On Not Being a Boy

We get to choose a lot of things about ourselves: our haircut, the clothes we wear, the coffee we drink, the food we eat; indeed, we have a huge amount of choice over many aspects of our lives except the facts about us that are chosen for us before we are able to make those choices. When we are born we are given a name, and a gender. Both of these are provided to us without any input from ourselves, whatsoever. We have them imposed on us. This for most of us I would imagine does not feel like that much of an imposition - it is just a fact that our parents choose our names and our biology determines our gender. The vast majority of people will live and die not once feeling the least bit inconvenienced by the name and gender that was picked for them at birth. They have a penis, the parents assumed they were a boy, gave them the name John, or Matthew, and that was that - off you go into the world. What happens however - when those choices were incorrect? What happens when John grows older and finds that they are not a John at all, but a Mark, or a Luke, or - even more scandalously, a Mary?

In many ways, it is very difficult to choose to be who you want to be. It is harder to make people understand who you are. Growing up I always felt like I didn’t fit snugly into the hole that had been assigned for me. I remember chasing boys around the playground much more than I chased girls. I struggled making friends with the pubescent boys in school with pictures of Britney Spears on their walls. It was a world I couldn’t understand - and it incubated a deep and lasting alienation in me that has lasted the rest of my life. It feels like the assumptions the world makes about how young boys should be are profoundly and incalculably harmful.

I was never what you would call the athletic type and I was never particularly interested in sports or cars or things that go very very fast and make loud noises - but I didn’t fit especially well into with the other type of boy - the shy or nerdy or introverted boys into Doctor Who and Star Wars didn’t feel like they were my kin either. I spent most of my school days making friends with girls and learning the ways in which they experienced the world. In many ways my childhood did a great disservice to me in how it framed the world and how it placed me in it. I feel like I was ill-prepared for the torturous and agonising and all together fruitless exercise that was having a full blown identity crisis at 30 years old. Sometimes all it takes is a single spark to put into question ideas about the world or ourselves that we have held as true for decades. For me that spark came to me one night while involved in some perfectly ordinary task - a simple question: ‘/Am/I a boy?’

I thought about this question for two or maybe three seconds. The answer - I decided - was ‘yes of course’, and then I continued whatever it was that I was doing; making dinner perhaps, or cleaning myself in the shower. However, unbeknownst to me, a seed had been planted then which would grow into a tall and terrifying tree of self-doubt and deep deep questions about myself. Over the next couple of weeks the question returned to my mind time and again. I could not escape it. The time it took for my mind to settle on the answer ‘yes of course’ gradually lengthened.

This you must understand is an incredibly isolating experience. It felt always like I was putting myself on a dangerous and lonely road, dark long, winding its way toward a harsh and snow covered mountain.

Looking into the mirror and not seeing your face, but a stranger’s, is a disconcerting experience. I would stare at myself for what seemed like hours - quietly mapping the contours of my face - learning and re-learning the territory. I have seen my face in a mirror so many times that it has lost all meaning. But now here I was - looking for answers, hidden secrets in a landscape that was unprepared to provide any. I had wanted, until that point, to look like what I thought men like me were supposed to look like - fat queer men have their own unique brand of alienating and unobtainable beauty standards - beards and cropped hair - the epitome of masculinity. In part it’s a rejection of stereotypes - I was no effete faggot - I was a man! I could rumble with the rest of them; but mostly I think, on a much deeper level, it’s that old familiar yearning to fit in. That I had spent so much time crafting myself to fit in with these standards made it all the more surprising to me when I looked deep into the big brown eyes in the mirror and felt that it was in fact the antithesis of what I looked like inside. I wanted to shave. I wanted to grow my hair. I wanted to look like whatever that was not.

I was aware of transgender people, and the real and devastating struggles that they faced. However, even as a part of the queer community I had always felt distanced from that - as even though it affected people I cared about it still had not really affected me personally - that is to say I had not suffered violence myself - physical, emotional, or systemic - as a result of my gender identity. I had immersed myself in feminist theory and was ashamed of the struggles that women and girls were forced to endure - the unimaginable violence, the constant and daily struggles of living in a patriarchal society. I knew also that for transgender women in particular - a particularly cruel and violent misogyny is a very real threat. I felt a great sense of empathy towards women, and trans women in particular (as with most other victims of oppression of any kind, I feel a special solidarity with any struggle against a powerful force of subjugation) while being cognisant of my role in that oppression, by the nature of being a man. This caused a great disconnect within me, a disconnect created by my having been raised as a boy in a society that does all it can to promote masculinity, and coerce young men to eschew feminine traits, lest they be thought a queer, and thus, a legitimate target for abuse. It was with this in mind - the knowledge of how much the world I live in is wary of people who distance themselves from the normative understanding of gender - that I realised that I was /not/ a boy, and would somehow have to navigate what that meant.

My first stumbling steps into the ocean that is genderfuckery were hampered by my inability to pull myself away from a binary understanding of gender.

[I use the term genderfuckery now instead of gender-fluidity because I feel that fluidity implies a gentleness and a flow which runs counter to my own experience. Genderfuckery implies something visceral and playful, it also implies a violation or rejection of gender norms. ]

I was aware of the concept of being non-binary, albeit only peripherally. I did not understand it all that well. My vision of what it meant to be transgender was that you were one thing, and through a series of self discovery, you became something else, and that would present itself as a switch from man to woman, or woman to man, and any in-between stages would be ephemeral. I started to make decisions with this in mind. I began - tentatively - to ask myself the follow up questions to the initial question: “If I am not a boy - what am I?”, “Am I a girl?”, “Am I something else?”, “Do I feel like a girl?”, “What will my mother say?” The questions came slowly at first, I felt like I was a small child teasing a rock in the garden, poking it with a stick gently to see what insects and creatures lay underneath, hidden from sight. There was a feeling that once the rock had been upturned, you would never be able to put it back, or at least, you would never be able to forget the questions asked. More than this - as the questions began to challenge more and more of my base assumptions about myself - I felt less like a small child prodding at rocks in the garden, and more like Eve, taking a bite of the apple, and having a whole word of profane knowledge open up to me. I had opened a box that could not be shut again. I started to code myself in a way that was less overtly masculine. I wore nail polish at first, nothing special just block colours to match my work shirts. Nothing especially subversive - plenty of men wore nail polish, especially queer men. At the same time however, it meant a great deal to me; it was a small signifier, a small subversion, a small act of defiance, a small symbol of my soul in flux. I shaved. I shaved my face completely for the first time in probably seven or eight years. This was a much bigger step for me as it represented a more concrete rejection of the aesthetic values I had tried so hard to cultivate within myself for most of my adult years. I remember looking into the mirror - shaved head (because my head was always shaved back then) and shaved face. I looked blank - new - like a beautician’s mannequin head waiting to be dressed up. I looked at myself and felt a deep sense of frustration that I was not able to pull and tease at my flesh and craft it like clay, to mould it in such a way that would outwardly match how I felt that very moment on the inside. I shaved the hair from my chest, my arms, and my legs - anywhere I could reasonably reach. I wanted the world to view me the way I viewed myself in my head. I felt stunted and blocked by the limitations and restrictions of my body. I felt my soul was trapped inside a flesh prison. A cage of bones and sinews. It caused me deep shame, to look the way I did, while feeling the complete opposite.

People began to ask questions - why I wore lipstick, why I wore nail polish, and I did not know how to answer. I knew the answer - but I did not know how to convey this information to people I imagined would not possibly understand. I have always been queer, in one way or another, and I had learned the hard way the consequences of pushing at the boundaries of heteronormativity. I had learned this through being a deeply lonely teenager, and through not having anyone to share my experiences with.

So - I kept quiet. With some of my co-workers that I felt closer to, I let slip vague innuendos and small clues - a trail of breadcrumbs that if one cared to follow, would lead to a truth that I hid away from most. In my mind I had decided that I was not a boy at all, but a woman. I went to a website of baby names and flicked through pages and pages of girl’s names. As I clicked through the pages I felt despondent as none of the names I saw felt like they could represent me at all. The more names I read the more I questioned my intent in even looking at them - it felt like this was proof that the small serpent in the back of my mind telling me I was a fraud and a charlatan was right - that I was just cheating myself and lying to others as a result of some cheap vanity. But then I found the name. It leapt at me, and lodged itself in my brain. I had found my name and I felt instantly validated. Small things can have massive effects.

I hid away online - on social media, and through a close knit group of other queer and trans people came to grasp a more firm understanding of who I was and what I was trying to become. The real world, as we so glibly describe it, the world of flesh and stone, was harsh and terrifying. The world inside the screen was warm and comforting. For six months I lived a double life - appearing online as one person, one form of myself, a woman with she/her pronouns, and going to the office each day as another, a mild mannered salary man; Clark Kent by day, and Supergirl by night. Of course the distinction is only a phantom - it was always the same person. I was always both people at once in much the same way that Clark Kent was always Superman under his clothes.

It eventually became clear to me that my understanding was misguided. Over a period of six months I attempted to continue to ask myself questions. Why I felt this way - what it meant. In reality I was trying to define ‘me-ness’. In a lot of ways I am still trying to define it. That true core of my being. At the end - after a lot of searching and prodding I realised that the only thing I knew was that I wasn’t a boy. But even that answer doesn’t fully satisfy. What I learned most of all is just how cruel the world can be to those people who do not fit into rigid gender norms. The world feels threatened by those people who are interested in expressing themselves or identifying in ways that they can’t understand. I wish people would have more patience with people who don’t yet know who they are - or are in the process of questioning who they are. The end result of treating people with compassion and love if not understanding while going through this profoundly traumatic experience, is that they have a much better chance of making through it a happier person. The consequences of closing oneself off to that are devastating. There is nothing at all to be lost by listening intently to people who tell us they are struggling - there is only empathy and compassion to be gained.