Going through childhood as a girl brain in a boy body is hard. I knew something was wrong, but I didn't know how to fix it. Still, I knew. Something inside told me this was not right, someone made a horrible mistake, I should have been just like my other female friends, I should have been able to dress like them, wear my hair like them, act like them, and be treated like them. Instead, I was scolded, punished, told that little boys don't act like that, don't dress like that, don't wear their hair like that, don't play with those toys. And so, ever the good little trooper, I tried to conform, to fit in, if only for the sake of my physical well-being to keep from being punished and tormented by those even more ignorant of my condition than I was.
But those feelings of inconguity never went away. No matter how hard I tried to suppress them (because that's what boys are supposed to do, or don't do), there was something broken inside me that would never let me have peace with pretending to be something I wasn't. Throw in the massive confusion brought about by early male-oriented socialization, compound it further with a poison hormone that did horribly wicked things to my mind AND my body, and it's a wonder I lived through any of it. But throughout it all, inside I still KNEW.
Three million years of human history has proven sexual dimorphism to be a successful evolutionary trait. It's cross-cultural. It isn't something someone made up just to befuddle the gender-confused or so one half of the population could lord it over the other half. The truth is only a very small percentage of the human population ever even questions it. And no wonder- it's in our genes as well as our jeans, it's in the very chemical and physical makeup and wiring of our brains and bodies. Yin and Yang exist with all the power that the aforementioned three million years of evolution can put behind them. And that is why, despite all outward appearances, my female brain could never find peace in a male body. Something was broken and I had to fix it, or die trying.
Girls have vaginae, boys have penises. Girl brains born into boy bodies unfortunately have penises too, but generally find this a totally unacceptable condition in which to live, so we go to great lengths to remedy this situation. And thank the gods, there is a cure of sorts. It isn't exactly perfect, but it's good enough to make an intolerable life livable again. And once the cure has been taken, most of us who have taken it go on to live happy, fulfilled lives. The world finally sees us on the outside as we are on the inside, and even more importantly we know, even if no one ever sees between our legs, that the upside down world we lived in all our lives is finally right side up again.
So despite the antithetic socialization, despite the inborn poison hormones, despite a million and one things to the contrary forcing us in the wrong direction, we do know when something isn't right with our assigned gender. As I said previously, I would venture to assert that those of us who undergo the rather drastic measures of physical sex correction surgery believe quite strongly in the gender binary model. We know that what is on the outside is wrong and needs to be fixed to bring our brains and the rest of our bodies into alignment. The very fact that this extreme cure works gives credence to this. It's all well and good to speculate endlessly on what gender means or how it is interpreted by the particular culture in which we live, but each of us must deal with the hard, cold, physical reality we are born into.
I'm very glad there are men and women. As a heterosexual woman I love it when a man I'm attracted to behaves romantically towards me, and when he treats me as though I'm special, and when he sees me as sexually desirable. I love every aspect of being a woman, even the parts that hurt. Most of all, I love that my outsides fit my insides, and I am free to be who I was born to be: a complete female in this mixed up, muddled up, shook up (but still gender binary) world.
