Hi, hello, hi. So today, I wanted to make one of those draw my life videos in transition edition. I'd like to focus on my experience growing up trends. So I really wanted to make this into an animation, but I have no idea how to do that yet. I mean, I know how I understand the concept of animating, but I'm just not quite sure of what program I should be using yet, both in terms of time efficiency and quality of product. So anyway, in the meantime, these illustrated stories will be presented to you in the form of drawing time lapses, kind of. So before we get into this, I just want to give a quick trigger warning for anatomy, all that good stuff, talking about being trans, the usual. All right, so let's get into this. So I grew up in a house with my mom, my dad, and my older brother. I'm the youngest of the two, being two years younger than my brother, and when I was born, I was a female. Or rather, based on my anatomy, I was presumed to be female. And thus, I grew up as a girl. So I was my older brother's little sister, my mom and father's daughter, you get the point. Based on my body and the way that the world perceived me, I thought that I just had no choice but to be female. I remember feeling like someone had made a mistake somewhere. Like, I was put into the wrong sorting pile when the store was out delivering babies. Here's a funny story. This one time, when I was like about three or four maybe, I walked into my mom in the shower so that I could use the bathroom because, you know, mom's don't get any privacy in my bed, so I'm home. I asked her, you know, hey, when I grow up, am I gonna have boobs too? And, you know, she laughed and she was like, yeah, you will. Probably, you know, expect me to be like excited. But instead, I immediately broke down in tears. I was inconsolable and thought of my body going through female puberty even before I understood what that was or that meant was unbearable to me. See, the thing is, when you're a kid, aside from your haircut and the clothes that you wear, boys and girls kinda look exactly the same. Our voices are high, our chests are flat, and it's really just like the way in which you present yourself to the world, less people read you as either male or female. I remember when I was a kid trying to console myself and just like, I guess, reason with my body, sugar warning anatomy. I remember thinking that my parts down there were just, you know, shrunken boy parts. I thought that the female clitoris was just a tiny version of a penis. I just, you know, I thought that I had a shrunken penis and that that, you know, good enough. That thought made me really excited. So I taught myself how to be standing up after I decided that my parts were actually just tiny boy parts. And, you know, I say standing up with like implied quotation marks because I was basically just like facing the toilet and squatting, but like, you know, good enough, it made me happy into the point where I went to grade school and had to use like, you know, separate gendered public bathrooms. And I didn't want to face the toilet because then I was like, oh, what is that child doing in there facing the toilet? Why are you straddling the toilet, please stop. Anyway, fast forward a bit and puberty hit. And I was, as the youth say, an early bloomer. I hit puberty and got my menstrual cycle in fifth grade. What a rip off. But my time as a teenager was just, I don't know, overall confusing. I think that most people just thought I was really gay. Now, I was confused as hell. Z here's the thing, growing up, I was pretty much a sexual, which means I didn't feel any sexual attraction toward anyone regardless of gender. So I remember being like, what the hell? Where is this coming from? Meanwhile, I get it now. It's probably because I presented so masculinally and my whole like masculine air was interpreted as just like supergainous. But anyway, I just kept getting asked periodically throughout my life if I was gay, to which I would reply, no, I don't think so. Until one day, I became friends with this one girl. This girl was a singer at my dad's school. I used to go to my dad's school to participate in the orchestra program after my school ended. Something worth noting here is that my dad's school was an all-girl school. And not only that, but it was a Catholic all-girl school. And that means it was literally run by nuns, nuns everywhere. And my dad, my dad wasn't a nun. So I'm in the band with maybe like 20 something other teenage girls. And I get close to a few of them, but that one girl, that one singer, I became best friends with her. Plot twist though. I did not date or have any romantic feelings for this girl. No, instead I had romantic feelings for her sister. Yeah, I was that friend. Anyway, that girl, her sister, was the first girl I ever fell in love with. Maybe I'll make a different story about that one, make like a first love story, but anyway, the point of this being, look, I'm gay after all. The world breathes a sigh of relief and all makes sense again. This is why I am the way I am because I'm gay. I didn't realize at the time that what I was experiencing was dysphoria, gender dysphoria, to be specific. But the entire time I was dating that ex-girlfriend, I just remember always saying, you know, I don't really feel gay. I feel like I'm your boyfriend. And like, I never really dug deeper than that. I didn't have the words to explain more than that. That was just like how I felt. At some point in my life, I learned what transgender was. I remember seeing that one episode of Oprah with the pregnant man. And I remember the idea of being trans was just such an impossibility in my mind that I thought this person must be a perfect flower. Let me explain that a bit. Back in the day, I didn't have the language for intersex. We didn't learn that in school. However, we did learn about plant biology. In plant biology, I learned that there's this term called a perfect flower that was used to refer to a flower that has both female and male reproductive parts. So yeah, my teenage self thought that this guy was just a perfect flower person and that he was just pregnant because, you know, he has both bits like the flowers. Anyway. Turns out he's trans, a sign female at birth, still has his uterus. That's why he was able to get pregnant. I think his name is like Thomas Beatty, by the way. I don't know, you could probably look that up. Anyway, I also knew that sex change was a thing, but the only context in which I learned about a sex change was in like traveling circus kind of context. Like it was something that I knew existed and it's not that I consciously knew or associated it with bad things, but a sex change was only ever mentioned or represented to me within the same context as like a two-headed snake or like that first sheep to ever be cloned named Dolly. It's something that didn't seem real in my own world. And it stayed like that for a long time. Here's the thing. I didn't know that it was trans growing up. I only figured that out in adulthood. So in terms of what it was like growing up trans, the short answer is just confusing. It was just a lot of things that only make sense in hindsight. I guess that means I have to make a part two about how I actually knew I was trans, what it was like coming out, all that stuff. Hopefully you enjoyed the format of this video. I really enjoyed it. Let me know what you think in the comments section down below. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you have a great day and a great week. And you take care of yourselves. All right, love you. Bye.