Our community aims to be a safe space for people to explore and come to terms with their gender identity and sexuality, both by being accepting of the fact that there are different strokes for different folks, and also by talking about out experiences. The author of this memoir wishes to remain anonymous, but is hopeful that their experience growing up and learning about gender as an AFAB person can be helpful to others on their own gender journey.

The Femme Facade

Eight.

“You can’t do that!” Robbie whispered loudly, his pale, freckled cheeks growing peachier with each passing second. He grabbed me by the wrist and my shirt dropped back down over my belly button as I loosened my grip on it.

“It’s hot out,” I protested. The school year was coming to an end, and teachers jumped on any excuse to take their students out of the stuffy, drab classrooms and instead teach outside, where we could all enjoy it. Late spring was vibrant on the playground, with red and yellow tulips pushing up through mulched soil. The air was warm and stagnant, save the occasional gust of wind that found its way behind the building. “Besides, they’re doing it!” I pointed at two other boys, lifting up their shirts to enjoy the cool May breeze. 

Robbie shook his head, pushing his white-blond bangs away from eyes that refused to meet mine. “But you’re a girl,” he said.

I felt a heat emanating from my now-reddened ears. I stepped away from Robbie and my other classmates, and camped near the heavy double doors so I could be the first one back inside. I hid behind my book at my desk and waited for the familiar tone of the school bell to let me escape.

Ten.

My parents never made a fuss about me playing with Hot Wheels and Polly Pocket dolls, or reading and playing video games. As long as it was within my parents’ budget range, nothing was off-limits. I went fishing up in the mountains; we stood around a small, algae-topped pond and threw in our lines, watching the plastic red and white bobbers sit on the water’s surface. I took piano lessons from a nice lady who owned a ranch, and played recitals in massive chapels where I could feel the presence of something holy and didn’t dare miss a note. I made model cars with my dad, and we would sit together in the living room, digging elbows into the brown carpeted floor, passing the small metal pieces back and forth, and he would always ask me to put on the decals because my fingers were petite enough to get them in place properly. I helped my mom with baking for the church bake sale, and learned that nothing in the world could beat the warmth of a chocolate chip cookie fresh from the oven. I even went to a workshop at a Home Depot to make a sloppy wooden sailboat, painting it with every color I fancied to the point where it became a prism. 

I was never Daddy’s little girl; I was just a kid. It was nice.

Eleven.

Mortified, I looked in the mirror, reaching for hair that wasn’t there anymore. I ran my fingers through my thick locks, and it was jarring just how quickly they fell through and clutched the air.

“What do you think?” my aunt cheerfully sang, brushing some loose hairs away from her black and pink leopard-print smock. 

I gulped.

“It’s short.”

“Yeah,” my aunt replied, putting her scissors and translucent blue spray bottle back into the small caddy. “With how thick your hair is, this will be really great for the summer.” She brushed some talcum powder across the back of my neck.

I was too terrified of the boy in the mirror to process what she was saying.

Twelve.

I sat down in my English class, dropping my heavy backpack onto the linoleum floor next to my quad, my middle school’s terminology for ‘four desks pushed together’, which they adopted to masquerade as a more modern institution. Our regular teacher wasn’t in today, so the substitute would have to pick up where we left off. It was five minutes into the period and the class was at a noisy roar, despite the flustered look on the teacher’s face and the few pious pleas I heard slip from his lips. I was nice enough to help him find where the seating chart was kept.

“Thank you,” he replied, finally finding his voice, and standing up, ready to conduct the class. “We can get started now, thanks to this nice young man,” he said, with a painful silence in tow. I returned to my seat with quiet shame and hoped I’d misheard him.

But then my classmate, Liam, started laughing. “That’s not a young man, she’s a girl!”

Some giggling ensued. I tried to just brush it off, something much easier said than done when you’re in middle school, a ticking time bomb of hormones. I looked down at what I was wearing: a long-sleeved red and white baseball tee with your usual kid’s motivational text across the front like “awesome” or “super,” and some khaki pants. I loved this outfit, but came to a quick realization that the world did not. Did everyone think I was a boy?

The substitute teacher approached me after class with true remorse. All I could do was politely accept his apology and swallow my tears. 

Thirteen.

I went through multiple phases of favorite colors. Originally, it was yellow, and according to my mother I would cry if a traffic light wasn’t yellow when we passed through it. For a while, it was blue, the color of my grandparents’ swimming pool where I’d spend countless hours splashing around in the sun. Then it was green, the color of the grass in our backyard where I’d create fantastic adventures and magical places for my sister and me to explore. 

After the incident in class, it was pink. Soft, rosy, bright, girly pink. I consciously chose to love the color and made sure to incorporate it in my wardrobe wherever I could. My folders, binders, and pencil cases were all pink and covered with stickers. I asked for pink and pretty and jewelry. Maybe I could take charge and rewrite myself as a girl.

It didn’t work. Even growing my hair back out to shoulder-length. Even wearing my pink floral necklace. Even armed with a frilly white sweater. A middle school aide called me a young man while helping me to find my classroom.

Fourteen.

My gym teacher blew the whistle and we were finally done running. I leaned up against the sickly yellow padded walls and remembered how to breathe. Thank God. The pacer exam was miserable. We slowly marched our way back into the locker room, weary from the state-mandated exercise. I went into my usual stall and began peeling off my sticky clothes, letting my festering body breathe in the cool air. After re-applying some chalky deodorant, I finished changing and came back out to the entranceway with the rest of the girls, waiting for the school bell to sound. Portia was there, gossiping as usual. She looked at me in disgust when I joined them. “Ugh.”

I rolled my mind’s eyes hearing her start back up on her usual bit. Don’t say anything, don’t give her a reaction. Just ignore her. You know the drill.

She continued to mock me, getting a few smirks and giggles from the other girls. “I mean, a mustache, short hair, and boobs… looks like a boy… isn’t that weird? I heard that doctors don’t even know what it is!”

It.

The sound clawed against my ears like a grater pulled across concrete. With my humanity stripped from me, my raw soul shivered. I found myself plunged into these new cold depths, and searched my head for any sort of response, but came up short, gasping for air. Broken, I walked out and wandered to my next class, about a minute before the bell rang. I didn’t care. I could see nothing through my dark tears. 

Fifteen.

People wouldn’t doubt my femininity if I was holding my boyfriend’s hand. My closest friends were already an all-male cast, so it couldn’t be that hard to audition them and find one of them that liked me. Plus, I was in high school; it was about time to enter the dating scene.

I’d had a crush on Drew for a while, now. We were into the same things: Nintendo games, wind ensemble, sci-fi movies. Before we met, I’d never known someone could have such a deep love of Star Wars. He had been a good friend since elementary school. We even lived near each other; it was perfect.

I asked him to go to the dance with me. He said yes.

My mom helped me to put on makeup for the first time. I put on a modest dress, charcoal-colored and patterned with soft pastel flowers that draped down below my knees, and grabbed a crocheted brown cardigan to cover up the spaghetti straps on my shoulders. I barely recognized myself in the rearview mirror of my mom’s old Dodge minivan, fluffing up my hair, still sticky with sweet-scented hairspray. She dropped me off in the bus circle outside the school foyer. “Have fun, sweetie!”

I found him standing near some of our other friends who showed up, sipping some punch. He was clad in a sky blue button down and a cheesy checkered tie, one that he probably pulled out of his dad’s closet on the sly. He stammered a hello. And then he spent the rest of the dance avoiding me. All those years, I had never had trouble talking to him — until tonight. What used to come freely and naturally was now bottled up, stoppered, scared. Were things different now because I was trying to be a girl?

He was probably just nervous. But my “girlfriend” costume was falling apart, with my so-called boyfriend nowhere to be seen. I tried to stay near him, but he seemed disinterested. So I called my mom. “Can you come pick me up?” “Sure, be there in ten.” I told him I wasn’t feeling well, gave him a hug, and stepped outside to wait for my mom alone.

Sixteen.

It was exciting to be a girlfriend for the first time in my life. We held hands and kissed on the cold steel bleachers during football season, covertly fondling each other under the cover of a fleece blanket. We sat in the hallway before homeroom and snuggled, our backs leaning against the lockers. We were the disgusting, attached-at-the-hip couple that everyone in high school dreaded. And I loved every minute of it.

I didn’t feel like I had to be a girl to be with him. He didn’t care if I didn’t wear makeup, or if my legs weren’t smooth and shaven. I could just be myself with him. But for some reason, I still couldn’t with everyone else. I became obsessed with playing the role of “girlfriend”. I paraded him around to the rest of the world: Look! I have a boyfriend! 

I loved him. And he loved me, too. But he didn’t love who I was when we were together in public, and in high school, your life is basically a public spectacle. Things were great when we had dates, carving out our own private sanctuary where we could be happy together. Still, when we were together in school, I felt like I had to prove to the world that I was a girl.  He could tell that I was putting on a show long before I ever realized. I was not in a good place when we broke up, but at the time, I couldn’t tell whether I was mourning the loss of the relationship, or the loss of my “girlfriend” title.

Eighteen.

My friend and I were enjoying my family’s annual vacation to Ocean City, Maryland. I was single, and she was in another rocky patch with her long distance asshole-of-a-boyfriend. She wanted us to hit the boardwalk and dress up together, to forget about the failed relationships in our life and focus on ourselves.

I sat still on the wooden stool in the kitchen, careful not to move as she held the hot curling iron tight near my head. I felt the tension on my hair lighten up as she pulled her hands away slowly. “Okay, you’re all done,” she said. I ran to the mirror to take a look. My hair was coiled in short soft ringlets that hung above my shoulders. The smile crept across my face, pulling warmth into the corners of my mouth. I’d started to dabble in putting on my own makeup, mostly some jewel-colored eyeshadows that matched whatever I was wearing. Tonight, it was blue. I had bought a blue and black animal-print dress with silver coils around the straps and wanted to show off my slender, 100-lb frame. It was low-cut. I didn’t mind.

On Facebook, I flaunted my new dress with a selfie. Ella and I strutted our stuff on the boardwalk, chatting with some friendly teenagers, all while my parents were sitting on their favorite wooden bench at a safe distance. This was much better than that silly middle-school dance. Sure, my outfit had been cute, but for once, I was experiencing what it was like to be beautiful. A new confidence crept out, fortifying me as it wrapped around my short legs, my freckled face, my thick frizzy hair, my past insecurities. Finally, I looked like the girl I was supposed to be.

My notifications were blowing up when I got back. Someone in my graduating class from high school was messaging me. Hey. I saw your profile pic. Looking sexy. 😉 You single, now? I was uncomfortable. He’d never even given me the time of day when we sat next to each other in band. I stopped responding. He got the hint. 

Nineteen.

I was on all fours on my tough college mattress, straining to stay upright. My legs couldn’t spread any farther apart. Relax, he urged me as he pressed his hand on the small of my back and pushed again. I wondered if people knew that trying to relax is counterintuitive. I sighed and braced myself. Why couldn’t my body do this? I was raised Christian and conservative, and we weren’t married, but I wanted to do it. I loved him and wanted to have sex with him. 

My body wouldn’t oblige. With every attempt, my vagina tensed and clenched itself off from reality, like he was poking and prodding at a solid mound of flesh. It was beyond my control, a part of my body that wasn’t ready to exist yet. I never used tampons. I couldn’t bear to slide a finger in. We’d been at this for an hour now, and he wasn’t even half-way in. Every movement, every twitch was met with stifled grunts of pain. I knew I couldn’t do it.

We collapsed onto the bed over the crumpled sheets and sobbed while holding each other. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I held him tight. He cried because I mustn’t have been attracted to him. I cried because I couldn’t be a real girl.

Twenty.

Shame swallowed me up as I leaned back against my upholstered seat. I gripped the leather cover on the wheel tight enough to leave marks. The tears wouldn’t stop flowing. The appointment that was supposed to answer my lifelong questions and help me finally become a girl was a failure. “You don’t really need a pap smear until you’re twenty two,” the nurse’s voice bounced around in my head. “Come back after you’ve had sex.”

I wiped away my tears so I could see the road in front of me. I couldn’t do it. I tried to relax, to let my mind drift ashore and bob in blissful nothingness. The pain persisted. “This is the smallest speculum I have,” she sighed, frustrated. She jammed a bony finger inside to check for a blockage and I shrieked. “Really? That hurt?”

My grandma had told me it would be easy, that she usually asked for a female doctor so she’d be more comfortable, that it would be over before I knew it. Maybe it would be easy, for a real girl. 

Twenty-one.

A close friend of mine from high school came out and began transitioning. For a while, he talked about how much he hated the misogyny that had imprisoned him for most of his life. He wanted to be viewed as a person, not just his gender. My eyes beamed as I watched him make these huge changes. I felt a new sense of companionship, that someone else whose gender I’d never questioned could also be struggling silently. I was so proud of him, and it gave me hope that maybe I could make some changes and find happiness, too. In his moments of self-discovery, I started to contemplate whether neutrality was an identity I was willing to accept for myself. Maybe I could stop worrying about whether I was a real girl.

But then he changed his pronouns. He told his story: how someone at the supermarket had mistaken him for a boy and how right it felt, how he felt at home in his body. I thought back to the times I’d been called a boy, and how it made me want to crawl out of my skin. It was the materialization of my fears, in the form of my close friend: if you don’t want to be a girl, you have to be a boy. It hurt. I was a little judgmental for a while because I didn’t get it. But really, I didn’t get me. 

Twenty-two.

I arrived at the doctor’s office gasping for breath, both from anxiety and from my brisk pace as I rushed through the door. I walked up to the receptionist behind the front desk window. “Hi. I have an appointment with Dr. Banner.” 

She looked down at her computer monitor and clicked around. “Oh,” she said. “Dr. Banner reserves the right to turn away patients who are more than ten minutes late.” I felt the tears welling up in my eyes. I had already waited three months for this appointment. How was I supposed to know there were two gynecology offices on the same road? “Let me check if he will see you.”

I didn’t know how to feel when he agreed to see me. I still didn’t want to be there, the incredible urge to flee and never look back rising in my flighty heart. I sat, as self-contained as possible, holding it together, and waited for the nurse. She came in. I finally burst, explaining why I was there. That I couldn’t seem to have sex. That I’d been to the doctors twice for a pap smear, and both times it had been painful and the doctors just gave up on me. The silent tears welled up and dropped to the floor. But for the first time, I felt seen. At ease. She consoled me and said she would go and get Dr. Banner.

“Hey there,” he said in a soothing, slick voice. “We’re not going to do the pap smear today. Instead, why don’t you come into my office and we’ll talk?” I nodded and dabbed dry the corners of my eyes. 

The relief of getting a medical opinion on an issue that has been plaguing you for your entire life is something you wouldn’t believe. Within an instant, your existence is validated. I’m not just broken; with a diagnosis, there’s an underlying problem… and a solution. I could barely focus after he mentioned the word “vaginismus.” I was already familiar with the term. He showed me a set of small dilators that I could use, at my own pace, on my own time. “You’re not alone,” he assured me. “Many women are affected by this condition. But with the right exercises, you can control it.”

Control. For once, I was in control. 

Twenty-four.

I used to care so much about being a girl. I don’t anymore. Through college, I began to learn about the gender spectrum, that people didn’t have to subscribe to male or female, that we plotted our own identity graphs. Some people create their identity with their gender, and that’s fine. But it never worked for me. The word “demigirl” cradled the confused not-a-real-girl inside me and held them tight. Gone were the days of looking at the world with my gender-tinted glasses. The baby-blue and soft-pink lenses fell to the ground and cracked as I pushed my thumbs through the frame. I didn’t have to focus on boy this or girl that; I could focus my life, now, on being a person instead. 

I’m a person with a vagina who practices with dilators and has started on a journey to overcome vaginismus so that I can have sex with my spouse. Every day I make sure to express my love and gratitude to the man who understood me before I even understood myself. The fears of my girly facade fading are long gone, because it’s a front I no longer need to put up. I go by they or she — never he, never it; those pronouns were ruined for me a long time ago. Now that I don’t have to worry about being a real girl, I get to go out and discover the person I’ve been for the past twenty-four years.