No Sharp Edges: Finding My Gender Through Trial And Error
Tags: Gender, Nonbinary, Narrative, Transgender, LGBTQ

No Sharp Edges: Finding My Gender Through Trial And Error Dizzy Sep 3·22 min read

When people ask me how I came to my conclusions about my gender, I’m never really sure how to answer. It wasn’t as simple as the idea that I “always knew” that seems to be the predominant narrative. I haven’t always known, nor have I always been sure of what I did know — I had to discover it, and sometimes I came to incomplete conclusions. It’s been a living process of trial and error spanning over a decade. It’s impossible to explain without first looking at my world through the eyes of a confused, scared child. Let me begin there.

I was an angry kid when I was very young, but I rarely showed it. I felt wrong in ways I didn’t understand, and it was exacerbated when I was pushed to make friends. Boys made no sense to me, and they made me cry often with how rough they were. I fought a lot and got bullied in return. I got along well with girls, who said I was “more gentle” than the other boys, but those opportunities quickly faded around fifth grade, when girls began to separate themselves from boys. Suddenly, my unwillingness to conform to masculinity made me an outcast from both groups. So I was alone from then on, and that made me feel hurt and frustrated, especially when I saw girls around me acting exactly the way I wanted to and being rewarded for it.

I vividly recall one day, Christmas of 2010, when I realized that all my frustrations of the time were tied into my implicit maleness. That was the day when my then-stepsister got the toy I had wanted as a gift — the one I was promptly denied for it being “too girly” for a 13-year-old “young man”. I got to watch her look at it, watch her eyes brighten up as she unboxed it and ran to the other room to play with the forbidden treasure. There are some faces that have seared themselves deep into my memory with hot, painful emotion. My stepsister’s doe-eyed, awestruck smile over that present was the first such face. It is still vivid when I close my eyes, nearly ten years later, with the ghost of the toy’s box hovering just below it. And it still puts weight in my lungs and tears in my eyes with the same intensity as it did the very first time.

I don’t remember the rest of the day. I don’t even remember what the gifts I got were. Everything else has been blacked out by my brain, selectively cropped out of frame, except that one enduring flash. What I do remember, though, was that I didn’t cry in front of the others. I waited until everyone else had gone to sleep. That night was the first time I ever truly besought God in prayer. My request, I thought, was simple: to make me a girl. God did not answer.

As the dreaded puberty began, I drifted into a surreal, otherworldly numbness. I drifted through every day as they all blurred together into a formless mass of time. My body felt nothing, and felt like nothing. Depersonalization had dug its claws into me as a safeguard. My mind opted to shut off all feeling as a nuclear option to free myself from a kind of pain that I could not understand. It was, paradoxically, both insufficient and overzealous. Mysterious mental health troubles began cropping up, and they rapidly spiraled into physical ones. A large patch of my hair fell out, and tension induced backaches debilitated me for weeks. At the same time, my mind filtering out any thoughts of the root cause behind these problems left me powerless to stop them.

Towards the beginning of high school, I found myself gravitating to strange thoughts. I had finally entered puberty, late bloomer that I was, and I realized very quickly that girls were incredibly attractive to me. But the way that I processed this attraction wasn’t quite properly reflected by either the media, or by the other boys around me. To me, stereotypical masculine sexuality felt aggressive and controlling, and I wanted no part of it. I clamped down hard on any feelings of sexual or romantic attraction, often to the point of tears and frustration. Instead, I constantly wondered what it would be like to be a girl in my same situation. It was a burning curiosity that never seemed to go away. At 3 in the morning, on my iPod Touch, I would look up dating advice and sex advice aimed at teen girls, only to suddenly get stricken by feelings of wrongness and close all my tabs in shame. I felt like I was violating some sacred space by observing it through tainted male eyes.

It was the same for media targeted at girls. This was around the time of the origins of the brony subculture, and I found myself watching the show in secret (again at 3 AM) but feeling viscerally disgusted at the thought of ever identifying myself with the brony community. It was a community that set itself apart by being overwhelmingly male in defiance of a show being aimed at women, and I felt horrible engaging with that. I refused to call myself by the brony label, or participate visibly in the community in any way; even when my siblings independently and vocally decided to adopt the label, I never revealed it publicly. I even had to justify my interest to myself, by watching the episodes on a channel with a live commentator to make it feel like I was seeking out his content instead of the show itself. At the same time, the show’s actual content made me feel strange and conflicted inside. The depictions of female friendships were powerful and moving to me, and I wanted one so badly. But I felt like I wasn’t “allowed” to enjoy it, despite everything inside me screaming that I really did. It was for girls. Not me.

This pattern continued for years. Anything masculine was defiantly rejected. Anything feminine had to be pushed down hard, buried as deep as it could go. There wasn’t much left. I stayed up until that golden hour of 3 AM when I could, to consume content aimed at girls without fear and to listen to edgy depression music (Green Day’s American Idiot was a personal favorite). But waking hours were a chore, and not just due to lack of sleep. I had no desire to express myself in any way beyond video games. I buried myself in technological escapism for years. My friend circle languished as a result, being comprised of a small group of other similarly outcast boys. Though we became lifelong friends (and still are), there was always something missing.