply didn't care because I knew no other way to be. I had a lot of nurture catered to my nature. I helped out in the kitchen more than in the barn and my grandmother taught me to do needlepoint and cross-stitch. After the 2nd grade, I was allowed to start growing out my hair and by the 3rd grade, was breaking every rule in the book. As I got a little older, I graduated from baby dolls to Barbies, EZ-Bake ovens and drawing and painting. Other than the dumb clothes I had to wear that I always felt uncomfortable and awkward in, my home life, hobbies and interests were pretty much like any other girls.
Naturally, none of this did much to help my social standing. In fact, school was quite the disaster. By the time I was 10 years old (1965) my parents, now mother and step-father put me in therapy. None of this was to change me or make me into something I wasn't. It was more to deal with the way I was treated and ostracized for being different.
By the time I was in the 7th grade (1967), I had been to 12 or 13 different schools trying to find one where I didn't come home bloody or crying or where I wasn't the one asked to leave because my presence was deemed to be disruptive. This was kind of ironic considering I was shy, quiet, introspective, kept to myself and never bothered anyone.
7th grade though is when things really started taking off. When the new school in a new state wouldn't let me attend because my hair was well below my shoulders, my folks got a lawyer and threatened to sue. Then like my 2nd day of class, I was expelled for fighting a PE coach that tried to make me go into the boy's locker room. My parents took me to a psychologist and a psychiatrist and got me out of that too and I really became the ultimate social pariah.
We didn't know anything about being trans. Who did in the 1960's and certainly none of the many doctors I had been taken to had a clue either other than to tell my parents I was "probably gay". All I knew and had ever known that I was a girl and that was why things has always been so difficult for me. It didn't really make any sense.
When I was 15 during my sophomore year in high school (1970), an act of extreme, life-threatening homophobic violence proved to the turning point. None of this would have happened if I had been able to live my life as a girl rather than some queer androgynous freak of nature and I let it be known to my parents that I was going to become a girl and that there was no way in hell that I was ever going to grow up to be a man. To them, this was more or less old news and came as no surprise but in 1970, there wasn't a whole heck of a lot that could be done about it. I was able to get my ears pierced, my brows shaped and shave my legs and already with long pretty blonde hair, by the time I was 16 outside of school I was regularly and consistently getting gendered as a girl which made going to school where I was known by a boy's name all that much more worse. We still didn't have words for all of this or a name for it. It was just the way I grew up to be.
By the time I was 17, I was really in distress, hated life, hated my body that had begun to turn against me, wanted to quit school and never leave my room and became deeply depressed and suicidal. My folks had found a doctor 150 miles away in another city they wanted to take me to but I resisted. I'd been seeing damn talk doctors since I was 10 years old and they were all stupid and the whole thing was a waste of my time not to mention embarrassing. Sensing though that I was really in trouble, I agreed to go.
After talking to this guy for about 15 minutes, he told me I was clearly and obviously transsexual. A what? I had heard the word but didn't really think it applied to me. I was nothing like Christine Jorgensen. He sent me off to be evaluated by a psychologist (that I hated) and a psychiatrist and on my next visit with him, in 1972 before my senior year of high school, I was put on HRT. Finally I knew what was wrong that had explained where I'd been and gave me direction to where I was going.
I finished out my senior year of high school... somehow? By the time I graduated in 1973, my hair was almost to my waist and my breasts were impossible to not notice. The week after I got my diploma, my mom and I went to the DMV to get my ID changed and that was pretty much it. I had found a normalcy in my life previously unknown. As icing on the cake as they used to say, I had SRS several years later and have had just an average but pretty great life in spite of it all getting off to a bit of a rocky start.
So, I did conform as a child but not to the expectations of society or my peers but only to myself and what I knew myself to be. I even learned to like (most) vegetables!
