For many who have a blurry sense of their gender identity, it may have been a silent but prolonged fight against the rigid norms of outside society. Dale*, 20, from Bulgaria, shared with Jinqian Li of their 20-year long inner struggle with gender identity and sexuality. They said:
‘“Who am I and who should I be?” This is a question I have been keeping asking myself for the last 20 years.
My journey with my gender identity has been going on for as long as I can remember.
I recall from time to time going to nursery at the age of three and always looking at the girls green with envy.
They would wear their colourful, frilly dresses, braid their pretty long hair, paint their nails and just express themselves in the way they looked. They would all play games of princesses and fairies and all those things three-year-old me wished to be part of so badly. However, growing up in a post-socialist country – Bulgaria, children were fed gender norms fresh out of the womb. Even at a young age, I knew what I was feeling was wrong, though nobody could ever tell me why. I was born as a boy. I was meant to act and dress like one but it felt ‘unnatural’.
I dwelled upon these feelings for years and they would make less and less sense to me – why would a coin flip at the time of my birth decide who I can and can’t be. Was I meant to live my entire life as someone else simply because fate decided to? As I grew up I learned to keep it to myself and rebelled in my quiet little ways – I grew my hair out when I was eight (and has never had it short since). I would steal my mother’s makeup and dresses and fantasise that just for a moment I could go out on the street and feel beautiful and everyone could see that there was more to me than cars, superheroes and all the stuff I was told a boy should be.
As I entered puberty, I encountered a new struggle – my sexuality. Though I had crushes on girls, I quickly realised I felt the same for boys.
At this point I knew I could tell nobody about it. I went into a period of hating myself – there was no one else to blame for the way I felt after all.
Some nights I would pray to God I would wake up the next morning and love being a boy. Other nights, I would pray to be a girl.
I moved out at 18 to the UK, thinking independence would finally set me free. I was half the world away from home, with nobody to judge me. I could be anybody. I found that thought terrifying. I realised that all the years I spent hiding and being ashamed of myself made me want to be anything other than who I was.
At the end of the day, I didn’t want to be a boy, and I didn’t want to be a girl. I wanted to be myself.
You can’t get a first class ticket on your journey to gender identity. I would wake up some mornings, braid my hair, shave my entire body and paint my face with make-up. Other days I would grow a beard and wear a sweatshirt and jeans. But I have finally learned to enjoy the experience of discovering who I want to be, and the freedom that comes with it. I love my body all the same, no matter what clothes it’s covered in, what colours I have painted it in today, or how other people will see it because under all of that, there is still flesh like any other, and beneath it – a heart that I no longer have to twist and mould to fit the narrow box of gender norms.’
*Dale is a pseudonym.
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