How Realizing I’m A Boy Made Me Secure In My Femininity
by Percy Okoben
When I was a toddler, I loved playing dress-up. I loved pretending, for however long, to be a princess or a fairy. I had any number of pink or purple or yellow tulle skirted dresses in which I frequently pranced around. I was your classic girly-girl. But I think there was always some part of me that knew I wasn’t one. There was always some sense that, despite my overt femininity, I wasn’t… well… a girl.
I wasn’t like the other tomboys my age, who always wore shorts, rather than skirts, and who hung out with all the boys, rather than all the girls, who weren’t as boy-crazy as I was. But nevertheless, on some level, I always considered myself a tomboy. And I wasn’t sure exactly why.
Then, when I was eleven, I was staying at my grandparent’s house for the summer. We were watching the news after dinner and I found out that gay marriage was legalized. I found myself feeling ineffably happy, but I didn’t know why. My grandparents scoffed. The neighbors laughed at me for feeling this way. Even the priest at church the next day grieved this “tragic” development.
I decided that maybe this was because I was gay. For the next two years, I wavered between being gay and bisexual. I didn’t tell anyone. Not only was my family not supportive, but I was living in Texas, which is not exactly the most accepting state for LGBT+ people.
I was adamant, in my mind, that I liked girls and only girls. Why else would I be this masculine?
About a year into my identification as a closeted gay lady, I decided to cut my hair. It was the best decision I ever made. People started calling me “sir” and “young man,” and I realized I liked it. But I couldn’t place why. My parents and friends didn’t like it, so I told myself that I shouldn’t like it either.
I came out as a lesbian to a few friends near the end of seventh grade. Two of them later came out as queer themselves. One of them never spoke to me again after a few months, but that’s another story. One of them forgot that I came out altogether. It was in eighth grade that I moved to Ohio and openly identified as a butch lesbian. But people told me that I wasn’t a butch lesbian, not because they doubted that I was gay, but because they didn’t think I was masculine enough.
The summer after eighth grade, a few months before I transferred to an all-girls’ school, I started realizing my gender was, well, not what I had always thought it had been. I convinced myself for a few months that it couldn’t be so, maybe I was wrong and I could just push down the suspicions; it would be easier, what with transferring to an all-girls’ school. But the notion wouldn’t disappear. I came out later that year as genderqueer-genderfluid (which I thought at the time were dependent on one another, rather than two separate identities). I first used she/her and they/them pronouns, then she/her, they/them and he/him, then just they/them. I was at first insistent, going so far as to cross-stitch “They/them” on a potholder and shove it in someone’s face when they used the wrong pronouns. But then I merely let myself stew in discomfort when someone used the wrong pronouns.
The summer after my freshman year, I realized two things: one, I was a boy, and two, I liked boys. At first, it was a hypothetical,
“Hmm, if I were to transition to being male, would I like people who were the same gender as me?”
Then it turned into a more persistent,
“Oh, wow, Paul McCartney is attractive.”
Then, by the time I started my sophomore year, I identified as pansexual and was the same level of boy-crazy as I had been in my elementary school years.
I publicly came out as trans over winter break via an email to all of my teachers and several other faculty members. My classmates gradually found out and are at varying levels of success accepting my identity. But something still holds me back.
I watched a lot of transgender YouTubers who all seemed quite masculine, who all described incidents such as not wanting to wear girls’ clothes as children, or always having male friends. I did not share this experience. My childhood experience was more similar to the feminine cisgender gay YouTuber in the bunch than the masculine queer transgender one. I had always had female friends. I had always wanted to wear makeup. I had been indifferent or accepting of skirts (though dresses were another conversation). I remember going out with my Aunts once and being captivated by a skirt with prints of cats on it that I still, to this day, cannot stop thinking about and wish I bought.
But did that make me any less trans? It still stung when the cisgender boys in drivers’ ed or the odd restaurant employee called me “Miss” or “she.” On some level, I had always known I was a boy. But what was this feeling that made me want to wear fanciful hats that would suit Audrey Hepburn and imitate captivating makeup artists who painted Pusheen on their eyelids? Did this feminine part of me make me any less of a man? Though the people I used to consider friends would make fun of me for crossing my legs at the knee like men only did “if they’re gay” (which, by the way, I am), and though people in public, until I can start hormones and grow facial hair, will still call me “Miss” when I wear the hats I am so fond of, I know that I am not any less of a boy for my femininity.