I Am Not a BOY!

One of my earliest memories of being told who I was supposed to be involved a tree.

I loved climbing.

Trees. Monkey bars. Chain-link fences. If there was something to climb, I was already halfway up it.

The problem wasn’t that I liked climbing.

The problem was that adults kept putting me in dresses.

Every time I climbed, someone would shout,

“Your underwear is showing!”

Which always left me wondering,

Then why did you put me in a dress?

If modesty was the goal, shorts seemed like the obvious solution.

But this was never really about practicality or even logic.

It was about being a girl.

The funny thing is, I never hated dresses.

Sometimes I loved feeling pretty. There were days when I wanted to wear one. There were days when I wanted to twirl in one.

Most days, though, I had other priorities.

I wanted to build forts.

I wanted to make art (and make a mess).

I wanted to spend hours reading.

I wanted to swim until my fingers wrinkled.

I wanted to run races, climb trees, hang upside down from the monkey bars, and rescue every injured animal I could find.

None of those things felt masculine or feminine.

They just felt like being alive.

Puberty was when I learned that the rules had changed.

Almost all of my closest friends were boys.

We explored together. Climbed together. Built things together. We were just kids.

Then, seemingly overnight, I was told it wasn’t appropriate anymore.

I needed to spend time with girls.

I needed to find a few “good girls” to be friends with.

No one asked whether I wanted that.

No one asked what it felt like to lose nearly all of my closest friends simply because our bodies had started changing.

The decision had already been made for me.

For the first time in my life, I remember thinking,

Maybe I wish I’d been born a boy.

Not because I believed I was one.

Because as a boy I could have kept my friends.

Boys got to keep their freedom, at least that’s what I thought.

As I got older, the categories didn’t become more flexible.

People just became more inventive.

The boys treated me like one of the guys. They’d ask me for advice about asking other girls out, rarely considering that I might have been interested in them myself.

Somewhere along the way, I had quietly become “the buddy.”

Girls, on the other hand, gossiped that I might be a Lesbian.

Trans folks in college assumed I was trans too, but just didn’t know it yet.

Then, in my twenties, a friend proudly introduced me to a room full of people by announcing,

“She’s a gay man in a woman’s body!”

Everyone laughed and cheered.

He meant it as a compliment, a “one of us” narrative that was supposed to yield my acceptance.

To him, it explained me.

I wasn’t particularly prudish. I laughed at dirty jokes. I wasn’t embarrassed talking about sex. I was outspoken, loud, opinionated, and I was looking to date men.

Apparently, that combination required another category.

Instead of accepting that a person with a vagina could simply have my personality, people kept reaching for a different explanation.

Maybe I was really was one of the guys.

Maybe I was a gay man, born in the wrong body.

Anything except a woman who simply didn’t fit neatly into the boxes they’d been given.

There were times I genuinely wondered whether life would have been easier if I had been born male.

Not because I wanted a different body.

Because men seemed free in ways women weren’t.

In my simplified childhood perception:

They were allowed to occupy space.

They could interrupt without apologizing.

They could be loud.

Direct.

Competitive.

Opinionated.

Sexual.

They could lead without constantly worrying whether they were “too much.”

I envied that.

Though for the record I now know that it was never that simple for them either. Our boxes were different yes, but they were still boxes.

But at the time I wondered what life would have been like if I’d had their box instead.

Then something unexpected happened.

The culture shifted hard.

The message I had heard growing up had been,

“You have a girl’s body, so act more like a girl.”

Now I began hearing a different message.

“If acting like a girl doesn’t fit… perhaps you aren’t one.”

At first, I thought this might finally be the freedom I’d been looking for.

Maybe people were finally making room for women like me.

But the more I listened, the more familiar it sounded.

The language had changed.

The assumption hadn’t.

Growing up, I heard one message:

Change your personality to match your body.

Years later, I heard another:

Change your body to match your personality.

Different words.

The same feeling.

You are not acceptable exactly as you are.

And either way, there wasn’t much room for fluidity; the idea that a person can change over time and that the person you are today isn’t any more or less you than the person you were yesterday.

Over the years, I experienced people who were remarkably certain they understood my identity better than I did.

Some confidently suggested that perhaps I was really a man and should come out of the closet as trans. When that didn’t work, some moved toward coercive strategies, believing they could mind control me into the person I “should” be, that after the abuse was over, I’d thank them for it.

Most seemed unable to imagine that a person could simply exist outside their expectations without requiring a new label.

What struck me wasn’t their curiosity. They had none.

It was their certainty.

They weren’t asking who I was.

They were telling me.

Their confidence that my life needed to fit into their hyper-simplified view of the world, but not under any circumstances into the hyper-simplified view of the world that THOSE PEOPLE over there held.

That my personality couldn’t simply belong to a female person. That who I am can’t be called a woman.

That I needed a different category.

A different identity.

Perhaps even a different body to be accepted.

Eventually, I found myself growing angry.

Not because people asked questions.

Questions are healthy.

Because so many people had stopped asking and started controlling.

And one day I realized what I’d been trying to say my entire life.

I AM NOT A BOY!

Not because I hate men, women, or transpeople.

Not because I reject femininity, masculinity, or fluidity.

I am not a boy because I have never been one.

I am a woman.

A woman who climbs trees sometimes.

A woman who sometimes likes making art.

A woman who used to read for hours but lately prefers TV or travel for a dopamine hit.

A woman who leads sometimes, follows sometimes, and avoids either whenever possible.

A woman who talks and laughs too loudly.

A woman who enjoys dirty jokes a lot.

A woman who is deeply emotional.

A woman who is deeply analytical.

A woman who is equal parts homebody and adventurer.

None of those things cancels out the others, and none of them need be permanent states either.

They are simply descriptors that I may or may not identify with tomorrow.

Human beings change. We grow. We age. We discover new interests and let go of old ones. Identity isn’t a museum exhibit. It’s a living process.

For decades, America has been fighting over who gets to define men and women.

The political right often begins with the body and prescribes the personality.

The political left often begins with the personality and questions the body. They both do so using control, coercion, and oppression.

Both approaches can leave people with the same message:

“You don’t fit.” “You’re wrong the way you are.” Pick a team, then make the necessary alterations so there can be no confusion whose side you’re on.

But what if I do fit?

What if it’s your definitions that don’t?

Perhaps the problem isn’t that some women are too masculine. Or that some men are too feminine. Perhaps the problem isn’t that anyone was born in the wrong body either.

Perhaps the problem is that we’ve mistaken statistical averages and control narratives for identities.

We’ve confused stereotypes and oversimplifications with people.

We’ve forgotten that human beings are gloriously complex and inconsistent.

I don’t want little girls to be told they have to sit still because they’re girls.

I also don’t want little girls who love climbing trees to wonder whether they’re really girls at all, then be told their bodies are wrong.

I don’t want little boys told they have to hide their sensitivities.

I also don’t want little boys who love ballet or poetry to wonder whether they must therefore be something other than boys.

I want children to discover and play, to be able to learn about their bodies without all the noise, pressure, and judgements about them.

I want adults to have the flexibility to be themselves, without changing their personalities to satisfy one ideology or their bodies to satisfy another, so long as they aren’t hurting anyone.

I don’t need you to make room in your acceptance for me to become someone else.

What I want is for you to make room in your acceptance for me to remain exactly who I have always been.

Not a stereotype.

Not a political statement.

Not a diversity category.

Not a frozen label.

Not a boy.

Just… me.