I did not have a determined feeling that I was a girl when I was young. I was happy. I had genuine happy times as a male, and I don't remember questioning it... sometimes. I didn't know much of anything about transgendered people for a long time. It had been put in my head, from seeing how people talked about it, that they were... weirdos. And I carried that childish judgment of transgendered people with me for a while.
I was not heavily gender socialized towards being male. I didn't have strong pressures put on me to be 'boyish', or do 'manly' things.
The thing is, the realization of who I truly am did not hit me with its full impact until just near the end of last year. I met with someone who I found out, to my surprise, was transgendered. I looked into it more. It seemed to fit. What's made me feel I really am who I am is that when I look into the past, things seem to fit... but it's like I never gave them the chance of a second look a lot of the time, when I was younger. It's like a confirmation of all the puzzle pieces fitting properly together, now that I review it from the present with a greater understanding.
I did have something inside of me. I had a feeling of being... out of place. But when I was growing up, I determinedly ignored it, pushed it away, gave it the back seat because I saw it as something I desired, but couldn't have; I believed it an impossible dream to fulfill, so dwelling on it was too painful. By the way I acted in elementary school, there were people calling me gay. It was a growing trend to use 'gay' like it's an insult at the time, I think, but the word was thrown at me like flies on... flypaper (lame simile, I'll just make the excuse that I'm tired). ><
I remember watching TV and seeing girls in commercials or really anywhere, and I imagined what it was like if I was a girl too. I also couldn't help but be envious of how awesome their clothes are compared to what I wore all the time!
The strongest confirmation, though, is something I recall in my time from the fourth to sixth grade. I'd heard an old story that went like this: If you take a dandelion and blow on it as hard as you can, and you manage to scatter all of the seeds from the stem with one breath, you can make a wish... and it may come true. So I remember taking every dandelion with a full set of seeds that I could, blowing on it as hard as I could, and wishing to it: "I wish I was a girl..."
Now I look at these things and I understand how I've reached this point. It was at the end of last year, when some friends of mine were pretending to be girls to be silly, when I decided to join in. It was then that once I did so, I suddenly didn't want to go back. It was then that I began to feel that something was brought out of me, and I loved it... it felt right, and what I had just left behind was only a shell I had kept myself wrapped in to get by. I'm very happy that I've discovered this about myself. I wish I had done so sooner, and I just wonder why I was so late to it.
