=Who Do You Think You're Not?=

I have a really hard time believing I was ever supposed to be a boy.

Unfortunately, it took a long time for me to realize what seems so obvious to me now. But is it really any wonder, considering what I was up against, that my self-realization was such a long time coming?

There was an authority who defined who and what I was, who delineated the boundaries of who I could become, before I was even born. I was declared to be a "boy" before I even knew what a "boy" was, even before I knew who "I" was, that I was even an "I" at all.

Parents looked down at me crying in their arms and called me a boy. That's what the evidence of their own eyes told them; that's what society, what medical science, what common sense told them. Looking down between my legs, they saw what they'd been led to believe was incontrovertible proof. On the basis of that self-evident proof, I was raised to be a boy. I was dressed as a boy, taught to play as a boy, named as a boy, instructed to behave in each and every circumstance as a boy--and to be punished accordingly if I didn't conform to all that a boy was supposed to do and be. Is it any wonder everyone took me for a boy, expected me to be a boy?

Everyone, including me.

When I was old enough to understand what a "boy" was supposed to be, it was by means of a definition concocted by the very same authorities who condemned me to be one in the first place. It was a closed case from the start, a fait accompli. It was a judgment from above and beyond from which there was no appeal. I wasn't left with so much as the notion that an appeal was even possible.

It was fate.

It was, in fact, brainwashing of the first order. It was society artificially limiting individual option before the individual could become aware of the infinitude of options that actually lay before it, the plentitude of choices it could make to define and discover what it really might be.

Society, after all, cannot have it's members just deciding willy-nilly what they are. Imagine the pandemonium that would ensue. Limitations must be imposed. There will be no ordering off the menu. You are assigned a letter: A or B. You will go stand in the group where you belong.

So I stood there amongst the boys. No matter how ill-suited I felt myself to be as a "boy," it didn't occur to me to question something so seemingly basic, so seemingly self-evident. It was obvious to everyone, after all, why not to me, that I didn't belong with the girls. Gender was not an option; it was destiny. That's what I was given to understand. If I understood anything it was that I was a failure as a man, not that the failure was due to my trying to be something I wasn't. I didn't have the option to be anything else.

A little later on, puberty arrived. This event was supposed to make everything clearer; here was nature, biology, God Itself, if you will, stamping me with its seal. According to the fundamentalists, whether of the scientific or religious stripe, here was incontrovertible proof I was a boy.

To me, however, this "proof" was only further evidence that something was wrong. Why was my body changing like this? Why was I suddenly wearing this disgusting hairy "boy suit," with its peculiar stench, its squirting thing?

Here, too, was the imposition of another binary. This time sexual. You were either straight or you were gay. If you were a boy, you were attracted either to girls--or, more problematically and shamefully, other boys.

What could be simpler?

But this wasn't so simple for me. I wasn't attracted to boys. This I knew with the certainty that I was supposed to feel. But neither was I attracted to girls, at least not in the way I was supposed to be attracted to them. I realized the latter with a shock and a growing mystification that persists to this day when I'd be around boys talking about girls. They wanted to do what to the girls? They liked to put their noses, their fingers, their thingies where? While their hungry eyes bored into the exposed crotches of porn mag centerfolds, I averted mine, preferring to look at what sort of high heels the models were wearing.

I didn't feel comfortable with anyone, boys or girls, but I felt more comfortable with the girls; they, however, didn't feel comfortable with me. How could they? I didn't feel comfortable with myself, with my body, with the "me" I was supposed to be. And they perceived me as one of the "others," as the boy I was supposed to be.

But the boys didn't want me either. I made them uneasy, which is the nice way of saying they knew I didn't belong among them; like some weak and sickly animal they needed to drive off for the good of the herd. They bullied me to the periphery without mercy. They were, however, in their mercilessness closer to the mark than anyone: according their observations I threw like a girl, ran like a girl, talked like a girl, deferred like a girl, kowtowed to their bullying like a girl.

Their unerring ability to finger me as the odd "man" out constantly bewildered me. I was doing my best to fit in. I was doing my best to be exactly what everyone told me I should be: "one of the boys."

The only thing that I was certain of is that I was alone, that I fit in nowhere. How could I understand, accepting the rules of the game as I did (and why should I have doubted them any more than the fact that I couldn't breathe underwater or fly from the top of a building or any one of a thousand other biological facts I'd been told?) that what I wanted wasn't to have sex with a woman, nor to have sex with a boy, but to be a girl and be attractive to boys? How could I know that unthinkable confluence of factors was necessary for me to find my sexual identity, to unblock the "normal" flow of my desire? How could I know that was even in the cards? That it was even a possibility?

If there were a key to what seemed an indecipherable code, a path through the dark forest of confusion, it was my sexual fantasies. Desire accepts no constraints; it's held back by nothing, not even logic. If I had used my fantasies as a guide, if I had taken them as a blueprint for my reality, as I eventually would come to do, alas only decades later, I would have instantly been on the right path. I would have known where to go. I would have known what to do. More importantly, I would have known who I was. At the core of every one of my sexual fantasies was the dramatization of my basic dilemma. Looking back on them now, it's easy to see; in fact, it seems like you'd have to be determined not to see it to remain blind to the truth.

In all my sexual fantasies, I was the woman. Sometimes I was "forced" to be a woman; other times it was a more nebulous identification. Elaborate scenarios grew around a repeating archetypal scenario that would later become the skeleton of hundreds of erotic stories and novels I would one day commit obsessively to paper. The details might vary but theme remained the same. I was shamed, beaten, castrated, tied up, tortured, often killed, but I was made to be a girl, ironically by the very same world that had forced me to be a boy.

What a sweet revenge! But who was it taking revenge? At the time I didn't think it all the way through. It didn't seem to matter. Or I told myself it didn't matter. Such fantasies made me come. They were the only thing that could make me come and that was what was important. That was what made me functional, no matter it was in a dysfunctional way. Even when I was with a woman, having sex in real life, especially when I was with a woman having sex in real life, this fantasy was the only way I could reach orgasm. When I look back, I realize there was never a man in bed with us. Even when my penis was inside a woman, it wasn't mine and the penis, whoever it belonged to, it was inside both of us.

But my realization of all this and what it meant was a long time in the future. Before I hit on the truth, I felt like an alien to this planet.

I was a boy; it was simple. Everyone told me so. The entire world mirrored back to me the same message in every face that saw me: you're a boy. Infinite mirrors. Infinite proof.

No, I wasn't a boy. There was a mistake. I was defective, a fake, an outcast. There was something wrong with me; there had to be. I knew it in my soul, at the depth of my being, even if no one else did; it was a secret that I carried like a scarlet letter, but inside my flat, boy chest which showed nothing amiss.

How can the entire world be wrong, after all? How can biology be wrong? Is it really feasible that your society, your culture, your family, your teachers can all be wrong? Of course, they can, but it can take a long time for you to realize that a falsehood is a falsehood whether one person repeats a lie or a thousand. It can take a long time for you to understand that an entire society can be benighted in ignorance, or malevolence, or some combination of both in its self-serving need for control, that even infinite repetition of stupidity is no proof of wisdom.

Forget discovering who you are. It can take a long time, even a lifetime may not be enough, to figure out who you're not.

Hopefully, if you can manage even that much, and it's no small achievement to extricate yourself from the morass of lies and conditioning and control to which you've been subjected, you still have enough life, strength, and courage remaining to discover the mystery of who you really are behind the mask they fit over your true face before you were born.