Hi I was born in 1946 in the Black Hills of South Dakota into a family where social visiting was the only form of communications. In my family, my parents' bedroom was off limits and they keep almost all of their personal items in their bedroom. I was the oldest child. In my neighborhood, there were very few other children my age to play with. Unusually only one or two kids. In my preschool years, I had my brother who was two years younger and one other girl and one other boy. We mostly played outside.
I never even thought about rather I was a girl or a boy and I had no access to any girl's clothing. I was always a quite shy guarded child who in the classroom pictures I have seen was just there sitting off to one side and never projecting much of a personality.
About every five years I moved finding myself in an entirely new and not so new places so I spent most of my life just trying to figure life out and adapt to it without inserting any personality into it.
I was just a doer and not a thinker except for being self-conscious about myself. Many of the activities I was involved in would have been considered to be boyish activities or tomboyish activities. But, I was near-sighted and one eye was stronger than the other so my judgment of distances was off and when trying to catch anything I only saw it clearly when it got close to me. Now in running around in the Black Hills I only needed to see no farther than the next tree and they tended to be three to five feet apart and there were a lot of trees.
Looking back I had a lot of very girlish attributes. I was careful about myself, and not brash and outgoing as young boys may be and the farther I got from my house the more I felt it pulling me back to itself. I had one other girl to play with but remember only being inside her house once for a tea party where I felt really awkward and we never had any inside free play together and my brother and the other kid a little bit younger than me kept trying to ditch me in the woods behind our homes. We lived on a hillside beside a highway. There were four houses on our side of the road.
There were also a row of houses of Grizzly Gulch, but I was too timid to venture up the road much at four to five years old, even though my mother let me cross to highway to visit another friend that I never found who lived on the other side. His mom said he was playing with friends up the Gulch, but I never found him because I was too timid to venture too far off the dirt road running up the Gulch.
We moved to another city about forty miles or so away where I was a suburb dweller in Rapid City, SD in South Canyon for the next three years. Now I navigated streets which were more on the grid pattern rather than up a mountainside beside a highway. Again I just was. I had a baby sister now who was six years younger than me, but still no access to girl's toys or clothing yet.
Well, you kind of get the picture. I just lived as I was it didn't matter if I was a girl or a boy, I could have been either. I was attracted to pretty girls but never had any close friends while I lived there. The only kids I knew in my neighborhood were a couple of boys who lived across the street whom we ran in the nearby fields with.
Of course, I needed to see more than five feet in front of me now. So much of my life got fuzzier. I was clumsy so I had problems jumping rope with the girls and my eyesight interfered with most of the baseball and other ball games most boys were successful at. And as far as winning goes, while I wanted to win, I was more of a girl about it, because when I felt my opponent's need to win, like any female in the 1950s I surrendered my need to win to his. The only boy I was competitive with was my brother when it came to physical battles I wouldn't let him beat me.
After third grade, I moved again back to Deadwood where I lived on a street that sloped up the side of Deadwood Gulch near the library, my school, and downtown. I got my mountain to play on again and a street with only one other person my age another girl and my brother. We played mostly outside when we played together and that was in the warmer nonsnowy months.
I could play imaginary games with my electric train and toy soldiers because I didn't have any girl toys to play with and I never bought any girl things with my paper route money. But, on the other hand, I did not do anything that a girl couldn't do is she wanted to. I bought pop, candy, comic books, and plastic model WWII models and went to movies. I was a plain Jane and never showy.
Most of the world outside my house was so adult that I never ventured into it. Mostly I ventured into the dime store, a small grocery store, one drug store, and the movie theater. I was just a shy little girl and not an adventuresome boy. As far as buying things that were girlish, I was just too shy and girlish.
I was in cub scouts and boy scouts and went to campouts and summer camps, but I was very self-contained and had more of a girlish approach to things. I tried to do things, I failed, I felt bad that I was not as good as the boys were, I didn't give up, but I never figured out how to succeed enough to be happy with myself.
When puberty hit me when I was twelve going on thirteen it was strange. My dad was away getting medical treatment for cancer and I was left to deal with it myself. When the male urges hit me, I had no idea how a girl was different from a boy, being terribly naive and sheltered at the time. I was very self-conscious and felt guilty about masturbating and this made me want to do it even more. And I tried to hide it, but my brother shared my room and it smells.
There was no look at what I've got and I gotta get me a girl there-there. I started fantasizing about being that girl, whatever that meant. Yes, I had seen my mother pregnant when I was six, but I never thought about it at all. I started feeling that I would make a better Dale Evans than a Roy Rodgers.
Well, the Dale Evens and the Marilyn Monroe in me hid for a very long time and only in fantasies.
My dad died, and we moved to a small prairie South Dakota town. I had a new dad and a baby brother on the way and a new world to figure out. One improvement I finally got glasses. And I had another failure at being a male. I had never used a gun and had only gone hunting once. My stepdad came from a large family with 16 boys and two girls. He had absorbed all he knew from his large family. He couldn't understand why I was a terrible shot and had no hunting sense. I had been a failure at the other male sport of fishing for a long time. He was a big fisherman, and I was a failure. He never put me down, but I could just feel his emotional judgment. I guess being perceptive to the emotions of other was another girlish trait and I usually had a passive girlish response to my perceptions.
I moved to a big city suburb school in West Fargo, ND for about 6 months and then wound up in a North Dakota prairie town of about 1,500 people a few miles north of Lake Sacagawea where I went to high school with kids many of which families knew each other for a couple of generations, making me a real new kid in town. My stepdad became one of the town barbers and was a veteran of WWII so he fit in and created a niche for my family in the community which is what you really need to fit in. I lived the boy lie but even though I went out for football and basketball and wrestling, only in wrestling was I really a participant only because they did not have enough people on the team to fill all the weight classes. I was won 0 lose 14, but most were decisions and not pins. I was 145 and wrestling 154 and 165 weight classes. I lacked the male desire to beat my opponent. My brother was a winner. Now if all my opponents were my brother, then it might have been another story.
I guess the question was, Was I atypical individual or not. College and the Congregational church made me a thinker and school teaching meant that I could not be a wall flower. I lived as a dyke, but I was too effeminate in how I looked at the world to be successful as one or I would have been more successful as a male because of the drive to be masculine which I didn't have. I only succeeded in not being called a sissy even though I was picked on. I was pitiful as a puncher and much better at taking my opponent down and sitting on them. I just stood toe to toe and glared back into my opponent's eyes while clutching my fists until the cavalry came. While my opponent was trying to make me take the first punch, which was incapable of at the time.
Over time, Michelle peeked out of her turtle shell and finally seven years ago moved out into the world full time.
I feel that if I had been more masculine I would have had more female things to play with and wear, but I was so much like a girl of that age, that I just tried to fit in and not rock the boat, so I made do with what I had the courage to buy. When I played with my soldiers I would set them up in competing armies and knock them down with marbles or other things, but I wasn't destructive of them. I thought about throwing firecrackers at them on the Fourth of July but never did. So maybe I did boyish things with a girlish attitude and that is how I coped with being a transsexual female. When I taught school I taught elementary school and was just another female among all the other females, even if that is not now the other women teachers saw me.
But with a final thought it is probably my coping skills and still being that shy apprehensive little girl has kept me away from taking hormones or finding away to have surgery. Though I have no specifically boy clothes, except my shoes because my feet are female size 15 and the fact that I have diabetes 2 and need to take care of my feet so I can keep my feet and not have them amputated like others in my family.
