I can only imagine what it’s like to be in the delivery room as some new little bundle of joy is born. There, after months of carrying around some sort of parasitic bowling ball, and after the agonizing pain of passing said bowling ball, I assume the doctor catches the baby, makes sure it has nothing immediately wrong with it and goes, “Congratulations! You have a healthy new baby girl!” Except half the time I’m sure they say boy. It’s an odd thing when you think about it, that the first impression you ever make on anyone is by flashing them your genitals and then an entire room of people sighing understandingly and making a whole series of immediate assumptions about you based on this and only this.

“Oh, she’s going to be such a little princess! Decked all in pink and frills!”

Or perhaps

“Oh! He’s going to be such a lady killer! Look at him! Such strength in those tiny fists! I bet you he’s going to love playing baseball.”

It’s like a job interview you never knew you were going into, one which the only way you can respond to anyone asking questions is to mercilessly scream and cry. Welcome into the world!

I was born to a mother who very much wanted a daughter. You see, she already had a son, and she claimed she knew when she was pregnant that I was a girl without needing any sonographic evidence. So when she finally got to see me for the first time she was both not surprised and completely overjoyed. She’d achieved the perfect little family.

If only life were that simple! She had no idea what she was in for as I started to grow, to see the world, to express myself, and to constantly question why. This is normally a phase reserved for toddlerhood but unfortunately for my dear mother I’m in my thirties now and I still haven’t stopped asking. And that’s really what this book is about. It’s about my relationship with gender, my society’s relationship with gender, history’s relationship with gender, and above all that big looming question that never quite gets answered, “BUT WHY?”

This has probably raised a few eyebrows already. Who cares why?! Just accept your role as the female you are, sit down, shut up, and deal, right? Yeah, that was never my style. I was a socially phobic, painfully awkward child, but my mind burned with intensity and I knew damn well who I was and what I wanted. I wanted to play in the mud, catch frogs and snakes with my bare hands, build a Lego utopia, harass every bug and insect I could find, race my matchboxes, and abhor the color pink. What is up with pink anyway? It’s like red that didn’t quite make it.

My mother tried for years to get me to play with dolls. By the end her attempts seemed sadly desperate. To her chagrin the only dolls I really played with were a rubber Hulk Hogan “action figure” I’d been gifted by someone who looked suspiciously like a beer swilling, far less cut version of the famous wrestler, and the Barbie dolls. You’d think she’d be happy with my interest in the Barbie dolls but she showed no such appreciation as I wound elastic around their itty bitty plastic waists and strung them from the ceiling. Who wants to sit around waiting for Ken to grow some balls when you could be bungee jumping? My thoughts exactly. And just like the boys’ action figures and toy soldiers my Barbies had seen it all and bore the scars, melted feet, missing limbs, missing heads, broken bendable knees, dog chew marks, and one was even preemptively mummified with papier-mâché. Seeing my often limbless Barbies hanging from the rafters didn’t have as much shock value as I had hoped. She sighed and stopped trying to give me dolls.

She did however keep insisting I act ladylike and continued to offer me an assortment of things I had no interest in. The dresses were probably the worst. When I was small, and unable to voice my malcontent, she shoved me into pink frilly little ensembles that made me look fucking adorable, like a blonde Shirley Temple, with light golden locks tussled over my wee shoulders, completing the whole look with a set of painfully uncomfortable shiny black Easter shoes. The older I got the less dresses I wore until about second grade when she insisted I wanted to wear a little black skirt and a white blouse with giant pink flowers for my first day of school. I did not. But I found myself going in it anyway. That was the last time I remember wearing a dress to school. And that is almost the last time I remember wearing floral. My mother loved floral blouses, not the elegant kind mind you, but the sort of terrifyingly busy kind that looks rather like the wallpaper an over enthusiastic Victorian grandmother may have in her parlor. To me the colors were just godawful, the patterns made them worse, the flowers always looked like they’d been barfed up by a cat. I loved my mother dearly but she simply had no taste in fashion, especially when dressing me. Lucky for me we were very poor and I wore a lot of pass downs, pass downs that came from my brother or his somewhat younger male friend. I fucking loved those! My favorite was a navy blue sweatshirt with a rocket blasting across the chest. These ended in third grade. At the time I didn’t understand why. We were still poor, could still use a pass down here and there, but by this time it was becoming socially inappropriate to masquerade as a boy. So passed some of the happiest moments of my life.

That was a shame because I was rather enjoying my life as a pseudo-boy. The adults called me a tomboy. They said I’d grow out of it. I didn’t say anything but I knew damn well this wasn’t a phase. Wearing moccasins to school was a phase, reading nothing but Green Eggs and Ham was a phase, answering every question with, “Yes, no, maybe, perhaps” was a phase. My overall personality was not! My friends in those glorious pre-pubescent days were almost all boys. They didn’t care as much about me being a girl as the adults did. We wrestled and punched each other. We caught grasshoppers when we were supposed to be playing soccer, we went on poorly plotted out expeditions into the woods. When one of us hurt another’s feelings it could be settled with a good punch, perhaps a sharp yelp from our foe that day, and then everyone was cool with each other again. The girls though… they would get mad at some insignificant thing you didn’t even know you did and hold a grudge for years, slowly tormenting you whenever they remembered. And what was up with all the crying?! And whining?! And manipulation?! And the social circles! They all divided up into little cliques. The boys were simpler and I appreciated that. 

I spent many an afternoon daydreaming about being sent to a Victorian British boy’s boarding school. I wanted to learn Latin and poetry, and experience life beyond my tiny bubbled existence. I wanted to speak foreign languages and go on adventures. Eventually I would be the world’s most famous paleontologist, I’d tell myself, cruising through deserts across the world in search of amazing long dead beasts. Of course these were the days before I knew about nasty little things like hazing and leaving your children in the care of strangers for months at a stretch so you could go off on adult vacations with your emotionally vacant husband. And I suppose this was before I knew about colonialism and how rich people’s kids had a better chance at a fancy education than a pauper like myself. I also never really thought about all those boarding schools being inherently masculine. Where were all the girls? Oh yes, off making doylies and not voting. Hmmm. Life was cruel but so was my sense of humor.   

They say gifted children are more likely to like the bad guys in their favorite TV shows and movies, though there’s a happy little side note, “but they know damn well not to voice this opinion in those tender years. The look of disapproval they’d get for doing so is never worth it.” But it’s true. I was one of those kids. When the Lion King came out I decided without hesitation the most interesting character was Scar. I had surprisingly little empathy for that hapless little cub they had in the center of the story, clawing the edge of a cliff trying not to get killed by a stampede of wildebeest. It wasn’t that I didn’t care, per se, I wasn’t a psychopath, I just thought they should give Scar a chance. I mean he was forming an alliance with hyenas. That’s fucking genius. That’s how you conquer empires by uniting enemies. It made Mufasa’s goody two-shoe life seem all the duller. And the cubs? I felt they were overrated. When I was even younger my other favorite Disney movie was the Little Mermaid. I’m told a lot of gender dysphoric kids love The Little Mermaid, maybe because merpeople have fish tails that are seriously sexually ambiguous. I don’t think that was my reasoning. I think I just liked Ursela the sea witch. How could I not adore a giant octopus woman who could cast spells and had eel familiars? That seemed pretty cool to me. I had no idea that Ursela was drawn in a long tradition of gay nemeses. With cropped hair and a brassy voice, she was probably based on some butch lesbian tending bar somewhere. This was all beyond me. I didn’t grow up with any gays or lesbians within my little secluded small town existence. I’m not saying they weren’t around but if they were they were so far in the closet they were probably talking to the Jesus lion hiding back there.

It’s hard to say what I was thinking or doing or feeling during those critical years but I do know I was becoming more aware of society’s expectations of me. I wasn’t thrilled with wearing girl clothes all the time but a tiny glimmer of hope came to me one day while my mother and I were out visiting a family friend. I got soaked somehow and needed a change of clothes but all she had to give me were her son’s old Underoos. They had Alf on them, some sort of weird muppety creature that was on the TV before I was old enough to pay attention, and a red trim. This would be the next phase I refused to grow out of. They were amazing! They actually fit my frame and gave me decent coverage, unlike the girls underwear that were lacy, scratchy, and always ended up cutting into my thighs and wedging themselves where the sun doesn’t shine. I was never going to take my precious new pair of briefs off. NEVER! I campaigned for so long to keep them my mother eventually relented and bought me a fresh package of plain white boy’s briefs. She did so hoping they’d be boring enough for me to lose interest. On the contrary I balled all my girl underwear up and refused to ever touch them again. My mother continued to buy me these glorious tighty whities again hoping I’d grow out of it. I did not. Eventually puberty hit. She would occasionally go to the store and buy girls underwear and leave them in my room like they’d be enticing or hoping that I’d cave to the embarrassment of getting teased, which I was for years for this precocious preference. I didn’t stop. My tiny rebellion made me feel alive. Essentially I’d just found a way to cross-dress without offending society. I accepted I could no longer do so openly and just took my unusual interests to a quieter and more respectful tone.

Somewhere around this time I took a school field trip to the local historical society. There I learned of a local woman who had donned a Union uniform and fought aside her husband during the Civil War. She served until the very end and was not discovered to be a woman during this entire time. My eyes grew wide. YOU CAN DO THAT? You can just dress like a dude, change your name, saunter off to where no one knows you, and be a guy?! I could not wrap my head around the fact every historical woman didn’t do that. It seemed like such a better life! To be suddenly given the right to own property, vote, and go on harrowing adventures, seemed like a no brainer to me. Lost in this story was the fact this woman’s motivations probably had far less to do with a deep seated desire to pose as a man than it did her need to be with her husband when he was off doing something that could easily kill him. Still over the years I’d hear whispers and rumblings about other women who maybe were a little more on that side of reality. I read about female babies being secretly raised as boys by their mothers to give them better opportunities in life. I even came across several swashbuckling pirates who were women disguised as men. In fact the more I looked into it the farther this tradition ran, all the way back into antiquity. So began my journey into understanding gender and society.

Thank you for reading this chapter of my up-and-coming book Androgynously Yours which I am currently in the process of writing. If you enjoyed it feel free to leave a comment below! Encouragement is always welcome!