However, I cannot remember what my first thoughts were. The earliest I can remember from my childhood are a few random things ... the structure of the building where I lived, the windows in our apartment, the train tracks that I could see in the distance from the windows, the layout of furniture at home, the rough stone tiles at home that hurt when I fell down at home, ... and that sky-blue dress with a silver belt that the girl next door wore.
I think I was about 3 years old then. My baby-sitter, a 14-15 year old girl, used to live with us. Her parents were poor and they had let her stay with my family in exchange for educating her. My parents were not rich with money, but they have always been rich in their heart with compassion and in their brains with knowledge. My parents bought books for my baby-sitter, which she and I would sit and learn together. She would make sure that I was not hungry and not angry, to the extent possible. She was like an elder sister to me. I was an extremely talkative little child. Perhaps I learned to communicate well by talking with her and listening to her ideas.
We played lots of little games, with words, and numbers, and puzzles, and plastic bricks. We also played creative imaginary role-play games, non-sexual of course. I loved playing the role of a doctor. I was often sick, with painful tonsils, and my visits to the doctors' offices introduced me to the perforated prescription booklets. I wanted to be a doctor, not because I had any intention of curing patients or making money, but rather because I wanted to get my hands on perforated booklets. I remember using a needle to drive holes into the pages in a book, in order to make linear perforations to tear away pages.
While the role-playing was a creative activity, I observed that other children had brothers or sisters of their own. As an only child, I felt lonely. I recognized that although my baby-sitter was like a sister, she was not my real sister. Besides, she was too old. I wanted to have someone my age around home. I would role-play with an imaginary brother, not sister, playing some game or sport. I am not sure if this has anything to do with my gender identity, but my choice of a baby brother over a baby sister demonstrates that I was not necessarily interested in only stereotypical feminine activities. I wanted a baby brother so that I could indulge in more non-feminine games and sports too.
My baby-sitter took very good care of me, but she never agreed to buy me clothes like the girl next door wore. It felt unfair and unjust. I was angry and upset. I had also begun to recognize the social segregation between boys and girls. Boys were supposed to do a certain set of things, while girls were supposed to do a certain other set of things. I preferred many of the things that girls were supposed to do, but I also liked a few things that boys were supposed to do. I guess I wanted the option to choose the specific activities I wanted to do. I needed options more granular than choosing between being a boy or a girl. I soon began to recognize that I did not even have the option to choose between being a boy or a girl. The choice had already been made for me, by someone else. I was supposed to grow up as a boy, whether I liked it or not. Not only did I have no option, but the gender-specific rules also seemed unnecessarily stringent.
My baby-sitter probably told my parents about my persistent request for the sky-blue dress with a silver belt. Or perhaps she did not explain in so much detail, but she may have told my parents that I had been demanding new clothes. Or maybe she said nothing, but my parents overheard me asking for those clothes. Or it could be just that my parents wanted to buy me good clothes, perhaps because I was growing up fast. My parents took me out and bought me new clothes. However, those clothes were not the ones that girls my age wore. The clothes were short-trousers and shirts that made me look like a very smart boy.
My parents used to bring cash home for our monthly expenses. We are talking about a time two decades before ATMs were prevalent in that part of the world. Bank branches were few and far between. Besides, the only vehicle my family owned was one bicycle. With cash at home, my parents used it to teach me arithmetic. I learned that my parents had to live with this limited amount of money each month.
In addition, my dad used to tell me about his goal of constructing a large house for his parents in his home-town (more like home-remote-village), about a thousand miles away from where we lived. My dad always asked the leading question, "don't you want to build a good house in our home-town?" We were living in public housing and my parents were building a home for my dad's parents in his home-town. Why? Of course, I did not have the vocabulary to express my surprise at this lack of logic. I do not think that I ever answered his leading question with a positive response, but he mistook my silence for my agreement. I seemed to be reluctantly but silently agreeing with whatever my parents wanted to do.
We did not have enough money to spend on luxury items, but my parents always bought me the best food. Or I should say, they always bought me what they thought was best and what I thought was the best. Sweet limes were my favorite. I would gobble up many sweet limes when these seasonal fruits were available. My neighbors noticed excessive peels of sweet limes in our garbage and wondered how we managed to generate so many peels. Pastries and cakes were my other favorites. My parents bought them for me often. I also enjoyed lots of healthy foods. In fact, I would have enjoyed even more fruits and vegetables as a child (I say so because when I demanded greater variety of food during my adolescent years, I enjoyed most of that variety). However, during my early childhood, my mom would only cook whatever my dad liked to eat, which was a narrow and fixed set of dishes cooked in only a fixed set of ways. During early childhood, my parents took me with them when we bought all of these items - fruits, vegetables, fish, cakes, pastries, etc. We had only a limited amount of cash for the entire month. Spending too much would leave us with no money, and no money meant no food. I began to recognize the need to be thrifty.
My parents also instilled in me the value of keeping a promise. Of course, I was not capable of making promises after thorough evaluation at the age of 4, but my parents influenced me into making promises about things that they wanted me to do. And I kept each one of my promises.
When my parents took me out to buy clothes, the clothing store-keepers unhesitatingly brought shirts and short-pants for me from various shelves in their store. It seemed instinctive for them to bring me those clothes. Never once did they bring me anything meant for girls. My parents browsed through the inventory that the store-keeper presented to us and picked shirts and trousers that suited me well. Never once did my parents seem to ask the store-keeper for clothes meant for girls.
It seemed strange that I was the only one who thought that I should be wearing clothes meant for girls. The entire world around me seemed to be on the other side. I felt lonely. I felt like I was the only one who thought this way. I did not know what to say at that point. I did not feel confident enough to say that I wanted clothes for girls, especially not when we were standing in the store in front of strangers. What if the store-keepers and other customers and my parents were all correct, and I was wrong? After all, it seemed that all adults in the world around me were right in everything they did every day of their lives. Only children seemed to be making mistakes, because only children were being punished from my perspective of the world around me. I stood there reluctant and hesitant to say exactly what I wanted, unhappy that I was not getting what I wanted, and shy about saying anything embarrassing, while my parents paid cash for the clothes they had bought for me.
Once we got back home from the clothing stores, my parents, especially my dad, had a habit of proclaiming that the items we had bought were of good quality and that the price we paid was justified. Although this was his psychological defense mechanism to avoid buyer's remorse because he was ashamed of returning items to stores, I assumed as a little child that he had bought the most precious items for me that money could buy. The concept of returning items did not exist in my mind.
In addition, with the knowledge of how little money we had left with us after each purchase and after spending on building the house for my dad's parents, I was reluctant to tell my parents that what they just bought for me was not what I wanted. I recognized the sacrifice they had just made for me because now they had lesser money remaining for everything else we needed. I could not break their heart.
And so began my vicious cycle of not communicating my distress about my gender to my parents. I had to live with whatever clothes they had bought for me, even if those clothes were meant for boys. The more distress I hid from them, the more I had to hide from them. For if I had told them the second time when they bought me clothes that I wanted clothes meant for girls, they would have asked me why I did not tell them so the first time they bought me clothes. Besides, I assumed that it was perhaps wrong to ask for clothes meant for girls because I seemed to be the only on in my world who seemed to think that I was actually a girl.
Although I have discussed so much about clothes in this blog post so far, clothes are not the sole focus of my gender issue. However, clothes mark the starting point of my gender repression. The more I hid from my parents about my distress with they clothes they were buying for me, the more I had to hide from them my distress about my gender. I felt the social pressure to be consistent in everything I presented about myself to the world around me, perhaps because my parents had taught me to keep my (coerced) promises. This need to be consistent began to get me stuck.
I was stuck, both with being involuntarily forced into a gender that felt foreign to me and with the vicious cycle of incrementally pretending that I was okay with that gender so that I could be socially consistent.
Soon, I was in kindergarten. People began to know me as a person, even if only as the son (not daughter) of Mr and Mrs ___. People began to associate words such as boy, young man, he, his, him, etc when they referred to me. Very soon, I was in too deep into this incorrect gender. I felt overwhelmed by the need to correct everyone. It was becoming too late to get out of the gender trap.
Adults place little children into gender traps. The gender trap consists of the assigned gender and the trappings (no pun intended) of the assigned gender. Once a little child is viewed by adults in his/her surroundings through the prism of the assigned gender, the child often finds it too overwhelming to discover, accept and express his/her own unique gender identity. I found myself in this trap, not knowing how to articulate this feeling and not knowing how to get out of it.
Hence I began to live in distress with myself since age 3-4. I also began to recognize that I would grow up to be someone who looked like my dad. The evidence of this prospect of growing up to be like my dad came from all the strangers and acquaintances who often noted that my features resembled those of my dad. I disliked such comparisons and projections into the future about my appearance. I did not want to grow up to look like my dad. My mind said that looking like him would be wrong for my body.
My dad's features were not the right features for me. I felt that I was not supposed to have those features. I was not supposed to have hair on my arms and on my chest like he did (I shaved the body hair that grew on me until the body hair become unruly around age 12-13). I felt that I was not supposed to grow facial hair and shave with a razor (I only used an electric razor when I started shaving a decade later). I felt that I was not supposed to be dark skinned the way my dad was (my mom used this to fool me into drinking milk by telling me that I would become fairer if I would drink white milk). Although I had begun to accept the fact that it was inevitable, I wanted to do everything that I could do to avoid looking like my dad.
Before I finish, I must note that I do not dislike my dad. I love my dad. He has a good heart and a sharp mind. He cares about me more than he cares for himself. Of course, he has lots of failings too, but I will ignore them here as they are not serious enough to dislike him. I did not want to be like him because he is male and because I did not see myself as male. I did not want to develop the same masculine features and behavioral traits as he has. My issue with looking like my dad is not about him, it is about the gender incongruence that I felt inside me.
