This post was archived from blog.jenigrant.com

I first heard the term "transgender" when I was 19, and still figuring out my place in the world. I grew up in a small rural town in the swamps of North Carolina, where "gay" was a bad word and cis men in dresses was the height of hilarity. (Seriously, the "Womanless Beauty Pageant" was held every year and I bet some of my high school peers would be pissed to discover that counts as a drag show). I fled the day after I graduated high school, and spent my first year of college coming to terms that I was queer. And my second. And my third.

I tried to socially transition that third or fourth year of college, but it was the late 90s and "bisexuality" was still a hard sell for most people, much less transgender issues. That phase didn't last very long, and I realized then that I wanted to try to have children. I was under the (mistaken) assumption that a person who transitions can't get pregnant or have children. It was the late 90s, after all, and sterilization used to be a requirement of legal transition.

So I made myself a promise; I'd try to start a family and when menopause rolled around in my late 40s I'd revisit the situation. The irony is that 19-year-old me didn't know that I was infertile, that my hormones were all fucked up and that the condition I have would, years later, start to be recognized as an intersex condition. In short, I never had a working female reproductive system. My estrogen levels were low and testosterone levels were high. My uterus was basically a scorched earth where nothing would take root. It took 20 years for my cycle to stabilize and less than a decade after that to hit perimenopause and destabilize again.

For my twenty-plus years of adulthood, I would struggle again and again to fit into the mold created for me as a woman. I make a bad woman. I feel very little connection with the feminine mystique, as it were. I don't know anything about "women's ways of knowing," other than the ongoing hyperawareness and neuroticism that comes with being misogyny-affected. When I stand with a group of cis women, I never feel like I belong the way I do in the company of men.

In recent years, I have questioned masculinity as well. Run-ins with toxic people had me questioning masculinity as it exists, and if that path was truly meant for me. As a compromise with my self, a way to express my own understanding of gender, I came out as non-binary. I cut my hair off, stopped performing woman-ness, took off that damn bra. I feel more comfortable in my own body, but for the last six months I've felt more stagnant in my life than ever.

There are other reasons for the stagnation: disability, first and foremost. My relationship with work. (Working and disability are another post, though.) Since the winter I've felt stuck, lost without purpose or goalpost. I couldn't see a way forward for myself. Depression loomed like a specter. The constant attacks on trans people by politicians and pundits have weighed on me. Where is joy, purpose in this? How can I live a life like this?

The answer is: I can't.

I have stopped performing woman-ness to myself but allowed myself to exist to others as woman-lite because I'm scared to take the next step. I couldn't see a way forward because I stopped myself from moving forward. The only way I can see a future for myself anymore is by saying magic words. Important words. Words that make me feel something other than fear: elation, joy, hope.

I am a boy.
I've always been a boy.

Seems obvious in retrospect.

With those words, I have purpose again. I can see a life forward. I can see myself aging as a man, growing older. I see a lot more on the horizon: it won't be easy, not in this climate of trans hate. It may lead to violence, death. But the message I scrawled to myself in a moment of enlightenment is the most meaningful thing I've ever written. I must exist as my truth even if it kills me.