Retrospect?

[aesmael]

In transgender a poster made this request: "I wanted to open a discussion about all the things from childhood to adolescence that speaks to your gender not fitting into the concept of your birth sex."

This was my response:

When I was younger I used to read lots of books about astronomy and dinosaurs, trains, chemistry, biology and physics texts and sharks. I would keep rings and fake gems I found on the ground and believe them magic. At one point I asked for a necklace like the ones my sisters had, and I wore it until I had to stop. My favourite shows as a child were things like Star Trek and Transformers. I used to spend hours drawing atoms and molecules, or tracing identifying images of sharks and linnean diagrams of relation. In primary school I was given a ken doll, maybe what I asked for, so I could use it to play with my best friend in high school. We used to play with her doll in the bushes at school, pretending she (the doll) lived in the trees of a dense jungle with inspiration taken from Tarzan. I played a lot with toy transformers and dino-riders and thunderbirds and had no problem including action or 'off time'. When I was younger there were toy soldiers too, although with all my toys they were mostly references for the action happening in my imagination. For very many years I slept under a pile of plush toys who I regarded as friends and protectors, and share consciousness.

Most of my friends were girls. We would talk about writing and environmentalism and Star Trek and Judge Dredd and our various invented ideas and shared mini-culture. I conducted minor experiments in cryogenics and tried to adapt The Hobbit into a play without really understanding how that would work.

In high school I had little interest in most sports because they were distractions from reading and writing and also I did not know how they worked. I did play sports when I was younger, though, and only stopped when they became more competitive and physical than I wanted to be.

Although most of my friends have historically been girls I also hung out with a predominantly male group through much of high school, which later merged with a mostly-female group we had a close association with. The vast majority of men and women have always been puzzles to me and I do not understand much of their behaviour in other than an academic sense. I tended to be shunned by either unless they wanted someone to champion their side with trivia or reasoning.

In high school again I spent most of my time reading, now fantasy and science fiction since the available non-fiction had stopped telling me anything new. Apart from that, I mostly wrote my own stories. On one occasion I got up in the middle of the night because I suddenly needed to randomly generate (via dice and grid) a galaxy to use as a setting for something. Another time there was a mis-started attempt at a 'choose your own adventure' story. I shied away from horror stories and had an aversion to handling venomous arthropods. I played a lot of video games, especially strategy or first-person shooter types, and especially when I could share them with fun company. I once tried to make a pen-and-paper strategy game and even convinced someone to play it for an afternoon.

Sometimes I would look at other students and use them as a reference to imagine how my body would look if it had developed differently, or I would lie awake at night wishing for my body to change. I would wish I could change my body to suit what sex or appearance I wished to present at the time. I used to hate seeing my reflection, though later I appreciated it more. Growing up, I was often criticised by my mother that my mannerisms would give people 'inappropriate' ideas about my sexual orientation. Eventually I found out there was such a thing as HRT and nearly immediately set out to get myself on it.

I do not think anything in my past speaks to a gender not fitting any birth sex that might have been mine except the desire to alter this body.