I Was Not Born Into A Body So Much As Positioned Within One

“Trans people are often portrayed as controversies, threats, or political problems to be solved. We are none of those things. We are human beings.”

I was not born into a body so much as positioned within one.

I was assigned female at birth. Assigned. The word has always fascinated me. Assigned as if gender were a slot on a bureaucratic spreadsheet, an administrative designation attached to skin before a child has spoken a single word about who they are. Assigned as if identity were a fixed destination rather than a lifelong process of becoming.

When I was five years old, I ran into the house and announced, “I want to be a boy.” Back then, my family called me Blue.

Blue rode a Huffy BMX bike through the neighborhood, chased birds across vacant lots, played football shirtless with the boys, and smeared toothpaste across my face while pretending to shave like my father.

I watched men move through the world and felt an undeniable pull toward them. It wasn’t because I wanted to imitate them. It was because I believed I was one of them.

Looking back, I realise the problem was not what I said. The problem was that I said it decades before most Americans had the language to hear it.

That was the early 1970s. Gender identity was not part of public conversation, school curriculum, pediatric care, or family life. No teacher ever discussed it. No counsellor pulled me aside. No book in the school library reflected anything remotely close to my experience. There were no role models and no roadmap.

My father fought my masculinity whenever he could. Dresses appeared. Expectations appeared. Rules appeared. Every attempt to force me into girlhood pushed me further away from myself. I remember being wrestled into dresses for family gatherings only to throw myself into the yard and roll through dog excrement rather than wear them. It sounds absurd now. It was not absurd then. It was resistance before I had language for resistance.

I searched elsewhere for recognition. Music became one refuge. David Bowie, Boy George, Tracy Chapman, and Annie Lennox challenged assumptions about gender long before I had words for my own experience. Films offered glimpses of lives that seemed to exist just beyond the boundaries of what I had been told was possible.

Sports became my camouflage. Football, swimming, and running helped me mask the breasts, waist, and broad hips that intensified my dysphoria and reminded me daily of a body I never experienced as my own. Athletics kept my body lean and offered relief from a struggle I could not yet name; movement allowed me to outrun the confusion waiting for me everywhere else.

As I moved through college and into adulthood, the gap between who I knew myself to be and who the world expected me to be widened. I became adept at performing a version of myself that others could understand while carrying a growing sense of dislocation.

By my 20s, that dislocation became unbearable.

I attempted suicide twice.

It wasn’t because I lacked strength or ambition. I was building a career, earning advanced degrees, teaching students, and creating what looked from the outside like a successful life. However, success and survival are not the same thing. Outwardly, I was thriving. Internally, I was disappearing.

Then, during the 1990s, something began to shift. Language that had once existed only at the margins slowly entered public conversation. For the first time, the word “transgender” entered into public discourse and health care.

The word positioned and grounded experiences I had carried my entire life.........

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