We're all so different.
I'd tried to have the conversation with my parents about not being a boy when I was around 5-6 but it didn't go over so well. I found out though that as long as I didn't talk about it, I could still mostly express myself as the as the girl I knew myself to be which once I entered the school system, also didn't go over so well.
I did everything I could to distance myself from being a boy and after the 2nd grade and more or less a meltdown of sorts, I was allowed to let my hair grow out removing any chance of ever really being accepted as a boy but yet I had to be known as a boy and was caught in the middle. I hated it. I struggled with it. It caused a lot of problems.
By the 7th grade, if I was a boy or a girl had become quite ambiguous so naturally I was further ostracized socially and of course by that age, I was just that weird queer ->-bleeped-<-got kid that acted like a girl and in 1967, this crap never went over well but I was just who I was. There was no one else to be.
The first thing I did when I knew I could no longer live as a boy was to (re)announce this as a fact to my mom and step-dad. I was fifteen years old.
An unfortunate event leading up to this announcement had acted as a catalyst. I had always been bullied, teased, mocked for the way I was and looked and being beat up was pretty par for the course. I'd been in 15 different schools by the time I was in the 10th grade due to lack of integrating socially because I was so different and during that 10th grade high school sophomore year, I was attacked by a group of homophobic boys on my way home from school. I was hurt pretty badly. Hospitals and police were involved and I just hated how being a boy and not just a girl had gotten me into this predicament in the first place. I knew I could not do this. Even my parents assumed I was gay and had been telling me for years at that point that it was perfectly okay if I was.
I was out of school a month recovering from my injuries, with both of us in tears and with my mom sitting on the bed next to me holding my hand having one of those deep talks about being gay, I told her I wasn't but that there was no way I could go on living as a boy and that I sure as hell was never going to grow up to be a man. This is something she just understood with a mother's intuition, with no judgment or surprise but deeply concerned there was nothing that could really be done about this, not in 1970 anyway in our conservative redneck town. Neither of us had any concept of what trans was or what any of this meant? I didn't anyway. There were simply no words. I only knew I could not go on as life had been no matter how much more difficult it made things for me or how much bigger of a target it painted on my back. After all, I'd nearly just been killed and didn't think things could get any worse.
I was in some real distress at this point in my life and blindly without really understanding what was going on because it just happened, I was allowed to express myself more openly and less androgynously which helped things immeasurably. I was able to wear girl's clothes as long as they were unisex and could pass as boys. I got my ears pierced and shaved my legs, got my brows done at a salon and started wearing a bit of discrete makeup on special occasions like weekend dinners at a restaurant with my folks. Already with long pretty blonde hair halfway down my back and at maybe 5'5" and 125lbs, by the time I was 16, I was consistently passing in public as a girl which is exactly how I went to school where I still had to be known by a boy's name and he/him pronouns that my parents and extended family had already mostly stopped using by then.
I can't really explain and maybe don't even want to remember in too great of detail what an absolute mind bending time this was in my life and probably the hardest thing I've ever been through? I was a "late bloomer" but when natal puberty finally began to show its signs, it sent me into an absolutely depressed and suicidal funk. I wanted to drop out of school and never leave my room because it made me so miserable being such a freak and to be seen as such and having to deal with that five days a week to go to school saw suicide ideation and planning hit its peak. Nobody still had a clue about what any of this meant other than I had just grown up to the girl I'd always been and known myself to be and that was a huge problem because I wasn't female.
Fortunately and in ways I'll never understand, my parents realized the depth of my despair and darkness and found me a doctor that after talking for just 15 minutes diagnosed me as transsexual and after some further evaluations, at 17 started me on hormones which was certainly an unusual and experimental protocol at the time (1972) for someone so young but gave me just enough encouragement to make it another nine months to graduation knowing that once out of school, no one would ever have to know me as a boy or an "it" ever again.
And they didn't. At nearly 64 years old, I'm still that same girl I grew up to be and have always been. It's really the darndest thing when you think about it and when I did do that first thing when I knew I had to stop being known as a boy - telling my parents - I can't even imagine what would have happened to me if they hadn't been supportive and understanding?
I take that back. I know exactly what would have happened to me.
