Oh Sh*t, I'm a Guy

How I worked through 40 years of denial and accepted I'm transgender

Today marks seven years since I accepted my identity as a transgender man. I was 38 and “Mom” to a 15-year-old. I’d been a “wife” for almost 19 years.

My active “gender journey” had started a year and a half previous when a family friend shared that his child had come out as nonbinary, they/them. Back then, those labels were still uncommon, and I lived abroad, so I was probably behind the times anyway.

But when he said nonbinary, a spark of recognition ignited deep within me. A connection, a familiarity. This was the first nonbinary or trans person I knew personally (that I knew of). It made it real. I let the concept percolate in the back of my mind for a full year before I dared say it out loud, declaring “I’m nonbinary” to my little sister. I remember we were somewhere on northbound I-15 on the way to REI.

Once I said it out loud, once I put the label on myself, something shifted. I felt an overpowering urgency, a drive to explore more. In times of inner turmoil, I avoid, avoid, avoid, do a sideways glance, avoid some more, take another peek—until the wall of denial I’ve built crashes down from the weight of it all. This is how I spent the two years leading up to leaving the Mormon faith 20 years ago. I spent a lot of time on MuggleNet in 2004, trying to avoid and deny the cracks in the wall labeled “Forbidden: Devil’s Propaganda.” In the last two weeks before I realized I no longer believed, I read at least 12 books (that I’d been avoiding). And the wall came tumbling down.

Similarly, after embracing a nonbinary label, I spent six months in a private frenzy, reading any transgender/gender book I could find, journaling, talking it out in weekly therapy, and watching hours of trans men and nonbinary people on YouTube. (Oh, I don’t need testosterone, I told myself, that’s not envy I’m feeling, I’m just happy for him!) I restyled my already-short pixie-cut hair into a queer, androgynous look. I discovered chest binders and started walking with my head up and shoulders back for the first time since puberty. I never wore a bra again. Even thinking about bras is still cringe.

Nonbinary didn’t feel quite right, though. But I also couldn’t admit yet that I’ve always thought of myself as a boy. One of my earliest memories is from when I was three years old. My mom told me I could be anything I wanted when I grew up, anything at all! She hoped to raise her girls to be feminists, to not let society tell us what to do.

I was ecstatic and said to her, “I’m gonna be a boy when I grow up!” She said no, not that. She didn’t mean that.

I had to push that dream back into its little box in the darkest corner of my mind. I added thousands of gender items to the box over the years, hiding away my thoughts, desires, needs, labeling it all “I’m a tomboy,” and “There’s no one way to be a woman,” and “Well, I’m not a girl, like, not a girl-girl.” Eventually, I accepted that wearing a costume, a mask, that existing in constant discomfort, was simply how life feels.

And I developed chronic pain, anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. In middle school, I would try to relax the muscles above my eyebrows, forever cocked into little divots. My shoulder muscles were so tight in my 30s that even massage therapists commented, “Oh, you said these were tense, but these are rock solid!”

After six months of voracious consumption of all things trans, the walls finally broke over two days, February 4 and 5, 2018. On the 4^th, I gave in to my friend’s insistence that I attend her women’s-only Zumba class. As not-a-woman, I didn’t feel comfortable there, but she didn’t know that.

In class, two horrors struck me at once. One, I was the only student—nowhere to blend in, disappear into the background, sneak out. Two, we were facing the full-length, ballroom-wide mirror. Like a slap in the face, I realized that when I attended the all-gender yoga class in that same room, I hadn’t been laying down my mat in the back of the room to avoid the instructor’s gaze. No, I had been avoiding my own gaze, reflected in that mirror. I became conscious that I had hated mirrors all my life; I could look into my own eyes in a reflection, but hard-core avoided looking at my body.

Something foreign weaseled its way up my chest, wriggling to escape my control. I blinked away tears. I refocused my eyes away from the mirror and onto the teacher’s back, her heels, the fabric of her athletic veil, and flowing pants. I moved my feet to the beat, but my heart was out of sync. I felt solo on the dancefloor. The spotlight glared, peering into my shadows. I captured a sob just before it escaped my lips; it surfaced as a quiet, limp-lipped raspberry. I debated leaving.

With another flip of my hand, a turn of my ankle, a memory surfaced: a friend-of-a-friend, a military man stationed in Germany. He danced a perfect rendition of “All the Single Ladies” in size 12, 3-inch stilettos, with two male compatriots as backup. They were fabulous.

Men do this too, I thought. Men can dance like this; it’s okay.

Locking eyes with myself in the mirror, I pictured myself as a man. I imagined these swaying hips belonged to a man, dancing a feminine-coded dance. A thin thread tethered me to the dancing military man, to every cross-dresser and drag queen.

I’m okay. I’m a man pretending to be a woman. I could breathe.

With that, I managed to finish class, but the minute the music stopped, I fled. I spent the rest of the day crying. That night, I dreamed my husband demanded a divorce.

On February 5th, I pulled up a Wikihow page I’d found and had been avoiding (see the pattern?): “How to Know You’re Transgender.” Trans people’s stories all seemed to start with knowing. “I always knew I was trans,” they’d say. But how did they know? What led up to knowing?

After the moment in the mirror at Zumba, I found the courage to dig into the “Gender: Do Not Open” box in my brain and write down an inventory of all the things I’d tucked away for decades. When I reached the end of the Wikihow, I had five single-spaced pages of bulleted feelings, thoughts, examples, and anecdotes. I reviewed the full list; it covered childhood, adolescence, and adulthood; relationships, social norms, and gender expressions; body parts, emotions, and thoughts I’d never verbalized.

With my gendered life in writing, there, in one place, the computer cursor blinking at me after the last bullet point, I Knew now. The gender box shattered.

Oh shit, I’m a guy.