Reading /u/Rosyresy’s “Drop your embarrassing stories from when you had zero realisation of what you are” (2024-12-29) in /r/egg_irl made me think of the early signs of my own gender-nonconformity. (My current position is that if I weren’t largely non-binary and a strong believer that gender roles are pointless (cf. postgenderism), I’d be a trans woman; I guess demigirl is pretty accurate.)
- When I was around 3, I wore oversized t-shirts as pyjamas — in the style of nighties — by my own choice.
- I was easily scared as a child — whether by horror films, haunted houses, or rollercoasters — and always bristled when my parents said “Boys must be brave”.
- I always felt intensely uncomfortable around the “rough and rowdy” boys in primary school, preferring to read a book (Enid Blyton was so much of my childhood) while they were tackling each other. There must be some relation to my not liking anyone but close friends and family touching me at all, but the violent aspect of their play also really put me off in a big way.
- In my primary school days especially, I followed my mom around a lot at home — I loved cooking and washing up (and still love the former) — but never really had much of an interest in what my dad, an electric engineer, did. I tried, because I realised very early on that I barely spent any time with him, but just could never bring myself to care about most of what he did. The only exception was photography: the intersection of electronics and art.
- When I first started getting body hair, I hated it so much I did anything to get rid of it. This started with trimming with stationery scissors (the round-tipped kind used in schools), which was very dangerous — and occasionally painful — on pubic hair; I remember many evenings when I would just sit on my bed plucking leg hairs out one by one. I didn’t really get pocket money in the early days so I had very few options: stealing tweezers from my mom’s drawer was about the extent of it, as well as treating any crappy razors I took from hotels during summer/winter holidays as the most precious items and using them far longer than their blades really allowed. Around age 12 was when I first realised that I could — though only very occasionally — afford to buy waxing strips and hair removal cream; I was always so frustrated at how temporary these were. Finding out about electrolysis was a revelation, though it really saddened me that I had nowhere near the money for it.
- My inability to grow a beard or moustache has always been a point of pride (and now a semi-permanent feature after over a year of IPL treatments). Up until about 2 years ago, I expressed it to friends as “why would I want to have the hassle of shaving?”; nowadays I’m completely open about simply not liking any hair below the eyebrows.
- Around the age of 11 I had a long debate with a close friend about wearing short shorts and my strongest defense was that table tennis players wore them; he said he didn’t because “I’m not a girl” and I refused to accept that as a valid argument (because of my longstanding rejection of gender conformity, not because I thought he wasn’t cishet — he was and is).
- Until the age of around 13 I wore undershirts most days — always the vest kind. As a child it’s just what I’d been raised with — my dad also wore undershirts — but as puberty hit, I became increasingly insistent on having an undershirt on at all times, especially when wearing looser martial arts clothing. (Correspondingly, I hated going topless during PE swimming sessions at school, though I attributed this to the perception of being fat, which was and is an issue and is a story for another time.) In the later years I particularly insisted on buying undershirts that were as tight as possible, specifically because I wanted smaller armholes; I was also quite frustrated that I could never find undershirts with thinner straps. (If it sounds like I was looking for a camisole, I was indeed.)
- I had been envious of girls’ bootcut jeans from a very young age (8 or 9?) and when I was 11–12 started insisting on having them for myself, though never raising to my parents that this was related to gender of any kind. Specifically, I wanted very low-rise bootcut jeans — precisely the kind that was only sold in the women’s section.
- I was not excited in the slightest for my voice to break.
- Around age 12, when I was growing my hair out, I had a side parting with a fringe — mid-2000s emo style, in a way — and used to dream of dying just that fringe hot pink. I have never had any particular interest in rock or metal music and in those days was a classical music purist.
- Disney songs aside, the only “modern” music I associate with my childhood is Avril Lavigne (“Boyfriend” and “Sk8er Boi”, most strongly) and Aqua’s “Barbie Girl”.
- Around age 12, I was hooked on TV shows like “Wizards of Waverley Place” and “Hannah Montana” and found myself obsessed with Selena Gomez and Miley Cyrus — with almost no interest in the other actors. Self-insertion? Perhaps.
- Around age 16–17 I’d started wondering about wearing leggings, having seen quite a few girls in school wear them (no school uniform in the last 2 years). My going to a nearby mall and buying Nike leggings from the women’s section — this was long before leggings-for-men was a thing in this part of the world, as far as I can recall — marks the first time I proactively rejected the idea of limiting myself to the men’s section. I wore these a few times, but ultimately wouldn’t be secure enough in myself to do so on a regular basis until many years later, when I had the “defense” of going to the gym and practicing both yoga and aerial yoga.
- I was a student supervisor for a school camping trip around age 16 and was adamant about reprimanding anyone in my group who made statements reinforcing stereotypes (the “All boys/girls are…”) — one of the very strong signs of my discomfort with binary gender.
- By age 18 I had grown my hair down to my tailbone.
- At age 21 I watched all of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, basically living out a childhood I’d never had.
But this all has to be taken in the context I grew up in: “transgender” was barely a word; “transsexual” was vaguely a thing, but, especially in schools, only really recognised in the context of “girls with dicks” porn; “trans” wouldn’t have meant anything to anyone around me. “Gay” was used as an insult for anything (“that’s so gay” could be used to mean “that’s awful”) and basically the idea of being anything but cisgender and heterosexual was either not a good thing, or just not a recognised concept. If I’d been born 10–15 years later — and into a very different family — things could have been very different.
Things that could be interpreted as signs but actually weren’t:
- I insisted on doing my own makeup for school plays. This had nothing to do with gender: I just liked being able to do things for myself and show others that I had knowledge and skills that most others didn’t.