I am five years old.
I draw hearts on everything. I draw hearts over the I’s in my notebooks, I draw hearts in invisible ink on my skin, and when we go to the paint your own pottery place, I paint four nested hearts.
I love pink even though I’ve already learned to tell everyone green is my favorite color, I love the Nancy Drew books I’ve just started to read, I love skating, I HATE skulls on clothing, and I only play with girls.
No one tells me there’s anything wrong with this, but they do tell me I’m a boy and boys behave differently, so one day I see a boy in my class play-kiss his “girlfriend” and I kiss my friend’s shoulder and she hates it and I hate it and it feels so wrong it turns me off of sexuality for the next 15 years. For a while I think this is because I’m not into girls, but it turns out that I definitely am. I’m just not a boy.
I am seven years old.
I tell my parents I wish the boys’ section had prettier clothes, and I tell them I don’t want my hair cut, but they don’t get the hint. I don’t know what to say, because to me “I’m a girl” still means what my parents told me it meant, so I don’t give them the only words they might have understood.
Instead I stand in front of a mirror and cover my crotch and pretend there’s nothing there (nothing because I’m seven and I have no idea what a vagina looks like), and if I squint hard enough I can almost make myself believe I’m pretty.
I am ten years old.
My school puts on a production of Robin Hood. We each write down our role preferences and I have Maid Marian and her lady in waiting as my one and two. I get Robin. I’m supposed to be happy, and I guess I mostly am. I’m old enough to know that Marian was a pipe dream anyway.
I am thirteen years old.
Everyone tells me that puberty is awkward and scary and awful, so when my skin starts getting rough and hairy and my voice deepens and my chest seems to cave inward rather than growing, I assume that everyone else is equally uncomfortable and the discomfort will resolve in a couple of years.
I am fifteen years old.
Spoiler. It doesn’t.
At this point, my adolescence is pretty typical if, like me, you’re willing to look past the body thing. I go through a photography phase, I stay on Skype until 3am talking about Pink and Daughter and Avril Lavigne with my best friends, and I read paranormal romance books like they’re going out of style, which looking back on it they definitely were.
I am eighteen years old.
I have always made faster friends with girls than boys, but that doesn’t matter during roommate assignments. I’m with all guys, of course, and it sucks (story for later), and I have begun to toy with the idea of coming out. I tell my friends to stop calling me handsome or masculine. I let my hair grow long, I start wearing the highest heels and deepest v-necks the men’s section will allow, and I feel my heart swell every time someone addresses me as “ma’am.” I fall in love with the fashion sense of a person I think of as Andrej Pejic, and I think I could maybe love my male body if I could just look like “him”, and then I discover that she has recently come out as a trans woman named Andreja. For the first time, I think of trans women as something other than the crude caricatures I’ve seen in movies, and I feel like I’ve finally found the words to express myself to my parents. Then my sister comes out.
I am twenty two years old.
My sister is comfortable in her new social identity. I am still uncomfortable in mine, so, hesitantly, I dress for the first time how I would if there were no constraints on my femininity whatsoever. I look in the mirror and I break down crying, crying out of pity for the girl who wore boys’ clothes and avoided her reflection, crying out of joy for the girl who at twenty-two finally recognized her own appearance, and crying out of excitement for the woman that girl might one day allow herself to be.