I am not sure how young I was when I felt different from, or out of step with others around me. I have very few memories of my early childhood – in the earliest I am sitting on the floor in the living room in front of a black and white television and playing with my parents’ brass crocodile nut cracker, and worried about starting school. It was the beginning of the 1970’s.
It is equally difficult to remember when my first questionings about my gender (identity) arose -perhaps because as a very young child gender didn’t matter so much – it seemed that I did much the same as the girls around me and none of the adults seems to bother about that.
As I got a bit older, towards double figures, there were some differences between me and other boys for others to see, but I was just being me and never really wondered about it. A relative might have said something on one occasion about whether I’d prefer to play with the boys’ but I just said ‘no’.
Later, I started to see differences and started to question if there might be something wrong with me – it was before the days of the internet and there weren’t a lot of ways to try to find out more.
So, I have a sense that I was always different, always more a girl than a boy.
Beginnings
There were a lot of children in the street I grew up in and plenty of girls to play with. I wasn’t interested in the activities that boys seemed to be interested in, like football, but was drawn to play the games the girls played like elastics or skipping or ‘you can’t cross the red river’. Sometimes all us children played together – games like coco-21 or hide-and-seek – and it didn’t seem to concern us who was a boy or who was a girl. And as we got older, games with the girls became hanging out and talking about emotions.
At this point in my life, I didn’t seem to be aware of gender – yes, in many ways it was all around me, but I didn’t think about it as a thing – there were boys and there were girls and there was me, who in all outward ways was a boy. And yet gender became a thing too as I found myself attracted to girls and the clothes they wore, and I often looked at girls interacting together – their closeness, tactility, freeness – and I wanted that, to be part of that.
At school in late primary when I’d be around 10 or 11 we were tasked to write an essay about ‘what we liked’ and I wrote about another girl in the class called Susan and how much I liked her long brown hair. The teacher thought it was such a good essay that she asked me to read it aloud in class. Strangely I don’t remember being embarrassed at all but I seem to remember Susan being a bit embarrassed. I don’t think the teacher thought it through but there didn’t seem to be any negative consequences for either of us. Sadly I don’t have that essay now nor remember what else I wrote. What I do remember of that event was my excitement at being ‘given permission’ to write about what I liked and what I liked was Susan’s long hair – it wasn’t so much that I liked Susan but that I liked her hair and if I was a girl I’d like hair like that.
Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I was attracted to long hair (occasionally in male-presenting folk too). Oh, and female clothes – skirts, boots, jackets – and wanting those for myself. I never wanted to wear a dress as a girl – I think as a girl I would probably have been a tomboy – but I did like some very feminine things too.
As a child I rarely went into any public toilets and found the “gents” sign slightly intimidating. When my mother would take me to a shop to get trousers, I remember always feeling uncomfortable in the male changing rooms, a little flustered, embarrassed and fearful. At secondary school, thankfully there were no showers, but in the changing room for gym, I felt that same awkwardness and embarrassment – almost a shyness. I didn’t know why I experienced these feelings in these situations but I knew I had to keep them hidden and appear like everyone else.
I didn’t know it fully at the time, but the source of my discomfort lay in the fact that I didn’t identify as a boy – in some way I felt different from the ‘other’ boys and I was afraid that they would see that somehow, and I’d be vilified for being in the boys changing room.
A contrasting experience was changing with the girls for a show the drama teacher was putting on – I was the only boy, but being with the girls just felt ordinary and natural. I remember reflecting on it later in my journal about it being the first time in my life I had felt comfortable changing in public.
At times throughout my childhood and early adolescence I seemed aware of the gender differences and at other times it was more like I felt gender-neutral or just didn’t ‘see’ the (gender) difference between myself and the girls I was around. I think I often behaved as if the people around me and me myself were gender neutral – especially if they were girls.
I don’t really remember ever thinking that I wanted to be a girl – I think because I knew (believed) that it was a ship that had sailed: what would be the point of wanting to be something I couldn’t be2. And yet I almost coveted being a girl at times.
So back then, it wasn’t that I knowingly wanted to be a girl – it was that I wanted to have and wear the clothes that girls had, hang out with girls, and talk with girls. I had no interest in the things that the boys around me were interested in or talked about. At times I was aware that I wanted to feel like a girl but I never had the feeling some folks talk about of having been born in the wrong body, although I did wonder whether I had been born with a girls’ brain3.
Something else that was confusing for me around that time was my trying to sort out parts of my body I didn’t want. I would have maybe been nine or ten or eleven. I found an old pair of swimming trunks that were far too small for me but I would wear them to try to squash this thing between my legs – force it back inside. I didn’t know why I was doing that, and although I felt happier once I was wearing them and liked being able to feel the smooth flatness with my hand, I also felt that what I was doing was aberrant in some way – or at least would be seen as aberrant. With gender (identity) not really being a thing that was talked about back then and gender conflated with sexuality, I wondered whether I had a problem with my sexuality4 and wondered if I might be masochistic after reading about masochism in one of my fathers’ books – and so there was a taintedness to it and a need for secrecy. I think I stopped doing this when the trunks became too tight to put on and I didn’t want to continue to do something that felt so messed-up.
I was in the boys brigade as a teenager5. When I was away at my first camp, each ‘tent’ had to put on a show on the last night – I can’t recall what exactly we did, but I was chosen to be the Dick Emery female character6 who would get interviewed at points. I remember getting a long t-shirt from one of the older boys which became a short dress. I don’t remember what other female attire I wore, but everyone loved my characterisation and I certainly enjoyed being the character.
Another memory from when I was around 13 or 14 was during the summer holidays. A friend and I had gone into the loft and up the loft ladder to open the roof hatch and look outside. She went up first, opened the hatch and turned around on the ladder to look outside. As I came up after her and before I turned round to look out too, I remember pausing and looking at the tops of her breasts and how smooth they looked covered in tiny hairs that were glistening in the sunlight coming through the hatch – they looked beautiful and how in that moment I wanted to be her so much to have breasts like these and wear the clothes that she wore.
I find it a little strange that I still have such a vivid memory of that moment and yet have rarely since been particularly attracted to breasts. Was it sexual for me that day? Longing? I’m not sure. I was aware that I wasn’t sexually or emotionally attracted to her. There were girls I was attracted to in that way – like Susan Dalrymple (another Susan) – but not to her.
It also wasn’t really about wanting to dress like her, but back then it was confusing. Later I would understand that it was that I wanted to feel like a girl.
That same friend often cut my hair and I remember asking her to cut and style my hair like a girl at school I liked. I’m not sure what that was about exactly – that I might feel more like her, a girl with a hairstyle like hers – I don’t know, but the next morning in a panic about what my parents would say, I washed it and brushed it all out.
Like hair, I noticed the clothes that older girls wore and I often mused at how their bodies looked in the clothes they wore – how their bum looked or how their legs looked or how a skirt ‘held’ their waist and flowed when they walked – and I longed to have clothes like them and to look like they did in them. Although I sometimes wondered why I was so interested in girls clothes and looking like a girl looked in girls clothes, it was something I just accepted about myself.
[Many years later, in the 90’s, I loved watching The Clothes Show with Jeff Banks and Selina Scott. I could vicariously experience how I might feel in some of the clothes – and I could get in on conversations with girls about clothes fashions.]
At times I tried to understand my yearnings through reading the largely medicalised books my father had – like Kraft Ebbing7a, Alfred Kinsey and Eustice Chesser – and a very heavy book I got from the library called Depth Psychology. There didn’t seem to be a narrative for my experience but I wondered if this longing for female clothes, this identification with being female, this belief that I had a female brain – that it was more sexual than gendered: that it was a fetish7b. And I did seem to be particularly attracted around that time to owning some girls underwear.
When I was 14 or 15 our neighbours were a couple of young doctors. One evening in the garden I noticed that a row of her pants were hanging on their drying line close to the dividing fence. I leant over fence and took a pair – white cotton, with a trim and blue balloons. I only did it that one time. I think my desire to have them overrode my fear of being seen: I wanted to wear them and feel them on me and know I was wearing them. I think I wanted to identify with being a girl. In some way wearing female pants was also like a subversive act (against my assigned gender) I could get away with and feel more congruent. And I did feel more congruent and also discovered that I felt more confident. I wore them nearly every day after that for a long time (washing them by hand and secretly drying them in my bedroom).
A few years later I saw Eddie Izzard8 in an interview relating how he had been arrested as a teenager because he wanted a lipstick but was too embarrassed to buy one and so tried to steal one from a shop. Like Eddie, I had the money and would have gladly bought a pair of girls pants but like Eddie would have been too frightened to buy them in a shop.
I’m not sure of my reasons as to why I didn’t progress to other feminine clothes. Now, I might understand it as relating to the fear I had back then of buying feminine clothing as someone assigned male at birth and outwardly male-looking and aware of the pervasive cisgenderist9 values and beliefs. Back then I was just aware of a fear of being found out and what might happen to me – a belief that it was in some way against the law to wear feminine clothes unless you were clearly a girl.
Over these teenage years, I came to be afraid of being seen as effeminate. When I had been a child – I can’t remember now what age, somewhere between 7 and 12 maybe, I had been mistaken for a girl in shops on a few occasions. Maybe it had something to do with my blonde hair, I don’t know. I have few pictures as a child and I wouldn’t say that I looked especially like a boy or a girl. One incident I remember was being sent into a shop to get a comic and when I was paying for it at the counter, the assistant said something like, “you know that’s a boys comic”. I didn’t say that I was a boy, I said that I knew (it was a boys comic). I can’t now remember how that felt, but I do seem to recall thinking that I mustn’t let my parents find out. I seem to recall it was mildly confusing rather than embarrassing (or affirming).
I became aware of a fear of potential ‘embarrassment’ and my need to avoid being mistaken for a girl. That did progress through adolescence and I grew a beard in large part to look more male. This had always confused me until recently when I read about a model of childrens’ gender identity development by Britney Brinkman10 which describes the emerging ‘negotiation’ between authenticity (how I feel) and conformity [how the world expects me to be (be seen)]. In the research they use the word ‘negotiation’ which suggests to me a conscious process akin to debating a dilemma, but for me this was a process that was driven almost by unconscious forces and there was little conscious decision making going on.
And back then, when I was a child, there was no internet, no trans role models. Cisgenderism9, transphobia and transmisia may not have been ideas that were named and understood, but they were forces that operated in the media (newspapers and tv) and were internalised in society. And somehow I knew it would be dangerous to be open about how I felt.
Later with the discovery of Eddie Izzard8 – even though at that time they identified as a transvestite, it was something – someone normal to find some affinity with. For a long time I did partially identify as a transvestite although it never felt fully right – what was going on inside me was far more than a desire to ‘dress up’ like a woman.
I was coming to understand that I wasn’t desperately seeking Susan1 but rather seeking to be ‘Susan’.
Postscript
This challenge between conforming (to cisnormative expectations) and being authentic to how I felt was to continue on and off for many years to come. Conforming took more of a hold as I left university, started working and got into a long-term relationship: it was to be a long time before I listened to my heart and revisited understanding my (gender) identity. During this time there were occasions when I would watch a film about a trans character and feel that yearning – but then it would be back to work and the life I was living at that time and yearnings suppressed. My search for my gender identity was pushed into a distant place in my mind, heart and life, until my circumstances changed and I felt able to pursue who I was, discovering some amazing authors, like Julia Serano, and later, some amazing trans folk.
I have written about this more recent part of my journey in an essay titled, “Tonight Matthew I’m going to be …”11.
Notes
1. ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’ was a 1985 film starring Madonna and Rosanna Arquette – a really lovely gentle film about two very different characters, one secretly wanting to be someone else, concussion, mistaken identity and liberation. The title refers to an ad in the local newspaper.
2. biologically – I think from reading I knew that it was possible to surgically change the body on the outside (to match the inside) but it was fraught with danger and I imagined accompanied by a lot of physical pain. I already had a phobic aversion to any sort of surgery. If I had had someone back then who would have supported me through the surgery it is possible that my desire to be female might have overridden my fears of the surgery. Sadly, even now, surgery is a long way from being able to create a fully functioning sex change.
3. Interestingly there is a growing body of evidence demonstrating that structural and functional areas of the brains of trans women are more similar to cis women than cis men, and similarly, areas of trans men more similar to cis men than cis women. This is not the whole story and does not mean that gender identity is solely biologically determined, but I find it interesting that as a child I believed that I must have been born with a female brain. Perhaps one day I will be able to get an fMRI scan for myself.
4. I am currently writing more extensively about my parallel sexuality journey.
5. Although this might sound incongruent for me – being in the boys brigade – at the time it felt fine for me. I enjoyed getting away from home and I enjoyed the outdoors. Of course, now, writing about this, I wonder what it might have been like if I could have been in the girls brigade.
The Boys Brigade is an organisation for children and young people which “provides them with opportunities to learn, grow and discover in a safe, fun and caring environment which is rooted in the Christian faith.”
6.The Dick Emery Show was a British sketch comedy show starring Dick Emery and broadcast on the BBC from 1963 to 1981. The character I played was Mandy a ‘very friendly’ blonde who would end with her perceiving a double entendre in the innocuous question of the reporter and then after giving them a ‘friendly but over-forceful push’, saying her catchphrase, “Ooh, you are awful, but I like you”. Sadly of it’s time, the Dick Emery show was often homophobic and sexist although Peri Bradley critiqued the show in the chapter “The Politics of Camp” in British Culture and Society in the 1970s: The Lost Decade. Bradley examined how camp could “operate as a political and liberating force” in the 1970s; and felt that Emery’s characters “comprised representations [which] instigated” a “transformation of consciousness” as described by Judith Butler.
7a. These were books from the early 1900’s and discussed sexuality and masochism.
7b. I expand on this in some writing I am currently engaged in around the development of my sexuality and gender identity.
8. Eddie or Suzi Izzard is a comedian, actor and activist. In the 80’s they identified as a transvestite but now identity as genderfluid and, at time of writing, is happy with the name Suzi or Eddie and ‘he’ or ‘she’ pronouns.
9.Cisgenderism is an ideology that understands that there are only two sex and gender categories and that to be normal someone’s sex assigned at birth must match their gender identity. Anyone who deviates from this is seen as abnormal and pathologized. Cisgenderism is systemic in society and results in prejudice, discrimination and violence.
Whereas ‘transphobia’ strictly speaking means an irrational and overpowering fear of trans folks, ‘transmisia’ describes a hatred of trans folks, highlighting the prejudice at the root of attitudes, beliefs, behaviours or policies that stigmatises or harms or denies the validity of trans’ folks identifies and their right to exist.
10. “Children’s Gender Identity Development: The Dynamic Negotiation Process Between Conformity and Authenticity” (2014), Britney G Brinkman, Kelly L. Rabenstein, Lee A. Rosén and Toni S. Zimmerman, in the journal Youth and Society.
11. “Tonight Matthew I’m going to be …” is a short essay charting the last five years of my gender identity journey.
This article was originally drafted in the summer of 2013.