"Becoming"

There is an idea that someone who is transgendered is "becoming" another gender.

If it says "F" on your birth certificate, for instance, like it (currently) says on mine, then you are considered female. Okay, cool.

So let's say that you spend your entire life feeling incorrect. That at the age of five, you tell everyone at school that you're really a boy. That you get made fun of for it, but you insist. So then you're just a five-year-old with an overactive imagination who watched too many stories with male heroes, right? Uh.

And let's say you grow up, being told that you're female, and expected to act a certain way. So you do it. You wear dresses, and makeup (sort of, for awhile), and you go to prom and you imagine getting married and you get a boyfriend and on and on and on.

But it's not right, and you know it.

Years later, you finally go back to what you'd been saying all along.

I am really a boy.

This is a super-condensed version, but obviously, a true story.

When you finally tell everyone - your family, your friends, whoever - they decide that you are becoming a man.

Well that's wonderfully philosophical of them, isn't it? We can be here all night, talking about what really makes you a boy or a man. Personally, I still consider myself a boy and not a man, even though I'm old enough to drink and all that jazz. It's just not a concept I've come into yet, and I'm fine with being just plain old Boy Wonder for awhile. Hell, maybe forever.

I digress.

The people around me are not being philosophical when they think that I am "becoming" male. They're taking it literally, but they're also entirely wrong.

I've always been male. I have breasts, because I can't just magically wish them away. They don't make me a woman. Gender is between my ears, not between my legs, but thanks for playing.

I'm sick of this mentality that states that trans people are "really" the gender that they were assigned which is incorrect. Actually, they're not! I am really a dude. Chaz Bono is really a dude. He did not become one, anymore than I am becoming one. We were already male, just, most people didn't realize it.

This obsession that biology is how to judge is absolutely ridiculous. Other cultures have more than just the binary gender. Not all other cultures, obviously, and many people are totally resistant to the idea overall. The idea that someone is really anything, based on an outsider's perception, is wrong.

No one can tell you what you really are, based on anything they know or think they know about you. You are really yourself.

I am really myself, regardless of how people judge me. I'm a boy who just happens to have breasts, until I can afford to get the damn things removed.

Biology does not define me. And it shouldn't define anyone else.