But, I didn’t give up; I just continued refusing to shave or wear dresses. I gravitated towards boys’ clothes. It started slowly: Oh, here’s one Pokémon shirt because I love Pokémon. Soon, I was only shopping in the boys’ section. My mother (and I want to make it very clear that she has come a very, very long way) is Christian. She had a lot of problems with homosexuality, and she perceived me to be a homosexual female because I was very masculine in how I acted and dressed. At one point, she came to me and said, “You’re so angry, and I know why.” I said, “Wait, you do?” And, she said, “You’re a lesbian.”

I was about 11 or 12 at the time. And, I knew I liked girls, but I’d never, ever, ever identified with the term “lesbian” — calling yourself a lesbian means asserting yourself as a woman, and I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to live in that gray area where I didn’t have to say that I was anything. So, the conflict started again. Apparently, being a lesbian doesn’t excuse you from shaving your legs.

I found out about the word “transgender” when I was watching YouTube. I clicked on somebody’s video, and he looked like a girl. Then, I watched another video from, like, two years later — he was a dude! And, you know, I was 12 and thinking, Holy crap. What did he just do? I want to do it!

By the time I was 13, I started questioning things that the Christian Bible considered “sinful.” My body was betraying me more and more, the older I got. It was a horrifying experience — one that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. There’s nothing that I can think of that compares to the emotional and mental anguish. I was bullied a lot for being masculine and for being perceived as a lesbian. I was chubby and I was different. It was a cacophany of bad.

That’s when I finally revisited the idea that maybe male vs. female wasn’t all there was to it. I actually came across a scientific study showing differences in the brains of cis males and trans females — despite both being born with “male” bodies. I thought, Wow, maybe I’m not crazy.

Just before my 15th birthday, I told my mom. I was going to wait longer, but it just became so much mental trauma to live as two people. It was such constant, extreme dysphoria that I realized if I didn’t tell her, I wasn’t going to survive. She took it pretty well.