sometimes i wonder if i'm even really a girl. i think i feel like one but dont know what im supposed to feel if i am. i dont dress like one or act like one, even though i want to and i have the privilege to be able to with a relatively supportive family.
all my transfem sisters have this certain... way of being fem and cute and all that but i feel like im the gray duck even among the gray ducks. did i get it wrong? have i made the biggest mistake of my life? i dont think so, because i know i WANT to be a girl, but everyone around me says that trans girls have been girls their entire lives.
i was pretty clearly a boy growing up. i had mostly male friends, i loved american football and hockey, i wanted to be either a racecar driver or a hockey player. the educated feminist in me says that those things dont make me a boy or a girl, theyre just things. But it's not like I was forced to do them. I chose to be that way.
I came out as transfem in freshman year of high school and all of my other LGBTQ friends were so effortlessly themselves. They all looked how I wanted to look, talked how I wanted to talk, and acted how I wanted to act.
I was the only TMA person in the entire friendgroup, of course, but this was before I knew about the whole TMA/TME framework. I had no way of understanding that there was a difference between the way society treated me vs the way it treated them. We were all just woke trannies that the government hated equally.
Every time the little voice in my head told me that I shouldn't want the femininity that my transmasc friends embraced, I told myself I was a horrible, transphobic, evil person. When I got out of high school, I was going to become a rapist pedophile just like all the other trans girls in the news.
I hated my friends. They had what I wanted, declared they didn't want it, and then just fucking... did nothing. And everyone just accepted them as transmasc or nonbinary even with all their neopronouns and dresses and push-up bras. I knew, I know that if I tried to pull something like that, if I forgot to shave for a day, or if I failed to wear the cold, hard, uncomfortable plastic women's fencing chest protector I used as breast forms, or said that I wanted to be referred to as something other than she/her or they/them, or announced that even though I was a girl, I identified as gay, or raised my voice, or asked people not to use they/them with me, I wouldn't be accepted.
I couldn't make a mistake, even if it was the same as one of my transmasc friends forgetting to wear a binder or intentionally wearing a dress that showed off cleavage, or calling himself a lesbian. But I didn't let myself think that consciously. I just told myself I was a horrible person and slowly ostracized myself from them.
And don't even fucking get me started on the GSA. I told myself I loved it, loved spending time with all the people who saw me as "the transfem". I was the only one who wanted to fight, but I was also the only one who couldn't. Everyone looked down on me, I couldn't speak my mind, I couldn't tell my TMA therapist, I was alone in a group of 20.