Notes on my childhood, by Rian B. (my ko-fi)
Notes on my childhood
When I was younger, slightly younger, maybe around my early teens. I knew that I wasn’t a girl. Even from when I was a kid, I was a pick-me. Looking back at it, it wasn’t because I hated my female peers. No, I tried to talk to them too. I kept up with Kylie’s lip kits, with the Korean lip tints that always made your lips dry at the end of the day, and I have had my makeup confiscated by teachers. But I was a pick-me not because I felt like I “wasn’t like the other girls.” It was simply because I didn’t feel like a girl. I wanted to be acknowledged by the other boys because I was a boy too. I was short, and chubby, and not very good at sports. I’ve always connected more with peers who were girls because I liked hanging out with them, but I never felt like I was a girl.
In my family, I was the youngest child out of two. So my parents always called me Adek, or what someone older would call someone younger in Indonesian. Everyone called me that, my parents, my brother, my grandparents, my uncles and aunts, everyone did. My mom is the oldest child out of her siblings, and I rarely met my father’s family. Everywhere, even when I was visiting my grandparents, I was simply just Adek. Then it changed when my uncle finally had kids, and then another uncle had kids too. Then, it changed from Adek to Mbak. It felt odd to be called that. I thought it was because I changed from simply being Adek or the youngest to being called Mbak which meant that someone else was younger than me. But it wasn’t just that. The term Adek and Kakak (which is the exact reverse of what being called Adek is) is gender neutral. There’s no implication on whether you’re a female or a male. You are simply just Adek or Kakak. But Mbak implies that you are a woman who is older, and I didn’t like that.
I don’t have any problems with ageing. I never thought I would pass the age of sixteen, eighteen, twenty, and in nine days I will be twenty two. So, no. The problem wasn’t because I was considered to be older. It was the fact that I was considered to be a woman now. A girl. That was the crux of the issue.
When I was in high school, I came out to my friends that I was transgender. I was a transgender male. I asked them to call me by my new name and that I exclusively used he/him pronouns. I cut my hair shorter, shorter than ever. My parents were visiting my brother in Japan and I got an undercut. I felt freer than I have ever felt in my life. My mom gave me hell for cutting it that short, but I was happy. I looked masculine, and because of my body shape, I could possibly pass as just a short guy.
Whenever my hair got longer, I had it cut. During the four years I spent in university, I cut it on my own. I felt comfortable enough with my own gender that I came out to anyone whom I felt like I was close to. But I wasn’t a transgender man anymore. I felt like the labels of gender were confining me so much that I couldn’t recognise who I was with the label that I put on myself.
So I just. Stopped caring.
I didn’t care how people perceived me. Though, that’s a feeling that I’ve felt for a long time. Living with my mom, not caring has been my motto throughout my childhood. My friends look at me and see that I am Rian. Not my dead name, not my pronouns. I don’t like English pronouns. In Indonesian, there’s no such thing as a gendered pronoun, not even a gendered noun. That’s why I think I love Indonesian more than English.
Sure, I still get gender dysmorphia, and when my hair gets to a certain length, or I look at myself too much in the mirror, I feel odd. But now, I don’t care anymore. I wear a full face of makeup, I wear dresses and long skirts, I wear high heels but I don’t think I’m a girl.
But don’t get me wrong, womanhood and being a woman is something that I hold near and dear to my heart. Whether that be through political reproductive rights or just the fact that I am born a woman, I will always feel a kinship to other women more so than to other men. But I’m not a girl. I’m not a boy either.
There may be a lesson to be learned from the twenty two years that I’ve lived, that I’ve experienced my gender, which would just be that: I don’t care. There are other things in the world that we should be thinking about. Your gender should be between you and yourself only. You shouldn’t care about how people perceive you, well, if you’re an asshole maybe you should. But how they perceive you, as a boy as a girl or as anything else, shouldn’t concern you. You should know best what it is that you are and no one can take that away from you.
Be happy that you get to choose who you are, even if that means that you’re still far far deep in the closet. You know who you are, and you know how to keep yourself safe. I love you.
