"In the fight between you and the world, back the world." --Frank Zappa, musician
"It is impossible to hate anyone whose story you know." --H.S. Boylan, author
"Growing up, the one thing that was consistent in my family, and in the families of all my friends, was an interesting form of misogyny. It was the one area in which I was consistently told NO. No, you cannot behave like, look like, or be a girl." --Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw
Sugar And Spice
The quote you are about to read is from the website of a male-to-female transsexual. There's a page on the site that talks about the Teletubbies. Tinky Winky is the purple one, who is known to non-viewers because of the huge stink Rev. Jerry Falwell raised about him possibly being gay. There is no evidence of him being attracted to either sex, but even if he were attracted to men, we could always use the line from Luna: A Novel by Julie Anne Peters: "He isn't gay... because inside, he's a girl." The only G-rated show where anyone has a gay old time is The Flintstones. (Actually, Yogi and Booboo of Yogi Bear sometimes seem like a couple. But that's a subject for another site.)
Observe:
I cannot imagine but that Tinky Winky is the first behaviorally transgendered character ever shown in a children's program designed for very young children.
Tinky Winky fits the classic model of the transgendered, especially the transsexual child. Tinky Winky is very quiet and reserved, but not especially shy. He is very lingustically advanced, and delicate of behavior and manner. He is a bit awkward, as though not entirely comfortable with his body. He has an early fascination with things that are bright and pretty, and associates mostly with females, and with artifacts generally associated with females. He is not otherwise especially effeminate ...just gentle and delicate and reserved.
These are all the standard, recognized qualities and behaviors of children who later turn out to be transgendered or transsexual.
I felt like I was reading a description of me when I was little. When I read that last line, I almost fainted from surprise.
In Thailand, such a boy would have been raised as a girl and taken hormones as a teenager to become a male-to-female transsexual ("kathoey") instead of a man. They make no attempt to hide what they are, because they are treated as women. They don't even have to get surgery if they don't want to. (However, there's a lot of resistance when a "boy" becomes a kathoey, and there's quite a bit of discrimination. My imaginary country Daruny is much better.)
The first time I noticed something wrong was when I was four. I was in the bathroom, using the toilet, when I looked "down there" and had a strong feeling that "that's not supposed to be there." (In fact, I tried to push the offending protrusion back into my body, with no success.) I also vaguely remember asking for "girl things" and learning that such things were forbidden to me on the grounds that I was a boy. After a few such corrections, and a few times being corrected for referring to myself as a girl (others probably thought it was a simple language mistake; I remember it because it was embarrassing), I learned that it was dangerous to be a girl in a boy's body. I didn't have the words to describe it, but somehow I knew that even though I was a boy, I was really a girl inside. I didn't know there were other people like me until I was 12. As a kid, I was really, really scared of breaking the rules. So, I was scared to go against what had been spoken from on high: Thou Shalt Not Play With Girl Toys.
They say what doesn't kill you can only make you stronger, and I learned over time how to use the one thing that has helped me survive all this: the loophole. Dolls not allowed? Get "action figures" instead. Play with them like dolls. Oh, wait, no doll clothes. OK, they can wear the same stuff all the time. It works for cartoon characters. Most of my friends were girls, so it actually didn't matter all that much. I could play with whatever I wanted at their houses; it was OK because I was playing with girls. So I didn't really need girl stuff of my own--which was good, because what you don't have, you can't get in trouble for. I guess possession really is nine-tenths of the law.
You're probably thinking my mom was some kind of Nazi officer. No such thing. My mom is actually very open-minded on the subject; there are pictures of me at age 2 wearing a pink flowered scarf over my head, and pictures of me at the same age carrying a Cabbage Patch doll at the park. In fact, other people criticized her for being too permissive in terms of gender roles and not forcing me to be more masculine; they thought she was going to make me gay. (And, no, she didn't make me a girl inside; enforcing strict codes of masculinity does not prevent someone from being transgendered.) Even at that age, I spoke in a more feminine voice (which still causes people over the phone or in the next room to think I'm a woman), and teachers told my mom to work with me on that because it was interfering with interactions with the boys; my mom pretended to accept, but never followed their suggestion. Perhaps it's because my mom was so supportive that I was fine with things as they were.
It was the people out there who were the problem. If I'd had girl stuff, I would have been bad at hiding it from the kids out there. I've never been a good liar. Being the age I was, I would have been bad at keeping it a secret. Plus, I had other kids over sometimes; I couldn't afford to be found guilty for possession. To top it off, I have Asperger's Syndrome, a neurological disorder that makes learning social skills very difficult. I simply didn't have the social equipment or the self-confidence (thinking you're the only person like you in the whole world does that to people) to simply let my house be an island of girl stuff and put on a male disguise while out in the world, as I do now. You would think either Asperger's Syndrome or being a girl in a boy's body would be bad enough by itself. I had the misfortune to be stuck with both. Needless to say, I got teased a lot.
"When the Star-belly children went out to play ball, could a Plain-belly get in the game? Not at all."
I used to say things that gave me away without even knowing it. I was 5 when The Little Mermaid came out. If you're my age or older, you remember the huge craze that existed. Among boys, however, it was a mortal sin to admit to liking it. (It still is; I've worked with kids in recent years, and things haven't improved.) Not only did I admit to liking it, I did not bother to hide my enthusiasm when I said I loved it. I even used to pretend to be Ariel and sing like she did; I always identified with the women in Disney movies. (Yes, even during the romance scenes!) The girls were just fine with all this; they even liked this about me. But the boys... well, like most girls, I learned at a young age to be afraid of boys.
This is Ariel, the star of The Little Mermaid.
As I learned while researching for this site, little girls who are physically male especially love mermaids. According to the 20/20 special on transgender children:
Jazz's bedroom is filled with things one would find in a typical girl's room: dresses in the closet, pink and purple sheets, and a bed overflowing with stuffed animals. There are also mermaids -- lots and lots of mermaids.
Asked why she liked mermaids so much, Jazz said, "Because they're different than us." She added, "They have tails."
"All of the male to female younger transgender children are obsessed with mermaids," said Renee [Jazz's mother]. "It's because of the ambiguous genitalia. There's nothing below the waist but a tail. And how appealing is that for somebody who doesn't like what's down there?" [emphasis added]
Amazing, isn't it?
I identified much more closely with girls than with boys from a very young age. Whenever I played a board game where the playing pieces looked like kids (such as Chutes & Ladders) or a video game where you can choose your character, I almost always chose to be the girl. My mom says the only thing that made her wonder if I wanted to be a girl was the fact that I would always choose to be the princess when I played Super Mario Bros. 2.
These are the four characters of the game Super Mario Bros. 2, in all their positions. From top to bottom, they are: Toad, Luigi, Princess Toadstool, and Mario.
I insisted that it was because she could float in the air for a few seconds (which no other character could do). This, of course, was an outright lie. But I knew that it was dangerous to have any thoughts of being a girl or wanting to be one. I was scared of what might happen to me if anyone found out.
I didn't understand the concept of "Gender Identity Disorder," but I knew that a person could be locked away if others thought they were crazy--and I knew they would think I was crazy, as if I'd said I thought I was a dog. Given what happened to Aurora Lipscomb, I think my fears were justified, especially since things were even worse back in 1989. What I didn't tell anyone, I couldn't get in trouble for.
When I was 5, going on 6, I saw a book advertised called "How to Be a Pregnant Father." I took the title literally and was really excited. I didn't tell anyone, but I thought, "When the time comes, I'm going to buy that book and then be pregnant with my kids." You can imagine how disappointed I was when I learned it was a book for husbands of pregnant women!
I remember when an older boy across the street taught me a password for the game Metroid. If you're not familiar with it, it's a game where you play a space hunter named Samus Aran who has to find items and shoot aliens. Throughout the game, Samus is wearing a space suit (because of this, I thought she was a robot).
Here's Samus in her spacesuit. Most people think she's a man or a robot.
At the end of the game, you learn that the hero is a woman. And if you use the password ("JUSTIN BAILEY"), you learn this, because the password gives her all kinds of items, and she goes without her space suit. This alone made me absolutely love the game. I played it using the password all the time, not caring about the items I had or even whether I got anywhere (though I did win once, with help). You could practically hear some subconscious part of my brain thinking, "She's a girl, just like me!"
This is Samus without her spacesuit. I don't know why she has green hair when you use the password and brown hair when you win the game.
Similarly, a lot of the shows I enjoyed on TV were girls' shows. I didn't even know that they were designed for girls. I just knew I liked them. My Little Pony, Clarissa Explains It All, Strawberry Shortcake, The Secret World of Alex Mack... I didn't like the boys' shows all that much, unless they were related to a video game or were otherwise interesting. I enjoyed Heathcliff because it was about a kid who loved his cat (Heathcliff was the cat's name). I had a dog I really loved, so I could identify with this kid. However, nearly all the characters on the show were boys, with one token girl. This made the show very foreign to me. For example, the boys would get upset about being beaten by girls in any kind of competition. I didn't understand why it mattered; what mattered to me was that they had lost a competition, not that they had lost it to a girl. But I've learned since that anyone who identified with boys would have fully understood. Same with Dennis the Menace. I loved watching him get into trouble; he had the guts to do all kinds of things I would have been scared to death to do. But he hated girls and would do anything to avoid them. I didn't understand this either. I still don't understand why anyone would hate girls. You can imagine all the misunderstandings I had with boys I played with. Unfortunately, the few kids around my age in the neighborhood were all boys.
By the way, most people tolerate boys and girls hating each other because they believe it's a natural stage of development. But imagine how parents would react if their children hated blacks (if your country has no anti-black racism, make the appropriate substitution), Jews (or any other religious minority), or foreigners. Would that be accepted? I don't think so. Not unless you hate them yourself.
In spite of everything, I was fine with having a boy's body and being seen as a boy. I could still play with girls and watch girls' cartoons. But there were some issues even then. I had more thoughts that started with "If I were a girl..." than I imagine most boys that age have. Sometimes, when no one was looking, I pretended to have magically turned into a girl. My favorite way of doing this was to pretend that I stepped on a magical blue tile that would transport me to the Dark World, a nearly-identical parallel world where everyone turned into whatever was in their heart, just like in The Legend of Zelda III: A Link to the Past. In the game, Link (the hero) turned into a rabbit; this is supposed to give the player an idea of his personality. When I played Dark World, I imagined that I turned into a girl. (Before I got that game, I'd been using a Calvin-and-Hobbes-style transmogrifier.)
My kingdom for one of these!
I didn't turn into just any girl. I had a specific image of who I had become. Long straight blond hair, big blue eyes, and wearing the same blue dress as Alice in Wonderland. And I never changed age, just physical appearance. I always felt a little bit disappointed when I had to stop playing, return to the Light World (our world) using the Magic Mirror, and turn back into a boy.
This is kind of how I pictured myself when I used to do this.
Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter
"Go directly to Hell. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200."
All things must come to an end, and the time when I got to play with girls was no exception. Somewhere around the age of 8 or 9, kids start caring a LOT more about differences. Boys and girls start to segregate themselves from each other more strictly. (Ironically, this was at the same time when we were learning all about how the races used to be segregated by law in the South; I remember wondering how this was any better.) Girls couldn't play with me because of custom; boys didn't really like me. To make matters worse, the teasing I had already been enduring since preschool was getting worse and worse. So, I was all alone. I had to play with anyone who was willing to play with me. I tried to become more of a boy so they would like me, but it didn't work very well. Imagine if a genetic girl were expected to be more like a boy. She would have considerable trouble unlearning her culture and trying to learn a new one. People would feel sorry for her for being forced to change who she is. Well, that was my exact problem, except no one would have understood what my problem was.
I saw that boys and girls could play together if they were boyfriend and girlfriend. This probably greatly influenced the timing of my first crush; it was less than a month after my ninth birthday. To make a long story short, I tried too hard to get her to be my girlfriend, and she didn't like me because of that. Later attempts to find a girlfriend weren't much more successful. Even if one liked me back, I was so unpopular that it was social suicide to be seen with me; no relationship I ever got into lasted very long.
Love: Always in plain sight, just out of reach.
My only real solace was in books. Books about geography, books about math and science, books of interesting but useless facts, and books about kids. Some of those books were about kids being made fun of, but others were just about girls who had normal lives. Almost all my books were both for and starring girls. It was the closest I could come to being a girl, or to being with girls.
Over the years, everyone liked me less; I got lonelier and more at the mercy of the few who were willing to play with me; I became more and more desperate in my attempts to find a girlfriend, or at least a girl I could play with without violating the social rules; at the same time, I retreated more and more into my solitary pursuits; I tried harder and harder to be a boy, but the disguise was almost transparent. In short, life was hell. Puberty just made things even worse. My body was looking more and more like the man's body I have today. Imagine the nightmare that must be for any girl, even if she is in a boy's body. I felt like I was gradually changing from human to Neanderthal. Even now, this body feels like a Neanderthal body, all hairy and top-heavy and everything.
Fortunately, I made a friend when I was 12. Let's call him Kevin. We were in the sixth grade, our first year of middle school. Our classes were right next to each other, so we ate lunch at the same picnic table. We learned that we had a common interest in chess and Nintendo games. So, we got to know each other over these, and then discovered we had more interests in common. In this way, we became best friends.
Kevin and I had our differences. I was more educated than he was; he was socially smarter than me, but not much. He was a real boy all the way through, not a girl in a boy's body like me. So there were times when we misunderstood each other. From this, I could see that he wanted a friend who was a boy inside and out like him. So I really, really tried to be a boy for him. I've since learned that trying to become what someone important to you wants you to be is a stereotypically feminine thing to do. (There's an interesting paradox.) But, of course, I never quite got the hang of it. I tried learning to be a boy by copying what he did, but I never knew when to quit, and sometimes I overdid things like teasing his sister and telling dirty jokes. I once read about a French visitor to the United States whose host had to stop him from putting ketchup on pancakes; his response was, "Don't Americans put ketchup on everything?" Similarly, I thought guys made dirty jokes about everything; you can imagine the trouble I got myself into. I also spoke about my feelings too much; he wasn't as into that as I was, and he often didn't understand the feelings I was expressing or why I needed to talk about them. Still, we had lots of fun with Dungeons & Dragons, playing pretending games in the woods, and playing Nintendo games.
The feelings of being a girl never went away. I began to see couples in real life or the movies and want to be the girl. I fantasized about girls, but I would also fantasize about being a girl in the arms of a big, strong guy who would want nothing more than to be with me--my teenage version of Dark World.
I wondered if this meant I was gay, but I justified it by saying it wasn't a gay thing to do because I always pictured myself as a girl in these fantasies. I couldn't afford to be gay. I was different enough as it was. Even in liberal areas, gay teenagers get beaten up so badly they have to go to the hospital. (As it was, other kids seemed to think I was gay.) Besides, I wanted to have kids someday. So I didn't allow myself to even consider being attracted to any boy. I relaxed on this as I got older. (However, now that I've become a strict Catholic, I try not to commit adultery in my heart with anyone regardless of gender.)
I also thought a lot about what it must be like to be a girl and how my life would be if only I had been born with that second X chromosome, instead of the Y chromosome that has given me so much trouble. I heard a joke involving a sex change and became really excited that such a thing was possible, only to become crushed when I learned what it really is (see the warning page). A character in a movie Kevin and I watched asked her father why anyone would have a sex change; the answer was, "Have you ever heard of anyone who felt like a woman in a man's body?" I realized that I knew exactly what that was like. But I didn't want to be like "those people," any more than I wanted to be gay. I was sure I'd grow out of it someday.
I was trying really hard to get a girlfriend, because not only did I want a girl I could have as a friend, but I was also starting to be curious about what romance and sex were like, and I hoped that maybe being in a relationship with a girl would make me normal. I put myself through such agony for nothing; my life would have been so much easier then if I hadn't. It was becoming like a drug; by the time I turned 13, I had lost the ability to just be friends with a girl and wouldn't regain this ability for a few years. In spite of all this effort, I didn't even get my first kiss until I was 22. As I'll explain later, I've now seen enough to know that it's not something to get so worked up over.
Then Kevin and I started high school, and he made some new friends, none of whom liked me very much. I'm sure they put lots of pressure on him to get rid of me, so he stopped being my friend, just like that. To make a long story short, the rest of high school was absolute torture, with the occasional happy moment. Every day, when I woke up, I knew I had nothing to look forward to except yet another day of being tortured by other kids. This wasn't Game Over. This was, "Go to Hell. Go directly to Hell. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200."
For more, see The Later Years.
