This question was posed to me a couple weekends ago, and initially I played off the response, saying I mostly got it from observations. The truth is, I’ve always been a girl. There’s nothing to learn. I’ve paid attention to girly things all my life, learning and wanting to try.
When I was growing up, my parents would often tell me that I was supposed to be a girl, and they thought I was going to be a girl. This stems from various feelings they had about the pregnancy, as well as the fact that my birthday was shared by my dad’s mother. When I was born, they even had a name already picked out for me, but only one name: Abigail, a decidedly “girl’s” name. When I popped out with an outie, they quickly assigned me a first a middle name after the first names of each of my grandfather’s. I never liked ANY of these names.i always wanted to change my name, but first I needed to figure out my identity.
I thought attaching to being German would be good. My dad was half German, and my mom had some on her side too. It is definitely my most prominent ethnicity, and so I began learning all I could about the culture and the language. I picked up a book on learning conversational German and I checked out all the cultural books I could find at the library.
Eventually my dad shared with me that I had a distant uncle that was a police officer when Hitler was coming to power, and he showed me a letter from him touring the greatness of the Fuhrer. I lost interest in the topic shortly after that.
The only other identity I was really allowed to have was Christian. Both my parents were quite devout, but my mother is fanatical. She never wore jewelry or makeup. Never changed her hair style and only wore turtlecks, and men’s sweaters or polos. Femininity is sinful by nature. Woman doomed mankind to damnation by sharing the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and her punishment was to be the bearer of the child of man.
She rejected her femininity, and so I was never allowed to express mine. When I tried, I was punished, by timeout or spanking. Like, when I was 8, and I drew fingernails on paper, colored them in, cut them out, and TAPED them to my fingers! I wanted to try having painted nails so badly. I never tried again, because my rear end hurt for so long after from being spanked with a wooden spoon.
Still, despite all of this, like a kid with a Christmas toy catalog in the 90s, I continued to yearn to be feminine. I saw all the makeup that girls put on. I saw the clothes they wore. I saw the way the walked, heard how they talked, how they handled themselves, and I applied mysogony and a variety of phobias to my reactions to it, because I was jealous. In the religious right sector of society, you’re mainly taught how to perform mental gymnastics to maintain your stance, weather you’re right or wrong. That’s because you don’t have to be right in front of other people. It’s the invisible opinion that comes from within one’s own mind that matters most. Ironically, that’s the exact opinion they’re fighting against, because they believe that the little voice in their head is actually real, unlike everyone else’s.
When my partner moved out, and I started to live truly on my own for the first time, I slowly began to allow myself to do everything as it felt natural. I no longer had anyone to impress, or any judgements to avoid. I was alone. Who cared what I wore, how I talked, how I walked? I no longer had any reason to correct myself. And slowly I became more and more comfortable being comfortable. I stopped caring to correct myself. Anyone who would want me to sucks, and those thoughts no longer deserve my recognition.
Stay conscientious of my every move and appearance choice weighed heavily on me to come across as masculine. I had not even realized how engrained in gender most things had become for me. I gave thought to how I opened a water bottle, what kinds of foods I ate in public, how I sat, how I held my chest. I would often compress my chest inward and push my shoulders forward to lessen the silhouette of my natural breasts. Yes, I developed small mammary glands as a teenager, which I discovered in college, when stress made me begin expressing milk. I went to see the doctor, and they did not tell me I was intersex or anything of the nature. They told me I began to experience early onset andropause, which can sometimes occur in males born with some female anatomy.
After that, I completely gave up on being considered a man at any point. I was self-proclaimed androgynous. That must explain all the pain of longer over the years, right? I discovered that due to a freak birth defect, I would never fully be a real man, thereby letting down everyone in my immediate life. And we all know that as good religious servants, we must prioritize everyone else’s needs above our own. And so I lived, watching from the sidelines, and just letting people call me what they wanted. When asked to identify myself, I always made sure to use words like “person” and “they,” although I never asked anyone else to do the same.
Even still, I don’t feel the need to push other people to be uncomfortable. I know what internalized transphobia feels like. When you’re faced with it in a public situation, it can feel like you’re fighting a losing battle against yourself. We just need to remember that phobias can be overcome, as a lot of them should be. It may be a losing battle at first to correct yourself, but it’s a battle you face every time you come face to face with the reality of the situation. And every time you fight, you get stronger. Let’s make a deal: I’ll let you call me what you want, as long as you make an effort to choose your words empathically. 😉
