High school (2005-2009)

As you grow older, there’s a question people start to ask of you more and more.

Do you have feelings for any of the girls in your class?

The confusing part is that I did, but I don’t think it’s anything like what normal men experience.

It’s hard to pin down exactly what I even mean by that. Was it jealousy? Did I just think they were neat? When I did have these sorts of proto-crushes on people, two things were obvious.

1. I didn’t want to put my dick in them
2. I didn’t really think about them sexually at all

If you’ve made it this far, you know better than to conflate #2 with not having a sex drive. What I got off to was usually variations on the same theme: I wanted someone to have their way with me. I wanted to be tied up and disciplined. I wanted to be a damsel in distress. And, I never associated a face with any of those fantasies, perhaps simply because there was no face to associate with them. It was obvious none of the girls in class wanted to do that to me, and it was obvious none of the boys wanted to either.

The abstract and mostly faceless nature of my sexual fantasies made me feel even more alien, in a world that revolved around crushes and dating. I think this disconnect made me appear falsely asexual as I grew older, when really I just lacked a dating pool.

Ninth grade

I began attending East Bladen High School in 2005. I had known I was trans for a couple of years at this point, and my sexuality and gender problems were the same as they’d always been. By now, it was weighing on me that I needed to “come out”. To, somebody.

First of all, I was painfully aware of the fact that I could get medication to delay my puberty; if I could convince my parents I needed that. Or, if I was brazen enough to order it from overseas, which is actually disturbingly easy. While I considered myself to be basically “done with puberty” at this age, I still hoped antiandrogens might do something. And now that I’m older, I’m convinced they would help at most any age, if you couldn’t just go straight to doing “the thing” for some reason.

Maybe more significantly though, I was starting to burst at the seams trying to hold it all in. I really wanted to talk to somebody, but I lived in Bladen County. I didn’t have a single friend who was openly queer. I might’ve had my suspicions about one or two of them, but that isn’t as helpful.

I spent a lot of mental energy during this time, trying to do the calculus of figuring out who to trust. Like I was trying to crash-land a goddamn airplane. And, I’m not even good at calculus.

• My mother: Deeply religious, liberal (or maybe more “conservative Democrat”), still in touch with her gay friend from high school, rolls her eyes at gay people on TV, sort of cringed when she learned what “LGBT” meant for the first time
• My dad: Raised Baptist, doesn’t go to church but isn’t an atheist, Republican, never said much about queer people either way, more friendly with the lesbian neighbors than my mom
• Josh: Loyal, but sheltered; conservative leanings, too close, high probability of it getting back to my mom, can’t really avoid him if things get awkward, also can’t get me Lupron
• Emma: Casual acquaintance from middle school who sits at my lunch table and is in most of my classes

At the same time, I was weighing the choice between coming out and just ordering the meds myself.

My calculus resulted in a set of guidelines and principles for pursuing my goal of talking to someone, and ultimately getting medicated.

• There are risks either way, but I have to at least try to explain it to my mom.
• Susan is very obsessive and possessive; it’s unlikely that she would disown me, at least.
• Susan is also fairly gullible; I might be able to pass this off as an adolescent phase if I need to bail.
• If Susan makes it clear she won’t help me get meds, then I’ll look into DIY.

Milestone one: tell Susan

At some point during my first semester of high school, I decided that I needed to tell Susan. Because, I needed antiandrogens. And, I needed to explain what was going on with me before I could make a case for them.

She likes to read, so I thought I’d get her a book on the subject. In hindsight, I don’t think this was the way to do it at all; but, we’re both still here.

Susan is very high-strung. She’s emotionally volatile, she panics, she’s anxious, she worries about everything. She has good days and bad days. Some months it could feel like mostly bad days.

I spent a lot of time just thinking about when to tell her. I felt like I needed an imposing date in my mind, to prepare myself. The holiday season stressed her out. Everything stressed her out, really. Attempting to anticipate her future emotional state, I eventually settled on the day after Christmas. I’d be home from school for a couple of days, for better for worse, and the holiday season would be mostly over with.

On December 26^th, 2005, I spent a good portion of the day at Paula Conner’s house, performing a repair install of Windows XP on their family computer. I started getting cold feet as the date approached. I forget why exactly, but something about the impending situation compelled me to bail and regroup. I still commemorate the date privately somewhat, as the first time I at least tried to tell someone. It’s like gay Festivus.

---

My mother arranged for me to start working at the local Radio Shack franchise not long after I started high school. I was barely old enough to obtain a work permit, and was excited to start the position. I had known some of the folks there since I was younger; Susan also briefly worked there after the divorce, in between the camp for troubled youth and various Social Services offices as a caseworker. The store still provided dial-up internet service off a pair of T1 lines at the time, and had a cellular booth that resold Alltel and Cingular. The latter service probably brought in the most money, and was the only real competition in town to the US Cellular store across the street.

Now that I’m older, I wonder if Susan was just trying to get me out of her underwear drawer. We never were good at talking about things as a family.

Phase two

I considered whether I should resort to DIY or just push the date out and try again. In the weeks that followed, my mind quickly turned to telling somebody else first. It’s difficult to remember how one thing led to another; but telling a classmate started to feel safer, and telling Susan started to feel more dangerous.

I don’t know what I saw in Emma that made her seem like a kindred spirit. Frankly, I think it might’ve been her relative distance compared to the rest of my peer group. Though I was trying to crash-land an airplane at this point.

The time period between March and June 2006 is a blur. I started hitting it off with Emma in the spring around the time of the state Science Olympiad that year. We started “dating”, somehow, or whatever it is immature ninth graders do. I began playing this childish game of “I have a secret that I can’t tell you”, Emma eventually asked if I was a “transgender or intersex person” after a couple weeks of apparently dropping one too many hints or something, and… somehow I told her. I don’t even remember how, exactly. I guess it just stumbled out of me.

Emma initially let on like she was an FTM, before walking this back after about a week. I was gullible enough to believe I’d found a kindred spirit or something, and probably shared more about myself faster than I would have otherwise if I weren’t under this false impression. I still don’t know if she lied purposefully to extract information from me, or if this was a simple matter of immaturity; though in light of what followed, I’ve frankly leaned toward the former explanation most of my life. I told her I thought she’d pass well because of her build, and I feel pretty bad about that now.

Ultimatum one: tell Susan

For some brief, seemingly infinitesimal amount of time, this was a secret between me and Emma.

It didn’t take long for Emma to tell her mom. For a similarly short amount of time, this didn’t seem like that big of a deal.

In the months before Emma and I started “dating” or whatever, she began occasionally attending our church for weeknight activities like the youth music programs. This laid the backdrop for my first confrontation with Emma’s mom.

So, Emma tells me you want a sex change operation.

The three of us had found ourselves sitting on the steps outside my house, which was beside the church.

I was still very secretive about this part of my life, and found myself unprepared for the bluntness of Karen’s query. I don’t remember how or really if I answered the immediate question. Knowing the sort of person I was at that age, I probably stammered something about how it’s actually called SRS.

The outcome of this conversation wasn’t anything obviously bad. In fact, I was relieved, if not also petrified, to finally be talking about it with people. But, there was one problem.

I had to tell Susan.

Uncontrolled flight into terrain

Emma’s mother insisted that this couldn’t remain a secret between the three of us, and that I would have to tell my mother sooner rather than later. It wasn’t clear yet how exactly that was supposed to happen.

My “relationship” with Emma was… turbulent, and filled with petty drama. She soon proved to be a loose cannon. I was already dealing with some very adult problems at this age, and I’m afraid I overestimated the maturity level of people my age in general. I really needed to talk to an adult about this; but also, the right kind of adult.

We would have arguments over silly little bullshit, where she insisted things were one way, and I remained utterly convinced she was wrong. I don’t even remember what we fought over; but, it didn’t matter.

She started dropping hints, before outright gossiping about me with other people in our peer group. This made me very uncomfortable, and it seemed like I’d already lost control of my deepest, darkest secret. It felt like things were happening way too fast.

Emma eventually just outed me to my friends one day. She’d been passing notes with Josh and maybe a couple others, obviously snickering and talking behind my back about my little gender identity problem. I tried to grab the note out of Emma’s hand, at which point she accused me of hitting her and made me out to be some sort of batterer. Emma and her mother accused me of hitting a girl: a sort of cardinal sin in the southern United States. I could’ve done without the genderey implications.

So, Emma outed me to all my friends at school, and now Emma’s the victim. Ignorant sucker that I was, I arranged to go over to Emma and her mom’s house to try and smooth things over; probably having my mom drop me off.

Once I was there, this “fire” was quickly extinguished if it was ever even real. The subject quickly turned to Karen’s ultimatum. And as luck would have it, today was the day.

My mom returned to pick me up a few hours later. And it was then, with the help of Emma and her mom, that I… well actually, I hid behind the couch as Karen told her. This happened after a protracted session exceeding thirty minutes, in which my mother guessed multiple times that I had impregnated Emma, and multiple times we responded, “no”.

Susan actually responded positively, and gave me a hug. I don’t remember much directly after this; though, I was surprised when she acted like she never found the box. I expected us to finally… talk about that, you know? She nearly gaslit me into thinking today was the first day she’d learned about it.

Despite Susan’s initially supportive attitude, telling her was ultimately a mixed bag. The bottom line is that I didn’t get antiandrogens out of this, which is the main reason I’d been circling the drain about telling her in the first place. I didn’t continue nagging for blockers, because I was already planning to order DIY as a backup plan anyway, and I didn’t want her to suspect anything.

Susan’s advice to me regarding my situation at school was to “Lie and deny!” She’d say it over and over, like Johnnie fucking Cochran. Even back then, something just felt… off… about this. I was hoping for some back-up, so that I could be an out-and-proud transsexual girl at East Bladen High School. We were kind of already down the rabbit hole, and my friends didn’t even seem unsupportive.

My older self knows that this was, as my gut suggested, bad advice. I probably could’ve done better damage control by being openly transsexual at this point; but I’m figuring that’s not going to be easy in Bladen County, and not even my own mother wants me to be out of the closet yet. She’s always doting on about how she “loves me to the moon and back”, right?

Susan did start taking me to see a psychologist. We didn’t live in the sort of area one might find a career “gender therapist”, but my mother did manage to find someone in Fayetteville who at least had a transgender client or two before and worked with adolescents. Sylvia is the only one of my childhood therapists I can still name today.

---

On our way to our first appointment, we took a bit of a “wrong turn”. While looking for the office of Sylvia Clark, Susan got lost, and we stumbled upon a totally different practice. We went in looking for Sylvia, and were pressured into doing a session with these folks instead. I was already hesitant, knowing how niche my gender identity problem seemed to be.

Susan and I were taken into separate rooms to talk with two different counselors - who I suppose were just… idly standing by? After the session, the two of us came back together for a few minutes to talk about it.

• I was accused of having incestuous feelings toward my mom, or a sort of “Oedipus Rex” complex.
• It was made clear that I had violated my mother’s boundaries by going through her wardrobe.²
• They said that they help “All sorts of people like [me]! Sex addicts, child molesters…”

Fortunately, we didn’t return to this therapist. Sometimes, I do wish there was a middle ground between radical acceptance and… this brand of tough love. Because, at no point was it compassionately explained to me that yes, you were just born different and look, you really should stay away from mom’s lingerie. I kinda just had to… figure out how problematic that was as I got older. Sometimes it feels like I never really had “sex ed” at all. And I was just supposed to know not to be… well… a pervert.

---

Sylvia was an amazing therapist. This was curbed by the fact that I got to see her at most once a month; and with everything that was going on with me, I wasn’t exactly an open book. I could tell the drive to Fayetteville and back put a strain on Susan, and the greatest therapist in the world couldn’t do much for my problems with “one session every three weeks, sometimes”.

Now that I’m older, I think I would’ve been better off with a local adult, who wouldn’t insist on anything crazy like telling my mom. Sometimes I feel like I just had bad luck with Karen and Emma; but the extreme nature of my abnormality does make me think I could’ve had a similar, if not somewhat more tactful experience with the clergy or a guidance counselor.

---

Everyone knows rubbing alcohol kills germs. But, did you know 70% isopropyl alcohol is actually a more effective disinfectant than 91%? The reason is that the more dilute solution actually aids osmosis, allowing the alcohol to quickly kill the cell from the inside.

The thing with Emma eventually fizzled out after a few months of on-again-off-again drama. What began with her telling all my secrets, ended with her perniciously blending truth and fiction, in an often successful attempt to strain my relationships with my friends and make my life at school uncomfortable. For example, she told people I had crushes on Noah Cooper (which was true) and Cody White (which was not). Attempts to right misinformation were quickly met with a Streisand-like effect, and the ratio of truth to bullshit was typically such that the bullshit was taken seriously.

The relationship lasted in total just a few months, from around March to some diffuse point during the summer. I got dragged out of the closet, most of my core friends were actually supportive of the basic trans thing, but Emma had since taken to just making shit up, and people tended to believe her. What my old friends thought of me became a bit unpredictable, and I drifted apart from most of them in my sophomore year.

The utterly diabolical and seemingly unprovoked nature of Emma’s attacks has led me to draw a few conclusions about the situation.

• I suspect she was being coached on “mean girl” tactics by someone like her mother; unless this somehow wasn’t her first rodeo.
• Distracting me at school while we were contentiously applying to the School of Science and Math is something I highly suspect as a motive.
• I also highly suspect Emma’s mother was a TERF.³

---

In the wake of all this, Susan was repeatedly very curious whether I “liked boys or girls”. While I said “uh… both, I guess”, what I really meant was… I’m kinda just someone-fucking-me-sexual. But like, I have at least as much of a snuggle drive as I do a sex drive. But, I do have both. Is that… normal?

It didn’t feel normal, given the bluntness of the question and the expectation of an unambiguous response.

This has always been a difficult question for me to answer; there was a lot of peer pressure and social programming pushing me to “date women” when I was younger, but now that I’m older I think I might be more compatible with guys on a hardware level.

It often does feel like my sexuality is just “being the woman in bed”; as opposed to being explicitly attracted to individual people. This has at times made me feel like an autogynephile or a pervert throughout my life. I don’t really experience lust for the male or female body; except perhaps for my marked forced fellatio kink.

Although she’s warmed up to it over the years, my mother’s feelings toward my gender identity during this period were generally ambivalent; despite her initial enthusiasm about me going to therapy.

Tenth grade

My sophomore year of high school was defined by a number of key points.

• I started eating lunch in the band room to stay away from Emma and friends.⁴
• I was applying to the NC School of Science and Math.
• The Radio Shack experienced increasing financial instability, ultimately closing its doors over the summer.
• As I could tell I was getting therapy but no meds, my attention shifted toward ordering DIY.

While they usually had to beg people from our district to apply to the School of Science and Math, competition was unusually strong this year. Among the other hopefuls just from East Bladen were Anna, Emma, and Noah; with a couple other really strong contenders from West. Josh was conspicuously absent from the list of applicants; probably because he enjoyed the lake too much.

Anna and Emma were real straight-A types. They were the sort to really get upset if their grades weren’t perfect. And they’d probably bother the teacher over it, too. I was a “good student”, sure, but I was mostly unmotivated by academics. I did almost all of my homework on the bus or between classes, and considered it a near sin to let work encroach on the few hours I actually managed to get to myself each evening. Noah didn’t take it all that seriously, and hadn’t committed to accepting the invitation if it were extended to him.

---

By the holiday season, the post-breakup situation with Emma had begun to drive me mad. Shortly after Emma and I stopped “dating”, she started seeing Josh. The couple (who I referred to in my journals as “Jemma”) became a sort of new entity, which wasn’t really my friend anymore until the relationship’s end brought about its destruction.

Josh started to behave as if he thought I wanted to fuck him. My other old friends started treating me like some sort of creep and gave me the cold shoulder. I don’t know that I ever caught that vibe from Noah, but I started just avoiding them all.

To me, it was obvious Emma thrived on drama and loved gossip. It felt like she was running a 24-hour news cycle at my old lunch table, where all my friends would gather to hear the latest about how me and Cody were actually really scary and violent and would secretly get it on in private. Everyone else just seemed to view her as a charming, charismatic, smart young woman, and lapped up her seemingly endless stream of colorful stories.

I got totally new friends during this time period. Kevin, Jocelyn Paige… I was already friends with AJ from boy scouts, but we grew closer as part of this new group. A lot of the aforementioned folks were queer or rumored to be, which felt a little more comfortable. We never talked about what was going on with me. I think most of the school had heard some sensationalized variation of the tale that I “wanted a sex change operation” by now, though.

---

At some point in mid-high school, I had another puzzling interaction with Tommy in private. At least, that’s what I remember. It’s probably another one of those Slaughterhouse-Five moments.

While avoiding specifics, he said he knew I was going through a lot right now; but there was this little cabal at church that understood and really had my back.

He then told me that he wanted me to do the scripture reading for the next service, and that I should pay extra close attention to the sermon; that it would be about me. This was an unusual request; though I think I’d done it once before as part of a “youth Sunday”, this appeared to be a one-off affair.

While I didn’t seem to document these next two key points, they are at least accurate to memory (and might still be noted in a journal somewhere).

• The scripture reading was the first several verses from Revelation 21.
• This was for All Saint’s Day; 2005, 6, or 7 I think?

I recited the scripture reading without incident, for which my oration received minor praise.

The sermon was much more puzzling. I waited anxiously to hear what it was about. Some anonymous transsexual girl? It’s probably something more mundane. A couple of people conspicuously switched pews so that they were adjacent to me; in particular, the Richardsons or the Mitchells got the Lees to move from their pew behind us where they always sat.

The sermon wasn’t about me at all. It was about a woman in her early 30s. She was struggling with mental health; she had a traumatic childhood, which included sexual abuse. Tommy stumbled unusually over his words, and appeared visually nervous as he described her as having “multiple personalities”. Her family didn’t really love her. Her mother was described as obsessive, snooping around her daughter’s house, almost stalker-like. The relationship between the mother and daughter had deteriorated. #TODOWording?

The sermon went on to describe the woman’s frustrated romantic life, or lack thereof. She’d never been in a real relationship, or even really gotten a valentine.⁵ She felt almost undateable. She thought marriage wasn’t for people like her. She’d lost faith in most everything.

At the beginning, I really did some mental gymnastics to try and interpret the woman from the sermon as myself. Was he fudging my age as a cover-up? Was the multiple personality thing a metaphor for being transsexual? Eventually I could no longer suspend my disbelief, and I had to accept this sermon was simply about someone else.

This was a long time ago, so I’m sure I’m missing bits and pieces; but, the story had a happy ending. I think somebody heard how she felt, and she ended up getting asked out on a date that lead to an amazing relationship or maybe even a happy marriage. I think there may’ve been some element of drama with the man calling off some prior engagement. I don’t remember the details.

At the end, all of these people who had conspicuously gathered around me before the sermon told me, “We love you.” At least one person (I think either Patty or Tammy) said “We love you”… some girl’s name. It wasn’t Elizabeth, or Sarah, or Morgan. It could’ve been Rachael for all I know. I… don’t remember.

I think there was even enough commotion for Josh to hear over where he was, and he jokingly said “We love you, Ethan” or something. Neither of us really understood what was going on; except that I was supposed to be conspicuously loved this Sunday. And, I had been called a girl’s name I didn’t recognize.

I remember this woman’s story creating quite a stir at church; and, my mother was conspicuously vocal about what a bad mom the mother from the sermon was. She had an air of “methinks thou doth protest too much”; despite the fact that the sermon was clearly about someone else.

---

Regardless of whether there was any truth to it, it often felt like Emma and her friends were conspiring to torment me and make me out to be perverse or abusive throughout my sophomore year. My cringy high school journal reminded me that Anna would sometimes act almost as a human shield to “protect” Emma from me; and that some little old church lady I didn’t know approached me with questions about “what I did to Emma”. I particularly remember Emma viciously gossiping about me and distorting my little gender identity problem during the civics and economics class we both took together. I was driven so mad that I took to carrying a handheld voice recorder in my pocket, in a desperate attempt to show people what an asshole she was being when no one else was looking. While I did gather numerous recordings throughout the year, it was surprisingly difficult to convey what was going on without a “through my eyes” view of the situation; and, editing the recordings to find the relevant bits proved to be a very labor intensive activity with little payoff.

The most memorable incident happened between myself and this other girl who was in Emma’s gossip group in the aforementioned civics class. The class was really easy; I’d often finish my work in the first 20 minutes, and spent the rest of the time staring off into space and trying not to let Emma and her friends get under my skin. It was during this latter time in the period, when I was awakened from my meditative state to Emma’s friend very loudly shouting

EWWWWWWWW! GROSS!

Still, I was barely roused. I kept staring blankly into space, trying not to think about them.

STOP LOOKING UP MY SKIRT, YOU PERVERT!

It was at this moment, that I realized Emma’s friend was addressing me in particular. At some point during my trance, this girl who sat a few desks ahead of me in the next row had turned around in her seat to gossip with her friends, while wearing a miniskirt that absolutely did not pass the fingertip test; and she was now very loudly accusing me of looking at her underpants in front of the whole class. My gaze was higher up; but, it’s really hard to explain something like that as a guy and not look guilty. While I can’t prove she did this on purpose, I found it suspicious given her connection to Emma. I’m glad nothing more came out of it except for her making me look bad.

This incident, combined with the band director getting fired over an accusation of sexual misconduct from a disgruntled clarinet player that was widely known amongst the student body to be false, galvanized me as being an “egalitarian, not a feminist”. My mother even had her own story about some teenage boys from the troubled youth camp she worked at getting a female counselor they didn’t like fired in this same manner, and subsequently joking about it in the dining room. I was actually taken aback when my college women and gender studies class tried to teach me that false accusations were simply a misogynistic myth.

The behavior from Emma and her friends was usually more subtle; loudly giggling about “National Coming Out Day”, or accusing me of hiding an erection by standing behind the wall in the band room, for example.

Susan has always seemed to have an idealized view of Emma and I’s four-month clusterfuck of a relationship. She was quick to blame me for the tension between us; and didn’t really even seem to care that she outed me to all my friends and turned them against me.

Susan wasn’t handling my gender thing very well. Maybe she tried to be supportive sometimes; but she was an absolute wreck after she had a visibly transgender woman come into work for food stamps. She really didn’t want me to do it after that. She was also convinced I fucked some dude (Carl?) from Goldsteins, who I went home with one day after work to fix his computer.

---

Anna and Emma got in; Noah and I did not. In retrospect, I was probably not a good enough student to keep up with the curriculum anyway, and I mostly just wanted to go because they had a gay-straight alliance.

There were a couple of upsides to this, ultimately.

• Emma moved away, and I hardly ever saw her again except in passing.
• I was in a better position to start DIY.

I tried to obtain a PO box, but was turned away because I was underage. This meant that I had to receive packages directly at home; which was still doable, because Susan was a single working mom. I also had an after school job, which made funding the venture more practical.

I placed my first order during the summer of 2007, after sending off a money order that I was able to purchase underage. I received the package on a sunny weekday without any trouble.

At that age, I was really nervous about taking the pills. I learned how to take my own blood pressure, out of concern that the meds would cause electrolyte problems that I somehow wouldn’t notice.

Now that I’m older, I realize all of my fears were unfounded. Particularly as a seasoned elder tran who’s taken this stuff for years, I’m very confident what I received was exactly what was stated on the bottle: some number of generic Aussie 100 mg spironolactone tablets, labeled for the south Pacific retail market.

My plan was to start at 50 mg of spironolactone per day, and ramp up to a final dose of 150 mg/day. I executed this plan, also without any trouble. I had no unwanted side effects, save for conspicuous salt cravings.

It was around this time that I had my last appointment with Sylvia. I remember being nervous about telling her I’d started DIY; I expected her to chastise me for it, but instead she just seemed to support my decision and wish me the best. I could tell the monthly trips to Fayetteville took their toll on my single working mom, and I guess we figured I’d had enough therapy for a while.

The second shipment came on a Saturday. While this was the most perilous day of the week, I still made it to the mail before Susan, and played it cool with the package. Hey, I’m getting pretty good at this!

Eleventh grade

With Emma and Anna’s departure, the second half of my high school experience quickly returned to an earlier status quo, and my friends started acting normal around me again. The Emma years were rarely brought up, and we carried on as if nothing had happened. It was like the Bourbon Restoration, without the whiskey.

I had made some money over the summer by helping Radio Shack shutter its doors, but was then briefly jobless before taking up employment at a computer shop owned by a family I went to school and church with.

I continued going steady with spironolactone. Band camp, Caswell, Beta club… I’d put the pills in an old bottle of guaifenesin with my name on it or some shit. I was a good kid. Nobody ever suspected me of being on drugs or anything…

---

I bought a modern laptop during my second semester of high school, after I’d been working at Radio Shack for several months. The laptop was quite versatile, so lots could be said about it.

Anyway, I started looking at porn around the second semester of my junior year. The fact that I have a history of viewing pornography is, perhaps, the most normal and relatable aspect of my sexuality. In fact, at times it’s given me a false sense that I’m really just a “normal dude” who has some kinks and paraphilias to work through.

My earliest and most innocent urge was that I wanted to look at pictures of teenage girls in bikinis. I’d sort of fantasize about abstract encounters with them, but there was never anything penetrative about it. I sort of just wanted to… masturbate, while looking at a picture of a girl in a bikini.

One of the first things I did, was print out a dozen or so inkjet pictures of teenage girls in bikinis to serve as a masturbatory aid, which I kept in a large envelope. Although I had a laptop, it was difficult to work with while keeping myself in a hogtie. Yes, I was tying myself up with a vibrator while wearing women’s clothing and looking at pictures of girls in bikinis. I haven’t got the energy for analyzing this aspect of my childhood, and would rather leave it up to the reader to determine what I am, exactly. I kept the envelope under my bed, usually on top of the original shoebox I felt I had little reason to hide anymore. We didn’t really talk about what I did in private, but Susan always made a point of telling me she respected my privacy.

This innocent phase was short-lived, and my taste in porn quickly shifted toward the thing that I’m into, which is BDSM. Like the gateway drug theory or something. Except I only smoked pot for a few months before I started doing meth, or whatever the fuck BDSM is.

---

EEEEE-THAAAAAN!

She sounds pissed off. What did she find back there?

I frantically rushed into my room - half expecting to find her holding a bottle of spironolactone.

What is this?

She used a tone of voice I’d never heard before, as she stood there clutching the envelope with the bikini girls. As if I’d been caught cheating on her.

I absolutely panicked and snatched the envelope from her hands. I ran from the house and threw it in the nearest trash can, ripping it up in the process.

I returned, barely able to catch my breath, my mother still standing in my room.

… WHAT. Is in THIS. BOX??

I must’ve said something like “Look, mom, really… You know what’s in there…”; with the most “are you serious” expression imaginable.

She was concerned that I had made noose-like self tightening knots with shoestring and the like, which I tended to just keep in the box and not re-tie to save time. I didn’t think the knots were big enough to fit around my head, but it’s been a while.

DO I HAVE TO GOOGLE WHAT TRANSSEXUALS DO WITH ROPE?!

I eventually had to explain that I… tie myself up for fun. And no, I don’t have a breath play kink. And I’m also not suicidal.

Do you tie yourself up while you’re wearing women’s clothing?

… No… They’re both just… secrets I didn’t want anyone to know about. So I just… used the same box.

I think it was at this point, when Susan said what might’ve been the most creepy thing she’s ever uttered.

Soon, there’ll be no more secrets between us!

I forgot until recently the impact this event had on me as a teenager.

I had a lot of unhealthy ideas about sex, and female sexuality in particular. At this age, I was under the honest impression that women didn’t really want sex in the same way as men, and didn’t experience sexual arousal in the same sense. I was probably influenced by a blend of Christian modesty and my mother’s restrictive prudishness; as well as contemporary sitcoms like “Everybody Loves Raymond”, where denial of sex was often used as a plot device in which the responsible wife would discipline the chauvinistic or misbehaving husband. The implication, certainly in my impressionable mind, was that sex was something Ray needed, and Debra could provide, at a cost. I came to view normal sexual relationships as necessarily transactional and manipulative, akin to the relationship between the Founders and the Jem’Hadar;⁶ and to some extent, I came to view most heterosexual men as “pussy whipped”.

But me? I didn’t need sex, like these men. I just wanted it. I wanted somebody to fuck me like a woman. But, I was starting to feel like women didn’t even want to be fucked like women. My growing desire to be fucked, and to be submissive in the bedroom, started to feel like a mere fetishization of womanhood, rather than the genuine experience.

This nagging conflict between my awakening sexuality and my belief that horniness was a fundamentally “masculine” state of mind came to a head when I found myself doing exactly what Blanchard accuses trans women of doing: lying about their private experiences to make themselves appear less sexually depraved and more authentically feminine. Before the incident, I felt like I’d already told Susan what I did in private, basically. Sure, I left out the part where I masturbate with a vibrator while tying myself up in mom’s lingerie, but I gave her the gist, right? But, now it felt like I hadn’t really come out at all. And if there was anything recognizably feminine about what I was doing, I probably wouldn’t have gotten yelled at like I was a horny teenage boy who couldn’t contain his sexual urges, by his chaste mom who has an obviously authentic female gender identity.

I went to school the next morning, knowing I’d gotten in trouble for one of the most unquestionably masculine things a teenage boy can do: masturbating to pornography.⁷ There’s one thing I couldn’t deny; I did always want to have normal teenager problems.

This might’ve been the beginnings of a new line of thought: that I really could just be a normal man, if only I surrounded myself with a bit of normalcy. I lacked male role models. My dad wasn’t around. I had limited socialization growing up. And god dammit, I had been a weird little middle schooler. I started to question whether I really just went through a “crossdressing phase” when I was younger. Maybe I convinced myself I was ackchyually a Real Woman™ on the inside after finding weird shit on the internet, and lost touch with reality for a bit. At any rate, it felt like the evidence was mounting against me being a “true transsexual”.

I was really at a crossroads in my life, and I felt like my psyche was being pulled in two different directions.

In the spring, I was distracted by an impending Science Olympiad date; probably among other things. I forgot to take my spiro one evening. And then the next day, I forgot to take it too. I found myself not having taken my meds for a full week.

It was now, when I uttered to myself that I had found a more mature place that was beyond gender. I had… transcended gender.

What really happened is that I found myself in a less mature place that was beyond denial. I had… not transcended jack shit.

More importantly though, I think I determined that I simply couldn’t be the same thing as a real woman; even if I was born different. Women were like my mother. Women were like Emma. They were almost intrinsically incomprehensible from my perspective. Whatever it was they enjoyed doing in the bedroom, it wasn’t… what I was doing. Real women talk about having crushes on boys, or liking a man in uniform. They like… all of that girl stuff, that makes my eyes glaze over. A quarter of their brains seem to be devoted to gossip and being a mean girl to their enemies. They’re all like “that bride is SO LOVELY!” The older I got, the more unrelatable women seemed; and, the more it felt like it was probably just a sex thing. An application of Occam’s razor suggested it was highly unlikely I was transsexual and into BDSM; and sheer probability led me to assume my “gender dysphoria” was probably related to the latter.

Something I often forget about myself at this age, is that I’m not sure I fully understood that it was normal for women to masturbate. I mean, I’m pretty sure I knew what I vibrator was; so I’m not quite sure where the disconnect was, exactly. I don’t think I fully grasped how normal it was until I got involved in the BDSM community in college. I remember obsessing over how frequently I masturbated and had erections while I was on spiro; thinking that both of these numbers being lower would make me “more of a woman” or something.

When I was young, I remember my mother telling me in response to a question about sex, that she’d only done it once, to conceive me. Even at that age, I said I didn’t believe her. Now that I’m older, I’m not convinced she wasn’t telling the truth. This woman is really weird about sex; and she unfortunately passed that on to me. I don’t think she had a great childhood herself.

Despite the unpopularity of the theory, when I took an objective look at myself at this age, autogynephilia appeared to be the most likely explanation for what was going on with me. I didn’t really wear women’s clothing to do my homework, or play video games, or dabble with Linux, or watch re-runs of Seinfeld. I did it to get off. When I was younger, I thought that I was transsexual, simply because of my deep desire to be a girl. But now that I was older, I didn’t feel like I’d been born a woman. I felt like I’d been born a pervert. My problem just seemed too sexual. And I guess women at the time seemed too chaste.

I had dreams of being able to live an outwardly normal female life when I was younger. But now all I saw in the mirror was an overweight deep voiced hairy pervert. I knew better than to think I could ever be anyone’s “damsel in distress”.

I didn’t feel like I fit the “true transsexual” stereotype of someone who just needed to present themselves as a woman to feel whole and complete in everyday life. But, I did still wish I were a woman, quite badly. But, I couldn’t really get excited about make-up. Or the loveliest bride.

What I’m sure felt like a “small break to see how trans we really are” at the time, ultimately turned into a nearly ten year-long gap in taking my medication. Of course, even token autogynephile Anne Lawrence still takes her medication. So, I guess my plan seems a little bit silly in hindsight.

I suppose I just couldn’t handle the idea of transitioning, and knowing I was totally doing it as a sex thing that’s entirely detached from normal female sexuality.

---

I attended Governor’s School this summer, and didn’t re-up my spironolactone. I still thought of myself as “quasi-transgender”; but in light of everything going through my head, I sort of just wanted to try being a normal guy.

Governor’s School was probably the first time I was exposed to religious and political ideas that were very different from what I grew up with. It was the first time I really talked to an atheist about atheism. It was the first time I heard someone unironically utter the phrase “What’s wrong with Marxism?”⁸

It’s been a while, but I remember there being different “tracks”, and I was on the science track. One of the classes was Evolution, in which we were encouraged to choose a stance on the issue and defend it in debates with other students. Creationism, Darwinism… I enthusiastically chose “theistic evolution” at this age, along with a handful of others. It was a cool class. It was the first time I’d heard the theory that dinosaurs had feathers.

For one of the assignments, we watched a short animated video that was very much made from the hard atheist prospective. It essentially panned humans as obvious primates with made-up religions who wouldn’t stop flinging poo at each other, and who were somehow too short-sighted to see that they were clearly just slightly more intelligent monkeys. We were then asked to write an essay on how we felt about it.

I wrote of how I was offended by the film’s lack of perspective on more moderate religion; but as I was writing this, I couldn’t help but notice that I wasn’t really offended at all. It was just how I was supposed to feel, as a Christian.

For one of the later assignments, we were split into pairs, and I was to have a sort of one-on-one debate with a fellow student who was an atheist. I think this was my first time hearing the “God of the gaps” argument. I walked away feeling like I had a lot to think about. My partner dusted off his hands like he’d just finished his Tuesday night homework.

I didn’t leave Governor’s School identifying as an atheist; but, I was starting to chip away at some of the religious bullshit.

Twelfth grade

I entered twelfth grade with the idea that I was transsexual as far out of mind as it had ever been. I took dual enrollment at the community college in the morning, and thus only had two high school classes each semester of my senior year. I’m also pretty sure I took band that year, which would’ve made AP English and Calculus my only other high school courses.

While I was nominally enrolled in AP Calculus, I didn’t really learn calculus in high school, in effect.

For the first semester, I think there was a scheduling conflict, either with dual enrollment or band. I was told that I was smart and could catch up, and was allowed to enroll only in the second semester “integration” portion of the course. I was already hesitant about this, considering math is my weakest subject.

The bigger problem is that the only person at the school able to teach calculus, Mrs. Hall, had fallen gravely ill with a long-term liver disease she’d been managing. While I had a handful of lessons with Mrs. Hall, the vast majority were covered by a substitute who did not and could not teach Calculus; Mrs. Hall passed away toward the end of the school year.

So, I took one semester of a two semester AP course, that ultimately didn’t even cover that much. I did manage to learn the chain rule and Riemann sums, at least. It was ultimately decided that we didn’t have to take the AP exam, given the unusual situation.

When I look back on this, I wish I’d have taken calculus at BCC, and I don’t remember why I didn’t. I got a couple hard classes out of the way, but on advisement I also took a lot of things (biology, geography, psychology) that didn’t count toward my university program. To be fair, I hadn’t picked a college when I first enrolled.

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I was accepted into NC State, UNC, and Georgia Tech, choosing to attend State along with Josh and a handful of other folks from East Bladen.

Sex ed

Like grains of sand through the hourglass, I eventually found myself with a complete pile of sexual education.

Okay - this is kind of a lie. I still don’t really understand sex, but I found myself with enough sexual education to be dangerous. Or, with enough rope to hang myself. Is that… too soon?

Two things seemed obvious by the twelfth grade.

• Masturbating in your mother’s lingerie is fucking weird.
• If something that fucking weird was a symptom of gender dysphoria, it would definitely be a bullet point in the DSM-IV, right? On the contrary, “weird sex stuff” actually seemed to be part of the differential diagnosis for “true transsexualism”.

Ergo, I’m not a “true transsexual”.

There must’ve been some point when I fully realized how fucking creepy it is to masturbate in your mom’s lingerie. I don’t remember when I had enough sand, and I didn’t seem to journal about it. It must’ve been akin to how Adam and Eve felt when they first realized they were butt-ass naked. Or like having to wean yourself off breast milk after realizing you’re way too old to be doing that.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to resent Christian conservatism and its desire to whitewash human sexuality, especially in children. They want sex to be something that’s “18+”, if not “for a man and a woman after marriage”; but, I was dealing with sex problems by the end of elementary school! Was I just… too young to know what was happening to my body? I remember getting hard playing with Katelyn and Cassie whenever our play involved themes like confinement. I just had to wait until I was older to have enough grains of sand to understand why I liked that so much? Then, when I was finally old enough, I felt guilty. Was that a scene? Was that consensual? I mean, there wasn’t anything sexual about it; for them. But, I really liked this stuff. Did I unknowingly coerce them into topping me by directing our child’s play toward themes that made me aroused, before I understood what sexual arousal even was?

Of course, none of this would’ve been a problem if another human could’ve just explained all of this to me at what I consider to be the appropriate age; but, Christians need to put sex in the same category as “drugs” and “rock and roll”. Increasingly, the Christian viewpoint seemed to be that the pious needed to avoid evil temptations, like sex, and porn, and maybe even homosexuality; but as I got older, these things didn’t seem like choices to me. They just seemed like variations of the human condition. You either like BDSM or you don’t. You’re either gay or you aren’t. I was even starting to laugh at some of my peers who already claimed to have “pornography addictions”. Bruh, you’re just a straight dude.

I was frustrated that, in my case, withholding information about sex when I was younger appeared to have the opposite effect as intended. If I had known more, I would’ve curbed my enthusiasm while playing with my friends. The problem is confounded by the fact that, if most adults did see a nine-year-old boy running around with two girls and a boner, they’d just assume he was getting to the age where he wanted to fuck one or both of the girls, when there could be something completely different happening in his head. For all I know, that’s why we stopped going to Katelyn and Cassie’s house.

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My mother never really brought up the weird stuff from my childhood again; except, when she came to me in a panic after David Carradine died. She is… very afraid of “losing” me.

I carried on with my budding pornography habit undeterred; but, I didn’t make any more print-outs. I started downloading pictures and making slideshows with them. I initially kept these in an encrypted archive on my computer, before ultimately setting up a VM for the purpose.

I liked this better than watching videos or looking at any one particular image. After a point, it felt like I had a scene in my head, and I mostly just wanted to arrange a dozen or so pictures to go along with it. Videos usually broke too far with the fantasy I’d built up, and often had long cuts to things I didn’t really want to look at like her vulva.

I would sometimes seek out the video to a porn I really liked the pictures of, usually to be disappointed. Or sometimes, to be satisfied by that two minute segment I was looking for, or even a still frame in the video that just isn’t comparable to anything in the high-res photo shoot. I’m not sure I’ve ever even watched a complete porno, from start to finish. I always just skip around, because I’m trying to get somewhere, goddammit.

So, by now I had a marked forced fellatio kink, which only made me feel more autogynephilic. My perception of real women was that they viewed giving head as a chore; and indeed one of the battle cries of feminism seems to be “You men need to reciprocate oral sex more often!” My identity was beginning to shift away from being transsexual, and toward being a kinkster. Whatever I was, I didn’t think I was evil, and I wanted to explore it with like-minded people; who I assumed shared my plight.