nostalgia

[julian6]

The other day, I was thinking through childhood memories for "clues" ..kind of playing "you know you're born in the wrong body when..."

once in middle school, I tried to pee standing up by squatting over the toilet and facing backwards. lol...it required taking off my pants completely. I had no idea why I felt like standing while using the bathroom but decided to try it one day.  It was simultaneously ridiculous and amazing.  I only did it once.

Anyone else feel like sharing?

[FebruaryFalls]

arguments over shopping in the boys department, my mom was typically fine with it though. I also ALWAYS wanted to get a buzz cut but they neevveerr let me.

I've done the peeing thing for sure though, but at home

Also, once when I was quite young at day care (pre-elementary so I was probably 4) there were guys who were under the slide in a secret club, and they wouldn't let me in because I wasn't a boy, that was a major disappointment early in life

[Anon]

I remember sitting behind the couch cutting my hair when I was three...learned from TV that if long hair conveniently got gum stuck in it, it had to become short hair.

tried peeing standing up definitely, but it turned out to be too much effort.

being made to wear girl's clothes to school in the younger grades..I gave in to be easy on my mom. and when the other boys made fun of me at recess, I just beat 'em up. :d

[Alex201]

I tried really really hard to use a urinal once. But I think that was more out of curiosity.

[Jigsaw]

My earliest memory of being a child was a Christmas when Santa brought me a doll baby.  I picked it up after unwrapping it, walked to my room and threw it in the trashcan.  I came back out and asked my parents if I could have my toys now.  From that point on, there was never a girl toy.  It took years before my mom gave up on the clothing issue and it was only during church I really had to wear girly clothing... but at least toy wise I guess I can say I won the battle very early in life. 

I also used to stuff my pants all the time which was kinda funny for that time period. I kept wondering why I looked different down there.

I also had a huge advantage in clothing when I hit puberty since my feet were too long for most womens shoes. My dad used to joke about them keeping the shoes and selling him the box.

I am so happy that while my parents and I had no idea what was going on, at least they did not force me to play with girl things or be a typical girl.  I was able to be a "tomboy" and nobody cared.  The bad part is nobody had ever heard of trans anything when I was growing up and it was not until I was in my 20s before I even knew about it.  Luckly the younger generations have soo much information and resources at their disposal.  I wonder what it would have been like for me and my family if we had of known back then what people know today.

[sascraps]

That was like my experience. I was allowed to have all the boys' toys and wear the boys' clothes at home, but I was forced to wear the god awful pink, pastel & frilly girlie things to school. I never had the slightest interest in anything for girls. My toys were all army men, GI Joes, transformers, hot wheels, etc.



Speaking of being nostalgic, here we go...

Me in 1984 at a family reunion http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/scremains/reunion1984.jpg
About the same time frame, 4th grade Halloween http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/scremains/1254399.jpg
And at 13 when we lived in Florida http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/scremains/me13.jpg

[Sharky]

I remember sitting behind the couch cutting my hair when I was three...learned from TV that if long hair conveniently got gum stuck in it, it had to become short hair.

tried peeing standing up definitely, but it turned out to be too much effort.

being made to wear girl's clothes to school in the younger grades..I gave in to be easy on my mom. and when the other boys made fun of me at recess, I just beat 'em up. :d

I wish I had of though of that. That's genius!
I just cut my hair and strolled through the living room like nothing happened. My mother freaked out and threw a fit. When I was locked in my room I could even hear her crying. After that she would find the biggest bows she could and I had to wear them.

[emil]

.learned from TV that if long hair conveniently got gum stuck in it, it had to become short hair.

i did the exact same thing three or four times throughout my childhood. my mom forced me to have long hair down to my hips! then when i showed her the gum she and my dad sat down and brushed/tore out the clot of gum+hair in a painful two to five hour ordeal. at some point i gave up trying and just neglected my hair.

other than that,...i refused to wear dresses from first grade on. luckily i had an older brother and a lot of clothes were handed down in those early years....from around age 12 i started sneaking into my brother's room and "borrow" from his clothing to wear that at school....we went to the same school and he sure didn't want me to run around in his stuff so at times things got ugly

my mom always took me to go shopping for clothes but i would never wear most things she chose for me and i would hardly ever get what i liked. she let me know how "ungrateful" i was and as with the hair, she put me under a mean psychological pressure that made me feel like what i was doing was the most horrible thing a child could do to their mom.

when i was in fifth grade i heard the word sex change on tv and i dreamed for years to come to just "tell my parents i wanna be a boy" and have one of those

i remember the last summer before my moobs really started growing i decided to run around shirtless all summer in our garden, because i knew it would be my last chance to do so...and i felt very sad about it. up to that time i also had a habit of accidently misplacing the top parts of all my bikinis.

at age 11 i remember searching through the house for the largest books i could find to place them on my chest in order to become flat again.

when my mom was pregnant with my sister i placed square pieces of sugar on the window sill so the stork would bring me a little brother.....my dad put some hearts (that should bring a girl) there as well but i put them back in the box so i could get a companion, not one of those weird beautiful creatures that i didn't understand and didn't like to play with


i did play with dolls though. i loved to cut their hair into boys haircuts and even sew them pants.
oh and played squire i wore a pair of silk shorts and long white socks up to my knees and i played old shutterhand and
at carnival i wanted to be a cowboy only. when i was ten i got a short curly wig so i could be Charlie Chaplin and i was more than sad when i had to take it off again:
http://i930.photobucket.com/albums/ad150/matt_thelen/chaplin.jpg
here's a picture of me playing "squire": http://i930.photobucket.com/albums/ad150/matt_thelen/youngme1.jpg


and i loved me my hawaii shirts: http://i930.photobucket.com/albums/ad150/matt_thelen/youngme2.jpg

and for my confirmation i argued so long until my mom took me to buy pants and a blouse, but they took me to the women's/girl's department and i told them they had nothing i wanted to wear there, but they still bought me something.
when i came out to my dad last year, he recalled that and told me how i cried and begged him i wouldn't have to wear this and if he could give me something else to wear because i felt so horrible...after trying to find out what exactly was wrong with my clothes he finally realized back then, even though i didn't explicitly tell him, that i wanted to go in boys' clothes and that what i ended up wearing felt just like torture to me.

wow, what a rant. if you've come this far here's your cookie

[Kohitsu]

My parents and relatives never figured out that I didn't like girly toys until I was in my early teens and spoke up about it, so I was pretty unlucky almost every Christmas and birthday. It's my fault because I pretended to like the girly presents just to make my parents happy (actually this Christmas I got some girly presents from my cousins and grandparents, but they live in another country so they don't know me very well, so I can't blame them). I would get jealous of all the presents my brother was getting; race cars, video games, boy clothes, you name it. Then there was one year when I was older when I said a nasty comment along the lines of, "My brother always gets the best toys every year, I get the stupidest girly presents, I hate Christmas!" THAT did not go very well with my parents. XD; It took them years to figure it out, but eventually they started buying unisex presents for me, stuff that ACTUALLY interested me; art supplies, movies, any merchandise that had "Tim Burton" written all over it, etc.

I remember a time when Gameboy colors were all the rage, and my brother had gotten one, and I begged my parents to buy me one too. My dad asks me, "Ok, we'll get you a gameboy. What color do you want?" and I said, " I don't care, I just want a gameboy." He told me how proud he was of me for not being so picky about my present. Later that day, he brought me home a pink gameboy. Of course I said nothing about it, because he said how proud he was of me for not caring what color it was, but on the inside I felt like my parents were still not understanding me.

There was an incident at school that really traumatized me about my gender. I was in elementary school in english class and we had an assignment to pick out a famous person and we had to dress as that person and give an autobiography about that person in front of the class. What were my first choices? Tim Burton or Bill Gates of course. XD We had to get our choice approved, so when I showed my teacher that I had chosen Tim Burton, she tells me, "NO, you're a GIRL, you have to pick a female role model." And I'm think WHAT?! I don't HAVE any female role models!! It just raged me that I couldn't be my favorite person in the world simply because I was a girl!! I didn't know who to pick, so I just picked a random person (cause I really didn't know ANYTHING about famous females). I picked Rosie O' Donnell because I looked at the cover and she was wearing pants so I thought, "Hey, I can get away with wearing that." Then when my "friend" found out who I picked, she was laughing at me yelling, "Are you a lesbian!?" (Of course I didn't even know what a lesbian was, my best friend had to tell me and when I found out what it was, I decided to pick another person because I didn't want to be known as the school lesbian). So it finally ended up in me being Princess Diana, and wearing a pink frilly dress infront of the class. That was the WORST gender dysphoria I've had as a child, and I didn't even figure out what all of these feelings of gender discomfort meant until recent years. x_x

[Devin87]

I don't think I really minded playing with dolls when I was younger.  We had this fischer price doll hosue thing I always used to play with (actually, we still have it) and I used to make up different scenes from that.  I found myself playing with the dad a lot more than the mom, though.  I also don't think I minded wearing dresses until about fifth grade.  After that I always felt like a man in a dress because of my broad shoulders and hairy arms.

Luckily the only kids in my neighborhood around my age were boys, so I got plenty of male playmates and I got to play boy games all the time.  I was usually the leader, too.  We would play power rangers and army men and dig in for snowball wars and all that fun stuff.   The rest of the time I would shoot baskets, although I never had an urge to play basketball with the boys.  I think I liked being the best player on the girls team and I knew that on the boys team I'd be good, but I wouldn't be the best.

I also remember seeing the episode of Full House where Michelle decides she's gonna be a boy.  I remember thinking how awesome that was and so I went around acting like she did for weeks.  I also liked pretending to be boy characters from books, movies and TV shows.  I really wanted to be the boy from My Side of the Mountain.  I never wanted to be a girl character except for Matilda, and only because she had really cool powers.

I'm just glad I found my friend who was the biggest tomboy I knew (she's now a butch lesbian and dresses more masculine than I do, though she has no desire to be a man).  It let me play boy games and act like a boy and stuff all the way up to high school but we didn't draw any negative attention because we were two girls playing together, which was considered normal enough that people didn't seem to pay all that much attention to what we were playing together.

[julian6]

haha thanks for posting pics, guys! It's really neat.  And the gum in the hair - genius! I had long thick thick thick hair and was constantly fighting with it...shoulda thought of that. 

Yeah, the standing and peeing thing only happened once in my own bathroom.. and yeah, I would stuff stuff in my undies when I was 9 or so..still only in private though.  Once my mom caught me applying a mascara mustache! lol she just looked at me silently and walked away.

Also, I never had an issue playing with girl toys/never exclusively wanted guy toys.. looking back, I saw I was a little different but at the time, I wasn't in any distress or anything... I only started having dysphoric feelings like 3-4 years ago when I first learned at college what "transgender" meant.

Kohdy - I had a green gameboy! I picked and paid for it myself.. one of my proudest childhood moments

[Devin87]

Kohdy - I had a green gameboy! I picked and paid for it myself.. one of my proudest childhood moments

I had a metalic blue one I got for Easter one year.  It was awesome.  I had all the pokemon games.  I also had a red one that I stole from a teacher's desk at school.  NOT one of my proudest childhood moments...

[Robert F.]

I was always a pretty boyish kid, so my grandma tried to counteract that by buying me tons for Barbies for Christmas/birthdays/etc. I would flip my bike upside down and turn the pedals with my hands while holding the Barbie's face up to the wheel. Then I'd catch frogs and put them in the Barbie's house.

Whenever we played "house" or "castle" or anything like that, I'd always have to be the son or the prince or I'd throw a huge fit.

I actually once told my friend that I thought I was an underdeveloped boy. I think that's a pretty good indicator, haha.

[KamTheMan]

Hey, I'm pretty new to the forum. Just two months into seriously questioning my gender.

When I first started questioning myself, I was envious of guys with such solid stories from their youth about packing and peeing standing up. I personally have an extremely bad memory, I think it's the result of hating my life so much I just block most of it out. The more I strain myself to think about my childhood, though, I do remember trying to stand and pee (and awkwardly try to control the stream). I may have packed before when I was really little, but that packing is covered up in my memory by the one of me stuffing my bra in middle school. I was such a tomboy up until the middle of fourth grade when my parents took away my JNCOs, put me in a skirt and told me that's how girls were supposed to dress.

..the more I type the more I realize about myself. Crazy.

[Tad]

packing with toilet paper so I'd have a  bulge in elementary school.  Being 7 and already passing for a male on the street. Being 4 and my mom telling me to pretend to like the barbie I would get for christmas from a relative. Always being the husband/soldier when we played house, doctor, whatever.. and my male relatives getting shunned to being like dogs.. or kids or whatever.

[Henri]

The earliest I remember was in kindergarten when my parents told me I should stop playing with all of the boys. I didn't listen to them though. Funny thing was that all of us really liked the Power Puff girls.

Then in elementary school I played with Gameboy and Digimon action figures. And dinosaurs. Awesome stuff. I also ran around without a shirt on most of the time. Man I wish I could still do that!

In middle school I wouldn't buy anything from the girl's section and would rage whenever my parents tried telling me that someday I would "grow out of it." When I lived in NY in middle school everyone thought I was a guy, even though I had long hair. I drew a lot then and had two characters of my "alter egos" and both of them were essentially boys in girl bodies. Then I moved back to Florida (I had lived there once before) and when I was in the locker room someone asked my friend who the boy was in the girl's locker room and she told them my name was Henry. And I liked that name so much that when I went into high school that became the name everyone (including teachers) knew me by. Finally in Junior year I heard of the term "transgender" and everything clicked into place... Good stuff.