Everyone must feel this way, Right?”
Growing up trans without the words to say it
Growing up, I never understood why I felt so different.
There wasn’t a moment of clarity, no sudden epiphany. Just a slow, gnawing sense that something was off — and a silence that swallowed the questions before I could even form them. I didn’t have the language to describe the feeling. There was no word like “transgender” in my vocabulary, and certainly not “nonbinary.” No framework, no blueprint, no map. Just a constant background hum of wrongness.
So I assumed it was normal. That everyone lived this way. Everyone must hate their body. Everyone must feel out of place. Everyone must want to crawl out of their own skin and leave it behind.
But I never dared speak those thoughts aloud.
Because every time I brought up something that made me uncomfortable, every time I tried to explain a feeling I didn’t understand, I was told it was all in my head. Not in the compassionate, mental-health sense — but in the dismissive, gaslighting sense. “You're making it up.” “You're imagining things.” “You're too sensitive.” So I learned to swallow the discomfort. I internalized the idea that my pain wasn’t real unless it was visible, tangible, or approved by others.
And yet — there were signs.
Signs that could have been noticed, if anyone had been looking. If anyone had wanted to see. If the people around me had been curious enough to ask why I didn’t seem to fit into the neat boxes they loved so much.
I didn’t care about wearing the “right” clothes. I didn’t care what aisle they came from. Boy clothes, girl clothes — they were all just fabric. I cared about comfort, about autonomy, about not being shoved into a costume I never agreed to wear. But instead of being asked why, I was corrected. Punished. Told I was wrong.
I wanted short hair. I didn’t care if strangers mistook me for a boy — sometimes that felt better, actually. Safer. Closer to something true, even if I couldn’t name what that truth was. But adults didn’t want that for me. Teachers, relatives, doctors — they wanted compliance. They wanted me to smile when I put on the mask.
And then came puberty.
Puberty wasn’t awkward or confusing for me. It was terror. It was grief. It was a violation I couldn’t articulate. My body began to betray me in ways I couldn’t understand and no one wanted to explain. I wasn’t told I had options. I wasn’t told I could say no. I wasn’t even told I was allowed to hate what was happening — and yet I did. Every inch of change felt like losing something I hadn’t known I was holding on to.
Genitalia was bad enough, wasn’t it? But nature had more ideas. And I had no words to say, “This isn't me.”
And then there was sexuality.
Or rather, the crushing expectation of it.
I never felt what the others felt. While classmates obsessed over crushes, hookups, and hormones, I found myself pulling further away. I buried myself in biology — not out of curiosity, but as armor. If I could reduce it all to chemicals and instincts, then maybe I didn’t have to feel anything. Maybe I could understand it without needing to want it.
But sexual topics made me deeply uncomfortable. Not in the “oh I'm embarrassed” way. It was something else — something deeper. A kind of disgust. A sense of intrusion. While others giggled and gossiped about partners, I felt like an alien listening to a strange species act out a ritual I was never meant to join.
And the way people looked at me? I couldn’t see their eyes, but I could feel the weight of them. That predatory heat, unmistakably sexual in nature. It didn’t flatter me. It made my skin crawl. I didn’t want to be wanted like that. I didn’t want to be seen like that.
If someone had looked closely — if they had truly seen me — maybe things would have been different.
Maybe I wouldn’t have had to learn how to live with a version of myself that felt constructed entirely to keep others comfortable. Maybe I would’ve had a space where I could say, out loud, what I didn’t yet understand. A place to experiment. A place to be.
Instead, I was shaped by silence. Sharpened by confusion. Tempered by the dissonance between who I was expected to be and the unnamable self that kept trying to breathe beneath the surface.
I didn’t know what gender dysphoria was. I didn’t know that being trans or nonbinary was possible. But I knew what wrong felt like. I lived in it.
And I know that story isn’t just mine..