I’m reading a lot of books at the moment. There are quite a few personal essays by transmen that recall their childhoods playing with the other boys. Until the boys learnt that they weren’t meant to play with them. I’m so jealous. I had one male friend as a kid. I didn’t make any more till University and even then it quite often had the sexual undercurrent running through it. I kind of have male friends now. I’m nearly thirty and I’m only just getting mates.
My friend M. was my next door neighbour. I have one photo of him playing tea party with me. He looks pretty much how I remember him. Overweight and blonde. I’m in a many-ruffled pink monstrosity of a creation, but I’m pretty sure that I’m wearing it over something. I’m in dress-up. Drag Queen age 4. For his fifth birthday he got a stamp with his name on it. I took it (I was a rather dominating friend as a child. My friends now would probably say that that hasn’t changed). While I was at school I stamped his name on my hand. It was red ink. Such a masculine name too. No gender ambiguity about it. I stamped it a few more times on my hand then worked my way up my arm. Then I stamped the next arm. I got my face too. I had tattooed myself with a boys name in red ink. Only it was my name. I had taken it. It was mine now. My teacher asked me where I had got the stamp from. I said it was mine. She kept on asking me till I finally said it was my brothers. I didn’t get a brother for another four years. We moved house. No more M. to play tea party with, boss around and steal off.
I went to a Catholic primary school that had predominately Italian and Greek students which meant that playground was divided neatly in the middle with boys on one side and girls on the other. Not an actually physical line, it was never enforced, but it was there. I was obsessed with the boys. The boys that I couldn’t play with. So that meant that I was boy crazy. If you have a vagina and you can’t stop thinking about the boys that’s what you are.
It took me a couple of years to make friends with girls. They were really nice. I’m still in contact with a few of them. I used to try and gross out the other girls. I’d put snails on my face so they could crawl around. When I grazed my knee I’d sit down, bend my knee and lick the blood off gravel and all. The girls would go ‘Eeewww!’ but the boys weren’t impressed, they just thought I was weird.
Towards the end of primary school there developed an intergender game of ‘kiss and catch’. No actual kissing was involved because eww, germs! So it involved chasing someone with the supposed opposite genitals down kissing your hand and then slapping them with it. I loved it. The boys were letting me play with them and we were playing rough.
I was sent to a girls only high-school so I didn’t learn any social skills with boys there. Hell, I didn’t learn social skills with girls either. But around that age I did learn something. If you have a vagina the boys will want to hang around you. They’ll actually think that you are pretty cool.
Introducing….. (drumroll please)… the girl in the little top and little cut-off jeans (so short that my ass was escaping slightly) who would do whatever you want!! I thought I was so awesome. Looking back I think I actually scared quite a few guys, I was so sexually aggressive. If you have a vagina you’re not meant to be sexually aggressive. It freaks them out.
I realised when I was fourteen that I liked girls sexually. My sexual fantasies (based on T.V. shows) kept on morphing and I’d end up being the guy fucking the girl. Again and again and again… So that meant that I was a lesbian. Right? What else could it have meant? There were no words in my adolescent mind for someone with a vagina who wants to fuck other people with their cock other than lesbian. So that’s what I was. I didn’t know how to tell anyone so I asked my mum to shave off my hair for me. Because that’s what lesbians do right? They have no hair?
I still did my thing with the boys. Because, you know, I kind of like cock. A girl who puts out and likes to fuck girls? I was their wet dream. You need to keep in mind that I mainly met these boys through Catholic Youth Group… They weren’t my friends though.
When I went to University I kind of made male friends. I say kind of because there was always the sexual undercurrent. I was awesome because I was so overtly sexual/laughed at dirty jokes/took my top off in public. If I wasn’t fucking them I was flirting with them.
Now I’m in this weird situation where I have male friends who kind of respect me. Some are actually a bit intimidated by me. Which is kind of awesome. When I told some of them that I was Genderqueer and was talking about clothes a couple of them actually offered to take me shopping.
It’s weird. There’s this group of people that I desperately want to be a part of and I don’t know how to interact with them because nobody taught me how.
Above and Beyond Gender 