A Boy, Mistaken
By: Ethan Johnstone
Tags: Short Story, Life, Gender, Transgender, LGBTQ

I remember the anxious excitement I felt the day the women in my family gave me a makeover. They curled my short hair and sprayed it with hairspray so it would stand up in a feminine style. They painted my face with concealer and foundation, mascara and eye-shadow. They put blush on my cheeks to turn them rosy pink, and I put on the most feminine outfit I had. It was some sort of holiday and we were going to a nice restaurant. This time I didn’t want to cause a scene.

I was 10 years old, and I was so tired of being “mistaken” for a boy whenever I was out in public with my family. Every time it happened I wanted to melt into the background and disappear. I felt ashamed and embarrassed. I felt my family’s embarrassment. They did the best they could with a female-assigned, gender-nonconforming child in a society that really likes its gender roles.

These “mistakes” were always followed by some sort of pardoning comment like, “This is our daughter, she just has short hair,” or “Oh, no, her hat is just covering her pretty face.” The surprised and flustered strangers would usually stumble over themselves trying to explain away their mistake. Sometimes they would attempt this by pointing to some aspect about me that justified their mistake; my hair was too short for a girl, the shirt I was wearing was baggy, I had on a backwards baseball hat. Or, self-reproachfully, they would blame their eyesight or their age for the mishap.

What I wished would happen, looking back on it, was that we would all just roll with it. I would be called “he” and “him” by random strangers and my parents would be told they had a handsome son. And that would be that.

What happened instead were swelling levels of shame following every one of these episodes.

Something must be wrong with me, I thought. So much embarrassment and anxiety isn’t normal for a kid to experience every time they went out in public, right? I should do something to fix me.

In my 10 year old brain the problem was my appearance, so even though I liked how I looked and I truly felt like me by presenting this way, it needed to change. I needed to change. The day of the makeover I asked my aunts to make me look more feminine. I sat down in the chair and immediately became anxious. They were altering me and I had asked for it. The more and more my hair and face changed, the more and more my family “Ooooh-ed” and “Aaaah-ed.”

Ok, I thought, I’m doing this girl thing right. I started to get nervous-excited. But something was churning inside of me. Something that didn’t know how to get out was screaming to be set free.

When I was all made up, I felt awkward, uncomfortable, and incredibly self-conscious. In my memories from childhood, the intensity of these emotions was never more significant than in this moment. But I smiled — probably the biggest smile I could manage because everyone was looking at me with such delight. Inside, my nerves were going crazy. I felt like I might literally jump out of my skin. I definitely wanted to come out of these clothes and makeup and put my hat back on. Walking down the steps out of the front door someone took my picture, and I gave the best goofy face I could muster. I don’t think, in that moment, I could just be — just smile for the camera. My defense was to create humor and take the attention off the way I looked.

After going out to lunch and successfully being read as a girl the entire day, everyone was so proud of me. Honestly, I felt a degree of relief too. This was one time I didn’t have to emotionally prepare for embarrassment and shame. The only cost was that I had to change, what felt like, everything about me.