Hello! My name is Rebecca, and.. just kidding! That’s not my real name. It would’ve been, had I been AFAB, but my real name is Jacob. I’m in my early 20’s and experienced a lower-class upbringing in a suburb of a large Canadian city. I’m a cis white male, which is probably the last person you would want to hear about any sort of LGBT issue from, but please hear me out. This isn’t the story you think it is; this is the story of how I dealt with my own gender doubt, and what came of the aftermath. This may not be the comfiest read but it will be me at my most truthful speaking on a subject I may have never properly addressed in words in my life. I may not even be the same person by the end of writing this. But without further ado, let’s set the scene.
Growing up, my family dynamic was strained to say the least. My dad was struggling hard with depression from the loss of his parents, while my mom was out being the breadwinner of the family. Needless to say, I did not receive a lot of attention from my parents during my early years. I don’t blame my parents for not giving me as much attention as needed, and this isn’t meant for you to pity me, but it’s meant to be used to frame my upbringing. I raised myself in a lot of ways, and my siblings raised me in several others. Because my sister & I were much closer in age, she ended up spending a lot of time with me. We even looked so similar that people thought we were twins! Some of her favourite activities were doing “typical little girl things”, like doing makeup and having stuffed animal tea parties, etc. Now many of these aren’t very fun alone, so she recruited me into helping with tea and occasionally some makeup and nail stuff. We also played pretend with other toys, video games and other things that aren’t as relevant to the topic at hand.
Right before my 9th birthday, my world crumbled. I wouldn’t know the true extent of it at the time, but between my parents divorcing, my brother going off to high school and my sister entering her rebellious teen phase, I became more and more alone. We moved houses, away from all of the friends I’d made during childhood, and I was now multiple floors away from my sister, only being near my brother in our split duplex. I actually preferred my brother to my sister despite the time we spent together because he was “cool” and I wanted to be like him. I wore his clothes, I played his video games, I tried to take after him since I figured he was supposed to be who I’d become in 5 years. You’d think this would be excellent by the way I’m talking it up, and initially I thought so too, but my brother’s job was not to be my father nor my role model. He was a sociable guy entering high school, and wasn’t home very often. He had his own life to live, and I had mine. This exacerbated my loneliness, and this period of time would be the lowest in my life.
During this period, I reflected a lot on who I was. I was still very young, and all I knew was that I like Nintendo and Flash games. The world was a scary place. I knew that above all, I wanted to be true to myself, and being true to myself felt like expressing myself in ways I didn’t have the money nor the agency to do. I asked for the 0 clipper at the barber so I wouldn’t have to deal with having hair, even though I wanted to die it bright blue like my Runescape character. I wanted to wear more colourful clothes. I wanted to wear makeup again like I did those couple times with my sister. Despite the fact that I’d spent all that time with my sister while idolizing my brother, as soon as we could no longer spend that time together, I longed for it. I didn’t understand what was happening to me. I felt as if I was 5 separate people at once, and my body was useless because I couldn’t even use it to express any of them. It didn’t represent me even in its base form anyways. I didn’t know why, but I wanted to be a woman. None of my headmates were women, it didn’t change anything about who I was or what I liked doing, it just felt like I could’ve been myself more if I was a woman. My interests aligned with them more at this point anyways, except for video games, but was that truly something that was only for guys anyways?
I longed for answers, but didn’t know where to turn. Trans discourse on the internet in 2020 isn’t even close to what it looked like in 2014, and was so decentralized it was basically nonexistent in the late 2000’s when it was happening to me. The only media I was even aware of that spoke about being non-cis was the episode of Family Guy where Joe gets a sex change. Needless to say, this journey was entirely personal. It was also very, very difficult. I’m not sure where I would’ve been, if not for my main friend at the time. The vast majority of my friends at school had been women, and she was no exception. I had lied to her about the reasons behind it, but the internal struggle was so difficult I had had severe and calculated suicidal thoughts, since it would’ve been far easier to just.. not decide. Despite everything stated above, I was a guy. This female fire burned so deeply within me, but I still felt incredible gender euphoria when my voice dropped (though I didn’t know it by this name at the time). No individual aspect of who I was felt “female” to me, because many of these aspects just felt.. genderless. They just happened to deviate away from what was contained within the expectation set of the average cis male. Did I want to be female? Did I want to be male? Why did gender have to be so confusing? What did any of it matter? Hundreds, potentially thousands of variations of these questions terrorized my brain at many times. I didn’t know how to express it to anyone, nor did I want to. This was a very personal part of who I was, and I didn’t feel safe enough with anyone (even the aforementioned friend) to share it with them. I didn’t think anyone would truly understand what I was going through. Hell, I didn’t even understand what I was going through. Eventually, I kind of just stopped deciding. I decided I wouldn’t be a boy or a girl because it was too much mental work, and both could wear sweatpants/jeans/t-shirts/hoodies anyways. I’m bisexual anyways, it’s not like my gender had any affect on who I was. If people asked, I would tell them my birth-assigned gender, but given the option I would select “Prefer not to answer”, “Androgynous”, or “Other”. I no longer felt as if I were 5 people anymore, as I had decided that I would simply pick my favourite and do what I could to become them. This is where I settled, around Grade 8.
High school was a very difficult set of years, but surprisingly easy from a gender issue standpoint. I was able to suppress my bodily expression issues throughout this time, as I had to adhere to a very strict dress code containing a unisex uniform and crippling lack of in-person contact due to underdeveloped social skills. I very, very rarely wore non-uniform clothes, preferring to simply wear pajamas (or nothing) all day considering I practically lived in my own basement apartment, only coming up to eat or do the dishes. All of my socialization had been on skype through competitive gaming. My gender had never mattered less, and several people had even confused me for a girl due to my predisposition to use emoticons in my speech, such as “o:”, “xD”, “^_^”, and “:3”. I even took a gender-neutral username. During this time though, I also started dating someone who would become my long-term girlfriend.
My girlfriend changed my life in very interesting ways, as she gave me a very interesting perspective on life. She was similar to me in a lot of ways, obviously one gender if you saw them but with a personality that had traits and preferences typically aligned with what the opposite gender would want. Her friends were predominantly the opposite gender as well. Despite our similarities though, she was cishet. This confused me, and called into question my own ideas of how I should live life, especially because her sexuality made my gender expression a small point of contention between us during the first time I brought it up. As I tend to be a path-of-least-resistance type of person, I decided I would simply ignore it until I needed to mention it. To her I could still be a boy, while to myself I could still be androgynous, but male passing. This was not a very sustainable way to live, yet I found comfort in it. I no longer needed to decide what I was anymore. Besides, I quite liked having a beard, and maybe this was a sign that I’d finally settled on which gender I wanted to be. Discourse had settled into itself by this point, and I could cope with simply identifying with he/they pronouns. Coming out of this relationship, I still felt as if he/they was the truest way I can identify. During recent muscle exercise I felt the first bit of gender euphoria I’d felt in a long time while looking at myself in the mirror, solidifying my feelings of being okay with who I am at this current moment. As of right now, being roughly halfway through college and roughly 5 years removed from high school, this is where I’ve left off.
At this point, I’m still not sure who I am. I long to be the woman my girlfriend was, in her tall and slender beauty despite knowing that my body-type cannot become hers regardless of HRT I undergo, due to differences in our shoulder widths, and the eating habits I support that are on top of these. The female gender image I would aspire towards is so deeply-rooted in a specific body type that is unobtainable for me that transitioning medically would be far less likely to be fruitful than for me to pursue my other path towards gender euphoria: to become a bearded buff guy. I’m aware that these outcomes may seem diametrically opposed, but it all harkens back to the same core tenet that I’ve never truly been able to put into words until right now: my gender is not important. What is important is that I am able to express myself in a way I feel comfortable with. If there had to be a point to this whole writing, it would be that. Thank you for taking the time to read this. I love you, and hope you love yourself too.
P.S.: I haven’t really proof-read this! It might be garbage but I’m okay with it. It took far too much out of me to write it in the first place. I hope it’s articulate enough, most of this was stream of consciousness and the first time I’d written most of it into words. There’s no tl;dr either, so enjoy the ~2k words of gender and life rambling haha.
