The Gender Identity Crisis I Never Knew I Had

I wanted to be a boy.  I mean, I really wanted to be a boy.  In fact, though I was told again and again that God didn’t make mistakes, I was pretty sure He had messed up by making me a girl.

I didn’t like dolls.  I wasn’t into princesses.  I hated wearing dresses and having my hair curled.

I wore a ball cap everywhere I went.  (Much to my mother’s chagrin.)  I tried to outrun, out-jump, and out-fight the boys as often as I could.

I loved the outdoors and climbing trees and playing war games and building Hot Wheel tracks in the dirt.  I picked up frogs and I baited my own hook and I swung a baseball bat pretty well for a skinny girl.

I still have written evidence of my “when I grow up” ambitions and I didn’t want to be a mother or a housewife or a teacher.  I wanted to be a baseball player or a cowboy.  For several years running.

Even when I played with other girls I pretended I was a boy.  Because boys were more interesting and did more exciting things, of course.

Boys grew up to be men, after all, and it was men who waged wars and won them.  It was men who explored lands and seas and ideas and made amazing discoveries through them all.

Men were brave and strong and smart.

And I knew I could be all three.

One year right before Easter I got hit in the face with a softball and had to wear my frilly purple Easter dress with an enormous purple eye.  My mom was devastated.  I was delighted.

A neighbor of my grandparents once mistook me for a boy, and while my poor mother was again mortified, I took pride in the mistake.  I knew it wasn’t my clothes or my hair that had fooled him; mom wouldn’t let me dress like a boy, (though she begrudgingly permitted the cap,) and my white-blonde hair was long enough to look girly.  But that only meant the neighbor had been duped solely by my keen ability to keep up with the boys, all my boy cousins, who were many on that side of the family.  It was something to be proud of for sure.

I was just as good as the boys.  And I was always out to prove it.

The fact I was surrounded by them only strengthened that desire.  I had an older brother, but no sisters.  All my cousins that I saw with any regularity were boys.  All of them.  And the neighborhood kids?  Boys, of course.  I was at least 8 or 9 before the first girl near my age moved in.

I wanted to be a boy.  And if anybody had given me a choice, that’s exactly what I would have become.

Thank God I was never given that option.

Children who make the change are called courageous and inspirational.  They are “brave” for becoming what they really are, for bucking the bonds of the gender they were “assigned” at birth.

I don’t question the love these parents have for their children.  I truly believe they want more than anything to see their children healthy and happy. 

And yet all I can think about is the little girl I knew myself once.  The one who wanted to be a boy.  The one who thought she would be happier if God had made her differently.

Because I grew out of that desire with time, I’m sure there are “experts” who would see some contrast in my circumstances, some reason why my situation was different from theirs, though I’m curious how any of them would go about proving it.  I see remarkable similarities in the details of their stories and mine, but with vastly different parental response.  My mom and dad were always supportive of my individualism, but they were also careful to channel my energies and ideas and desires in a safe and healthy direction.  At 5 years old I didn’t get to choose what I ate for supper, let alone what gender I wanted to be!  That was already decided, after all.

Like it or lump it, I was a girl.  Maybe I wasn’t always happy about it, but that’s the way it was, and there was no other choice but to accept it and learn to embrace it.

Because, though I didn’t fully see it at 5 and 6 and 7 years old, being a girl was good.  Really good.  Girls are strong and smart and brave, too, just like the boys, though often revealing it in different, but equally valuable ways.  What I was was wonderful, even if it wasn’t what I wanted to be.  And allowing me to transition into anything else, as if there was something inherently wrong with what I was, would have been destructive and demeaning to me as an individual.  I don’t know at what point the negative effects would have shown themselves, but they would have appeared, and I can’t imagine the long-term damage that would have done.

There is something cruelly ironic in the philosophy that says, “Be who you really are!” by then encouraging you to be what you are not.  

It’s not about crushing a child’s spirit or inhibiting self-expression.  It’s about honesty.  And reality.  And acceptance of who and what I am and seeing the beauty that lies in my potential.

I didn’t face a gender identity crisis.  That wasn’t what it was at all.  And thank heavens my tender five-year old heart wasn’t plastered with some Gender Identity Disorder label to complicate and confuse my future from that point on.

Instead, I was taught to love what God had really made me to be.  And I did.  And I do.

And I couldn’t be happier.  

(And I can still swing a baseball bat pretty good for a skinny girl.  Just in case you were wondering…) 😉