Being a teen is hard. Being
a teen with gender dysphoria is even harder. For most people, it is a time in life filled
with confusion and self-discovery all the while being very awkward as your body
quickly matures into adulthood.
For me, it was all those things as well, only I imagine to a bit
more of an extreme than what most cisgender people experience. By that point, I already knew I was a girl on
the inside and when puberty started I hoped that my body would follow suit even
though, logically, I knew my body was that of a boy which would cause it to develop
as a boy’s body should. All around me
the girls were in full bloom and yet I was stuck, my brain screaming one thing,
and my body doing another. As I began to
get body hair in the way that boys do, I tried to act as if I were excited
about it because, like my peers, I was “Becoming a man” while inside I was
disgusted with the whole affair. As the
girl’s voices matured and became musical in nature, I cringed with every crack
of my deepening voice. I would look at the girls with envy, wanting what they
had and wondering what I had done to deserve what was happening to me and
growing angrier at God the entire time at the cruel joke that had been played
on me. With every change brought about
by puberty the disconnect between my body and mind grew greater and greater but
I couldn’t tell anyone about how I really felt.
So I bottled it up inside, locking it down as tight as I could in hopes
that it would eventually go away, which it didn’t.
For a very brief time, I thought that I might actually be gay
because I felt like I was a girl. After
all, as I reasoned at the time, normally girls like boys and I was, at least
internally, a girl so that meant I would like boys. I even wondered if what I was feeling was
something that all gay men go through as a teen. I quickly discovered though, that this wasn’t
the case. I was attracted to girls, not
boys, therefore I couldn’t be gay because no matter how hard I tried, I just
didn’t find anyone of the male persuasion attractive. So I concluded that whatever it was that was
wrong with me, it wasn’t that I was gay. (Not that I think there is anything
wrong with being gay, we are dealing with my adolescent logic here so please
take that into consideration)
At one point, when puberty was starting to really get it’s claws
in me, I had some female friends of mine that, one day, asked if they could
dress me up and, while acting a bit wary despite the fact that I was doing
cartwheels on the inside, I agreed. That
was the first time I ever saw the girl that had been hiding within me, staring
back at me from the mirror. It was
magical. I was going wild on the inside
because this, the girl looking back at me, this was who I was supposed to be. Of course I tried my best to not let my
excitement show and, when asked if I would be willing to go out with them as
one of their “girlfriends,” I accepted as unenthusiastically as I could, with
means they could probably feel the enthusiasm oozing off of me. After that first time, me going out with them
as “one of the girls” continued to happen occasionally and I began to let my
guard down around them as they started to treat me as such. They didn’t know about my inner struggles at
the time, though if any of them reads this then I guess the cat is out of the
bag, but it meant so much to be accepted into (if only in a limited capacity) a
world I desired to be a part of. During
this time period, one of my best friends found out about my excursions when he
started dating one of the girls and, as far as I’m aware, he never told anyone
about me nor did he ever treat me any differently.
When I was sixteen though, everything changed. Eventually, between puberty, dysphoria, and
another event that I’m not ready to talk about publicly, it all became too much
and I figured out that I would never be able to be open to the world about who
I really was. That no matter what, I
would never be accepted as the person I felt I was on the inside. Up until that point in my life, I had thought
about killing myself but never in a serious capacity, it was more along the
lines of the fantasies I would have as a child, an escape fantasy. In fact, when it comes to being serious about
actually committing suicide, I have learned that there is actually very little
thought involved at the time and, when I was sixteen, I attempted suicide for
the first time in my life.
I’m not going to give any details about the attempt because that’s
not what is important and it could be very triggering for some people, but
after my failure and crying myself to sleep, I resolved to try and be the son
my parents deserved, to be the boy that was my mask, through and through. Obviously, I failed horribly at that
considering where I’m at now, but anyway, that’s not the point of what I was
getting at. After my failed suicide
attempt, I tried so hard to prevent any part of the girl I was on the inside
from ever seeing the light of day again but after a few years, the walls that I
had built to cut that part of myself off started to crumble and at that point I
should have seen the futility of trying to keep it locked away. Instead, I tried to build them better, to put
up thicker walls around that part in an attempt to deny that it ever existed
but with time, as it was before, even those walls began crumble and fall.
It wouldn’t be until a little later in my life that I would find
out what exactly a transgender person was and the fact that it applied to me.
- Arylin Michelle
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