Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out (21 page)

Special ed. was nice because there were just eight kids in the class. I was the only girl. Everyone was there for a reason. One kid didn’t think fast. Another had temper tantrums. I had problems connecting with people because I had a speech problem, I couldn’t exactly express how I felt. I knew what I wanted to say, but because I lacked the vocabulary, I couldn’t give a complete message. People would brush me away and say I was being silly.

Bathrooms became a big issue for me. First of all, they weren’t the cleanest places in the world. Also, I just assumed you can go into any bathroom. But the teachers told me I had to go to the girls’ bathroom. If I went into the boys’ bathroom by accident, the teacher would pull me out. I didn’t understand. All the bathrooms looked the same to me. So I was, like, “You know what? I’m not going to any bathroom because that’s too confusing.” I would literally hold whatever I had for the whole day until I went home.

I developed a urinary problem that lasted till fifth grade. I didn’t wet my bed; I wet my pants in school. If I was embarrassed, if I felt I wasn’t understood, or if I was sad, I’d wet my pants. Then I’d be even more embarrassed, misunderstood, and sad. If I did it early I would have to go through the entire day with wet pants. I tried to hide it, but people weren’t that stupid. It’s embarrassing to admit this.

In third grade, I was put in a regular classroom, but in the same school. I went from classes with eight kids to classes with about thirty. All of a sudden, I was forced to wear a skirt and panty hose. I hated it. Panty hose! I hated it completely. I liked to run around, and I’d fall and rip my panty hose. My mom would get mad because she had to pay for new ones.

My hair grew long, and my mother pulled it tight into a ponytail. That hurt so much, I felt like my head was stretching.

I felt weird because I still couldn’t express myself. In my head, I didn’t feel like a girl; I felt more like a boy. But I didn’t identify myself as a boy, either. I started reading lots of books about stuff considered androgynous or hermaphroditic, and I looked at a lot of pictures. I learned that there are people who look like both sexes but are not both sexes. They’re another gender — a third gender. You know how during the Renaissance the portraits seem androgynous? I was attracted to that.

Sex and human anatomy were not something talked about in my traditional, Roman Catholic family. When I was around twelve or thirteen, my mom gave me hints, like, “A woman has an egg.” I thought,
What’s that? What’s the point of that? Why is everyone so obsessed with this?
So I thought I had better find out. I didn’t want to talk about it with friends because you don’t know who’s going to be a tattletale. And the last thing I wanted to be was in trouble. I looked it up in my dad’s encyclopedia and saw the egg and the sperm, and back and forth. I needed to know more, so I went to the library. I wouldn’t go straight to the books about sex because a thirteen-year-old looking at those kinds of books, asking for those kinds of books, might make the librarian look at me a little suspicious. When I finally found out what sex was about, I said to myself,
Okay, that’s like, whatever.

Girls were becoming problematic for me. They were so girly. And they were so gossipy. They talked about things I never understood. It’s not like I was stupid, I just wasn’t interested. Clothes. Making fun of boys. Stuff about TV shows or the newest toys. They wanted to make a secret girls’ club, and I’m, like, “What the hell is this?” I never got into it.

Also, if you do one bad thing to a girl, and she has a group, the whole group will give you the cold shoulder and treat you like crap for God knows how long.

I tried to make friends with them, but little things hurt me. Like, once we went on a trip and a girl promised to be my partner. I don’t want to say her name, but this girl said she’d be my friend and we’d be friends forever. At the last minute she decided to partner with someone else. She left me, just like that. This happened a bunch of times.

The girls called me weird because I didn’t get the stuff they talked about. I knew I was smarter than they were, but when they gossiped or talked about girly stuff, I’d say, “What are you talking about? That’s stupid!” I’d say to them.

Once, one of the girls said, “Oh, the teacher thinks I’m stupid.”

I said, “That’s because you don’t talk about educational stuff. You talk about sex and some other crap. You don’t even speak English well.”

I guess I was a little too outspoken, especially since I was the one with the speech problem. That must have hurt her because her clique gave me the cold shoulder afterward.

Yeah, that’s exactly right. By the fifth grade, I thought,
You know what? I’m graduating to middle school and will never see you people again.
Middle school was in a new building. A new school! A new environment! I couldn’t wait to be rid of those girls.

If elementary school was about making fun of boys, middle school was about being attracted to boys. To make matters worse, half the people in my new school were the very ones I hated in elementary school. Crap!
That
group? Three more years with them? Crap!

My mother said, “It’s a new school and a new year. Leave everything behind you. You’re there to be educated.” I took her advice and I tried. I really tried hard. I thought my life would become better if I just studied and stayed away from the girls, but it actually became worse.

Sexual stuff was starting to happen. Girls would blow kisses to guys and say, “Oh, you’re so cute,” this and that. Whatever. And guys would say, “Oh, you’re so pretty.”

I was sitting there thinking,
I don’t understand any of this.
I felt left out too, because no one ever said that to me. I didn’t feel exactly pretty or attractive. My mom said I was pretty, but I’m her kid. Parents always find their kids beautiful. But I didn’t look like most girls. I looked like something else. I went through a lot of teasing because of this. Most girls my age are slim and have curves. Not me.

Everyone said I wasn’t fat, but compared to the other girls, I would say I was fat. The other girls were really, really skinny. I called them sticks. That’s how skinny they were.

From first to sixth grade, my mom chose all my clothes. Once I reached middle school, I wanted to pick my own clothes. “I know how to take care of myself,” I told her. “Everyone is choosing their own clothes. As long as I’m not showing any skin, like any slut out there, I think I can do it.” She had to agree. We lived in a neighborhood where there were a lot of slutty-type girls. I don’t think they were actual sluts, but that’s the way they dressed.

I mostly wore neutral clothes, like a shirt and gray pants. I always kept a sweater on. Even if it was eighty degrees outside, I would keep my sweater on all day. I didn’t like to show my body. I didn’t like the way I looked. People said I looked physically weird, and I believed them.

I never looked at myself in the mirror. The moment I looked in the mirror, I would get depressed for a month. That’s how extreme it was.

My mom wouldn’t let me cut my hair, even though I hated the way it looked. It got longer and longer, so I put it up in a bun.

I liked school for the education but I didn’t like the social atmosphere. I took art and music. I love those types of things. And I loved to read. But being with other kids, studying with other kids, interacting with kids my own age? I didn’t like that. I didn’t know how to interact with people, and that was a problem.

I did manage to have one group of friends — three guys and a girl. The girl became my friend last because I didn’t want to hang out with females. But she seemed nice, and she was tomboyish, so okay, I was cool with it.

The three guys were, like, outcasts, nerdy people. You have your cool kids and you have the nerds. I interacted with the nerds mostly. I sat next to one of the guys in math class. During a test, I didn’t know an answer, and he helped me.

I know, that’s cheating, but it was very nice of him. We started talking, and he introduced me to the two other guys. Then once, during study hour, there were no seats except for one next to this girl. So I sat down. She was a nerd girl too, because she was drawing cartoons and stuff. I didn’t want to be the kind of person who hated all girls, even though in my experiences most of them weren’t great. We started talking, and I thought she’s not that bad. We’re still in contact. It’s really ironic because I no longer see the guys.

Until late middle school, me and my brother shared a room. My dad said I needed my privacy. I never asked for privacy. “I don’t need privacy,” I told him. “I’m good for having someone to share a bedroom with.” But my dad insisted, and that isolated me more. By seventh and eighth grade, I was really angry. I went from “quiet” to “pissed off.”

Around this time, I began to grow breasts. They wouldn’t be considered breasts in the normal sense; it was more like fat. You know how when fat guys have . . .

It was like that.

I started to notice that my body was changing. But I wasn’t developing like girls. When I tried to compare myself to boys, I wasn’t like them, either. So where the hell should I go? I had a lot of trouble losing weight. I tried to lose weight for years and never lost a pound. I don’t want to sound like a victim, or whatever, but I constantly asked myself, “What am I?”