Being A Girl is Hard

Originally published in Lunch Ticket Magazine, Issue 28, Friday Lunch Weekly Blog (link below).

For me, the label of girl was almost threatening—something forced on me that I could never escape. I know every woman could, to some degree, feel threatened by their status as a woman, with sexual assault, harassment, and overall danger and misogyny following them everywhere they turn—those things followed me, too. But the threat I felt went beyond that: I wasn’t the girl my birth certificate said I was.

The real problem with the label of girl began with my dad, as I’m sure many people assigned female at birth have experienced. When I was little, I was the socially acceptable “tomboy.” I was a super hero loving, tree climbing, fort building kind of girl who relished in my dad treating me like the son he didn’t have. When he took me fishing and target shooting, I felt more like a son than a daughter. When I told him I wanted to be a welder like him when I grew up, he was so proud. I’d be a man just like my dad. I never said I was a boy because it was the 80s. There was no language to describe those feelings, and there was never an indication from him that who or what I am was wrong.

When my brother was born, and my dad had a real son to love, the closeness I felt to the man I admired so much was gone. I was suddenly very aware that I was nothing like a boy or a man, and it was impossible to change his perception of me. The value I had once held in my dad’s eyes was gone, replaced by something weak and unworthy of all the attention I had experienced before. I felt broken, like I had failed him as not just a son, but as a daughter as well. In the rare moments where my dad saw me for who I am and praised my strength, intelligence, or ability to argue with the best of them, I felt a joy I can’t describe, and the only explanation I have for it now was that it was the real me trying to tell myself something true, that I couldn’t understand at such a young age.

I used to think I was just bad at being a girl, if there could be such a thing, and I often felt like a walking contradiction. I loved Disney princesses (honestly, I still do), but didn’t want to wear the dresses. I loved imagining myself as a mermaid, but would have preferred to not have a reason for the clam shells. I had friends who were girls, but I wanted to run around, wild and free, with the boys, not cry over scraped knees but rub the dirt a little deeper to prove I belonged there.

As I grew older, the division between my perceived gender and who I was inside expanded. A friend once said to me that she needed to take me shopping to teach me how to dress. But I liked my baggy t-shirts and cargo pants with way too many pockets. I liked shoving all of my shit into those many pockets instead of carrying a purse. Part of me was insulted by her comment, as if my style was inferior to hers. The other part of me felt like she was saying something about my soul like, Shawn, you’re not a real woman. You don’t belong. You need to be better at being a girl. That internal monologue was right on one count—I’m not a real woman because I’m not a woman at all.

Despite the indignation I felt from that conversation, I still tried to be the woman I wasn’t. I’d go through phases of buying cute girly clothes that exposed my cleavage because I liked the attention from men, or perhaps it was because it somehow validated the false belief that I could be a girl if I just tried hard enough. I would model myself after my friends and the popular styles. I had credit cards for Torrid, Lane Bryant, and Avenue, and they were always maxed out. I bought the damn purses I hated; I wore the ballet flats that were uncomfortable; and I had leggings in all colors and prints. Everything I did felt right socially and so very wrong internally, but it was the price I thought every woman paid to be girl enough for the world. I just didn’t realize that my price was three times higher than average.

When I was eighteen, I met a girl, and we became fast friends and hung out often. One night, she said, “You’d look so cute as a boy.” I honestly can’t tell you why that one sentence upended my entire world, but it made me realize something important about myself—I had a choice. If being a girl was hard and didn’t feel right to me, I could choose an identity that did. So I went home, and I cut my hair. I changed my wardrobe, but not much because I was in my off-girl season, where I wore what I found most comfortable and not what I thought I should have been wearing. When my dad saw me like that for the first time, he called me a dyke. I knew right then and there that he’d never see me as a son, no matter what I changed. I ended up detransitioning pretty quickly. Maybe he was right, I thought. But a year or so later, when I no longer lived with him, I tried again.

This time, I was armed with information. I researched how to transition in the state of Oregon, places to get surgeries, how to change my name legally, and I started building a support network of trans and queer people. Most importantly, I asked for people to use he/him pronouns for me and call me by a different name (Gavin Orion Hawk—yikes). But despite all of the research I had done, and knowing I was transgender, I still had no clue how to communicate it fully with others. How could I possibly describe something as complicated as gender identity? So I did what I was supposed to do, what I was required to do in order to transition medically or legally at the time: I booked an appointment with a gender therapist.

I was so nervous at that appointment. I could have told her about other trans stories I had read online, about how I had always known, but that would have been a lie. I hadn’t always known. Some trans people just know when they are four or five years old that they were born in the wrong body, but I grew up in the 80s and 90s. It wasn’t a thing—not like it is now, and no one talked about it. So I did what I usually do when I’m nervous. I babbled. I said anything and everything I had been thinking and feeling throughout my life. I admitted that I was insecure about my weight. I talked about how my dad didn’t treat me like a son the way he had before my brother was born. I laid it all out there. When I was done, I expected validation. I expected this professional to tell me I was right, that my body and brain didn’t match, and that she could help me. But that’s not what happened. And what she said—that I was just insecure about my weight and wanted my dad’s approval—made me go back in the closet for another sixteen years.

For the longest time, I had convinced myself that it was all just a phase. I’d make self-deprecating jokes about it, like I used to think I was a boy! How silly is that! People would laugh, of course, but I think there was always a part of me that was sad and angry with myself for not living my truth, as cliché as that sounds. Only those closest to me, mainly my husband, knew the truth—that if I had been given a choice of gender at birth, I would have chosen to live my life as a man. And not because men undoubtedly have a social silver spoon that women are not afforded. I wanted to be a man in every sense of the word—balls and all, even though I think they’re a tad bit gross. But things needed to change before I could admit to myself that I wasn’t living the life I truly wanted.

Thankfully, those changes finally came when I was thirty-five. I got a new job and with it came a lot of feelings that it was time to take care of myself. I sought out therapy (with a new therapist) for the first time in years, initially because I had a lot of sexual trauma that I thought was hurting my relationship with my husband. Those two life events, a job and a therapist, seemingly small and insignificant, changed everything.

In my new role, I formed a strong connection with a trans woman—Lucy. She wasn’t even in my department, but volunteered to mentor me in a role that I wanted, one that she already worked in. I’m still not sure how this one person managed to reawaken something I had long felt was just a phase, but she did. My identity started swirling around in my head, and everything I thought I buried felt new and confusing all over again. When I started seeing my therapist, many of our early conversations moved towards gender instead of the sexual trauma I thought I needed to discuss. In those conversations, I told her something I had never told anyone, perhaps not even my husband—that part of me wished I would get breast cancer so I’d have an excuse to remove my breasts without judgment from others. When she told me that cisgender people don’t usually think about stuff like that, I became painfully aware that it wasn’t a phase after all. And if that fundamental truth was actually a lie I told myself over the years, what the hell could I do about it, as a thirty-five year old in Washington in 2020, versus a nineteen year old in Oregon in 2004?

It turns out, many things changed in those sixteen years. In 2020 and beyond, there were the WPATH Standards of Care that helped to define how to treat and care for trans people based on evidence. That along with Washington being an informed-consent state regarding gender affirming care, I was able to get hormones immediately after a brief discussion with my doctor. I came out August 1st, 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, and two weeks later, I had a prescription for testosterone. Two months after that, I changed my name and gender marker legally on my ID and social security card. These were things that would have taken years in 2004, but in 2020 they took months. Just this year, I finally had it updated on my birth certificate, something you can thankfully do in Washington, where I was born. That little piece of paper no longer can dictate my identity. And just a couple of months ago, on September 23rd, I had top surgery—a double mastectomy. Now the only scars of my gender identity are physical ones, and they’re so beautiful.

I’m forty now. When I look in the mirror, I don’t just see a fat body that the gender therapist said I was so insecure of. Yes, the fatphobia I was exposed to as a child will probably always whisper some harsh words in my ear, but it doesn’t carry the same punch that it used to. I’m finally starting to see the person I always knew, deep down, that I was. And the joy I feel at seeing my reflection is indescribable. I’m finally myself, and those labels of girl and tomboy and dyke can’t hurt me anymore. Now my label is what I say it is, and I say it’s man.

Being a girl was always hard. I struggled for so long, just trying to survive and prove myself to people by doing everything I was supposed to do—everything girls are supposed to do. But forcing myself to live a lie is not a life I want to live. Being a girl isn’t supposed to be hard in those ways, unless you’re not really a girl at all, and I never was. Now I’m stronger and better than I ever have been before, and I’m thankful for having a therapist who believed me and treated me with respect and dignity. Rachel, you’re amazing. And to that gender therapist I saw in 2004, whose name I can’t even remember but wish I could so I could send this message to you directly—wherever you are—I hope you’re not practicing anymore because you were wrong.

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