3.
“For the first seven years of my life, I was brought up as a girl by my birth mother, who really, really, really wanted a daughter and didn’t let the snag of giving birth to a boy stop her from trying to raise one. She was a pretty successful professional in a legal field and had me via an anonymous sperm donor from a fertility clinic. She found out I was a boy at a late ultrasound and then moved across the country. She gave birth to me at home, and we continued to move about until I was 5 years old or so. It was just the two of us all my life. We had contact with other people, of course, but they rarely got very close. I had lots of friends, but was always supervised. I found out way, way after that, my mother’s strong puritanical Christianity was a lie. She used to explain why she was so strict about me being ‘private’. I just accepted all of this as fact, having never been told anything different.”
“I was sent to a religious school for girls and had a really great childhood. I was a bit of a tomboy, playing with LEGOs and toy animals rather than dolls and stuff, but that’s not unusual, and no one ever questioned that I was a girl — even me. I knew about men and women, but had never really seen much of naked people. My mother never ever spoke to me about it, but had the impression that when I grew up and got boobs and stuff, my penis would fall off or something. I would be a woman, and other kids would keep their penises, and they’d be men. I dunno, to be honest, I never really thought about it.
Anyway, I carried on with my happy girlhood, had a bunch of friends, and everything was great until I was 7, when a teacher accidentally spilled a cup of hot coffee over me at school. The liquid soaked through my clothes and was scalding me, so the staff immediately stripped me out of my dress to get the hot coffee away from my skin. And then they found out.
The cops were called, and I got taken to speak with someone who, I guess, would be Social Services. They asked me a bunch of questions about life at home and stuff. Meanwhile, my mother was taken in for questioning as well. She refused to acknowledge me as male and insisted I was her daughter. Because she was, y’know, delusional and stuff. I wasn’t allowed to go back home, but got put with a foster family and went through loads of therapy and stuff.
The worst part was that literally overnight, I lost EVERYTHING. My mother, my home, all my toys, and all my clothes. I moved schools, so I lost all my friends. They cut all my hair off and told me I wasn’t a girl anymore. It was really, really traumatic.
In the end, I came out of it with a pretty healthy gender identity (I’m a guy, but not the most butch guy ever, and I’m fine with that). I went through school and got my degree, and have a pretty good job and an amazing, supportive wife. Everything looks great.
But I can never speak about my early childhood, and how I grew up as a little girl.”
—ABCH