As a child, I played with dolls, climbed trees, rode bikes, played basketball, and painted my nails. All of my friends were boys, and in all my dreams I was a boy saving a princess from various towers and space invaders. My two passions were Britney Spears and Pokemon, and I can happily say I haven't grown out of either. I played Nintendo 64 religiously, and refused to wear pants. Then I changed my mind and refused to wear dresses. Then I changed my mind again. In early grade school I hung out with my best friend, a boy, and we had sleepovers all the time, and changed in the same room, and all of those things that little kids do before they become girls and boys. In second grade, a boy liked me, and it creeps me out to admit that we would make out behind the trees on the playground. I wasn't really very interested, but I didn't have many friends at the time, and the one person I did want to kiss was a girl who I didn't actually like very much at all. After seeing Ace Ventura when I was little, I learned (through research and word-of-mouth) about people who had genders that didn't match their bodies, then promptly forgot. A few years later I learned about how girls and boys were supposed to like each other and not their own sex. I thought that must be a mistake, because my first crush was Jessica Rabbit. In third or fourth grade, I realized that something was off, so I put the clues I had available to me together and decided that I was supposed to be a boy. I kept it a secret. In sixth grade, a kid called me a lesbo, and so I googled the word and learned about the wonderful world of... GAYISM! ((As I like to call it.)) I knew the girl was trying to insult me, but that was a very happy day in my life, because I realized that, as a lesbian, I wouldn't have to get an imperfected surgery to make my body match my brain. (Yes, at age eleven I was worried about the functionality of phalloplasty. I was a weird kid.)
A few years later I realized that it wasn't that simple, and that all of my confusion couldn't be explained away with one answer. I still felt like I was a boy, but not completely, and frankly, I was the most confused I'd ever been.
Long story slightly less long: I spent years researching, joined a queer youth group, made friends with LGBTQ people, realized that lesbian sex didn't sound that appealing to me, realized that I loved my boobs but hated not having a penis, got medicated for depression, went through a phase where I thought that I was FtM trans but liked crossdressing in miniskirts, went from straight to gay to pansexual, always avoiding the word bi, and still ended up just as confused as before.
At the MOMENT, though who knows how long a moment lasts, I identify as asexual, panromantic, gender androgynous, and generally awesome. Ask me again tomorrow, and it'll probably be different.
But that's who I am, and I guess that's all that matters, right?
