Gender questioning: In the beginning...

A boy but wish I was a girl 

In the beginning I was a boy. So how did I come to realise that I was maybe actually a girl?
Time I think, to fill in a little of the back story. And if I’m going to do that, I suppose the beginning is a logical place the start.

The “beginning” is probably really about the age of 11. I wasn’t one of those little boys who played with dolls and dressed up pretty. It wasn’t until the onset of puberty that I started to wonder if I had missed my turn and was heading down the wrong fork in the road. Not in a traumatic way. You read about people feeling they’re in the wrong body and hating the sight of their wrong parts. I’ve never really felt that way about myself. It’s not so much hating what I am as dreaming about being something else. Am I making any sense? Probably not as I don’t fully understand myself!

Anyway, back to the beginning.

Realising girls are different...and wanting to be like them

Perhaps the earliest memory is from a holiday when I was eleven. It was a lovely summer and we spent the whole two weeks on the beach building sandcastles and messing about in the sea. There were lots of kids at the beach and we all played together. There were girls there and one in particular sticks in the memory. She was wearing a plain black swimsuit but had a little green crop top over the top, I guess to cover up. Sounds silly now, but it was the prettiest most feminine thing I’d ever seen. Maybe it was my first realisation that girls were going to start to develop differently and I was really intrigued by what it would be like to be her and to experience what she was experiencing. I had no sense of how it would feel to develop but I could imagine the feeling of the swimsuit at least.

After the summer I started senior school and in the first year we had the “special lessons” about puberty and stuff. These were partly gender specific but we also had a mixed session to help us understand about periods. This fascinated me and just like with breast development I tried to imagine what it would be like to experience as a girl.  In my head I would fantasise about having my period and how it felt. One day, I took one of my mother’s sanitary towels from the bathroom cupboard and wore it in my pants all day. It felt strange but it wasn’t the real thing.

I was still attracted to girls though both for themselves and because of my curiosity as to what it was like to be them. I was particularly fascinated by bras. The outline of them visible through a white blouse. One evening at youth club, a girl’s loose top got pulled up when she took her jumper off and I  saw, from behind, the band of her bra tight around her slender back and the straps over her shoulders. It looked so alien somehow, like her body was constrained in some kind of contraption. I know that’s an odd word for it, but it was what came to mind at the time and I still remember it now. Obviously any kind of “normal” boy would have wished he’d been standing around the front...I just wanted to know how she felt wearing it.

The first time I wore a bra

I’m sure I’m not alone amongst us Maidens in that the first bra I tried on belonged to my Mother. Ditto tights. And dresses. But it was the bra that really fascinated me and more than any other item makes me feel like I’m being a girl. Whilst it may be usual for us to wear our female relatives’ clothes, I suspect not so many of you would have thought it a good idea to wear a bra to school. Probably because it’s really not a good idea. Imagine the humiliation if everyone found out. And yet I  did it. I wanted to feel what it was like to wear a bra all day like a real girl. Turns out I felt self-conscious, paranoid and terrified. Not quite what I was hoping for. But at least no one found out about it.

This was “the olden days”, before the Internet but there was something called catalogue shopping. Like the internet but in a book. For most teenaged boys, the lingerie section of the catalogue was the go to place, for obvious reasons. And for me too, but not for the same reasons: I wasn’t looking at the women and imagining them without the lingerie; I was looking at the lingerie and imagining me being the women and wearing it.

Searching for a female experience 

My wish for female experience even carried over to my relationships with actual girls. After the first time I touched a girl’s breast through her bra, I wanted more than anything to know what she felt. So back home, I put on a bra to try and recreate the experience. I’m sure it wasn’t the same, but the point is, in this, as in the other things, I wanted to be experiencing life as a girl.

So that’s where it all began.