I Am A Boy

I feel really good this morning. I finally realized I am a boy.

But Elisha, you have been living as a boy for months.

I have been, but I got to that point from the outside in. I started dressing like a boy and using male pronouns, and decided that felt good, so I was like "huh, guess I'm a boy then." But I was apprehensive about it, always afraid that if I looked deep inside I'd realize I was actually a woman and I was just fooling everybody and I was going to look like an asshole later on.

Today I am a boy from the inside out.

Let me explain what I mean. This morning I was looking at a friend's pictures from "before", from the days when we were both living as girls. (We started transitioning at about the same time.) I just ended up there because of that thing Facebook does where it's like "hey look at these old pictures of your friend that they probably forgot are there!" And then I looked at his boy pictures, and was kind of like "ahh, that's better, that's my friend" even though I knew him as a girl for longer than I've known him as a boy. And I realized it was because he has become himself.

I then went looking through my own pictures and quickly realized I have not become myself yet.

Cue angst, etc. Long story short I end up on my old MySpace, reading through blogs from times when I felt more like a whole person. Last night one of my best friends made a comment that she just wants her friend back, like I used to be (this was a comment about the state of my mental health, not my gender!) and it made me so sad I had to go back and figure out what I used to have, emotionally, that I don't have anymore. Even if that meant looking at the days when I was identifying as a woman, even if it meant having to accept that I might still be a woman deep down.

So after skimming about three years' worth of blogs I realized that I was not reading a woman's blog. Regardless of how I may or may not have chosen to dress during that time in my life, I was not a woman. In fact, the only clue to my gender at all in three years' worth of posts was a "random fact" stating that "I was never into ponies as a child, I failed the girl test I guess." Ha.

And, I don't really know what it was in those posts that made me realize it, but I realized deep down I have always been a boy. But my upbringing caused me to bury that more deeply than maybe even most other trans guys do, because I wasn't just taught that I should be feminine; I was taught that masculinity was something to fear, something associated with mean, scary, stupid people who treat women like dirt. My only good masculine role model was my grandfather, who was my favorite person in the entire world, but he died when I was eight.

Because of my upbringing, I learned to fear the boy inside me. I knew I had a boy inside me when I was very little, but I stuffed him down. But now I know that even when I played Barbies and took ballet lessons, I was a boy.

And when I threw a tantrum in the middle of Kmart because my aunt was forcing me to buy a bra, I was a boy.

And when I played chess with my grandpa, I was a boy.

And when I was trying to become a teacher and I dressed like a woman, but all the little boys instinctively came to me with their booger jokes, I was a boy.

And when I tried to be a beautiful woman for my ex, all the while wishing we could just be buddies and ride four-wheelers together, I was a boy. And when he struggled with fears that he was gay and I was a lesbian, I was a boy.

And today I am a boy. Today I have realized that for all my joking around about being a "fag" and for all my going on about how I can be FTM and still wear nail polish, I'm really not very femme at all. I feel most myself when I'm just wearing black t-shirts and playing video games. Not that I'm gonna be all "oh that's a feminine thing, I can't do that", because fuck that shit. But I need to tell the little boy who's been hiding away inside me since I was five years old that it's okay to come out now. And I need to give him a chance to play in the mud and learn how to use tools and all the stuff I never did as a kid. Forget all my training in womanhood and just be what I am.

And then I can finally become myself.